Tiburon resident Sue Benvenuti was an award-winning reporter, humorist for Ark
Tiburon resident Sue Benvenuti, a former model and beauty queen who became an award-winning reporter and assistant editor for The Ark before serving eight years on the Richardson Bay Sanitary District board of directors, died Aug. 17 in San Rafael. She was 90.
Benvenuti worked for The Ark for nearly 20 years, from 1978 to 1997, covering a range of news, from government affairs and councilmember campaigns to crime and community profiles.
She also was behind the newspaper’s irreverent recipes during her time at the paper and wrote a humor column, “The Funny Thing Is,” containing her musings on day-to-day life. Among her observations were communities going “two steps forward and one back” with increased food snobbery or her recollection of the time her Italian in-laws led her to “death by gnocchi.”
“I could see it darkly in my mind, this unstoppable rubber bladder forcing its way under my ribs, edging over my liver, cramping my spleen, crowding my heart. There was no way out,” she wrote in that Dec. 12, 1990, column, which was one of the pieces cited by the California News Publishers Association when it awarded her first place for best humor column in the 1991 Better Newspapers Contest. That was her fourth win in that category, which she also topped in 1985, 1988 and 1989. Her other reporting was also frequently recognized in the annual contests.
Former Ark reporter and colleague Deirdre McCrohan said Benvenuti was fun to have in the office because she was a great storyteller who loved to laugh.
“She was very smart, very witty, and you could see that in her writing,” McCrohan said.
Former Belvedere Mayor Ken Johnson was on the City Council for two terms in the 1990s, crossing paths with Benvenuti during her time covering the city. He said she had a way of gaining people’s trust as a reporter, adding that she was a lovely person.
“She had a keen sense of getting to the bottom line in a fair and accurate way,” he said.
Benvenuti was born Norma Sue Goodman on July 6, 1934, in Wichita Falls, Texas, to Dorsey Goodman and Betty Dean Rinehart. She had four siblings. She moved to San Francisco when she was 18, attending San Francisco State University for a year before dropping out to sign with San Francisco-based modeling agency House of Charm.
She appeared in magazines and print advertisements, including those where she took on the role of “Safety Sue” to present home-safety tips. Benvenuti, under the name Norma Sue Fetz, won Miss San Francisco in 1953, and afterward appeared alongside fitness guru Jack LaLanne on his TV program.
Daughter Courtney Benvenuti said winning Miss San Francisco was a big deal for her mother, adding that her mother moving to California at a young age to make a life for herself exemplified her bravery.
“Any challenge she was going to tackle, she did not back down,” Courtney said. “She was very, very tenacious like that.”
The same year she won Miss San Francisco, she met Roy Benvenuti, who grew up in the city’s North Beach neighborhood. The couple married in 1955 and spent their first years together in Sausalito. They moved to Tiburon in 1963, living on Hilary Drive in the Del Mar neighborhood, where they raised their three kids, Loren, Christian and Courtney.
Courtney said she and her siblings remember coming home from class to their mom’s freshly baked bread, including cinnamon raisin, whole wheat and sourdough, as after-school snacks.
“My mouth waters when I think about that,” Courtney said.
And though her parents had different personalities, Courtney said her mom was known to make her dad laugh as they did everything together, from traveling to reading the Sunday newspaper over coffee to going on walks together.
“They loved each other’s company,” Courtney said, adding that “they were absolutely like each other’s best friends.”
Benvenuti started working at The Ark in 1978 as a reporter, mostly focused on Belvedere’s city affairs.
Johnson said he looked up to Benvenuti not only as a journalist but as a writer, noting she had “an identifiable way of writing that was her signature.”
Ed San Diego, Belvedere’s city manager from 1984 to 2004, said Benvenuti was able to quickly understand and grasp what was going on at City Hall.
Though San Diego said he had the closest relationship with Benvenuti out of all the Ark reporters during his tenure, “she didn’t abdicate her journalistic responsibilities with a softball” question, adding that “everything that she wrote about Belvedere was pretty much spot on.”
“It wasn’t ‘just the facts, ma’am,’ as the cops would say,” he said. “She would go beyond that.”
As Benvenuti continued to cover city affairs during her tenure, about 1982 she published the first of her humor columns, with one the earliest covering evolving telephones — dials to buttons, the cordless revolution and the rise of the hold button were some of her attack points in her April 7, 1982, column.
“I just can’t write straight news stories anymore,” Benvenuti said at a Feb. 15, 1985, California newspaper-awards luncheon, as reported in The Ark. “I see something funny in everything.”
George Gnoss, whose late wife, Barbara, was co-editor of The Ark from 1985 until 2009, said Benvenuti was “a star of the paper” who helped court and keep readership.
“She had an unbelievable wit in her writing,” Gnoss said. “She was a beautiful writer, and readers loved to get the paper to see what she was writing in her latest column.”
Benvenuti was also a short-story writer, Courtney said, and part of local theater troupe the Tiburon Pelican Players, which built up a following from the late 1960s through the 1980s. As a Pelican, Benvenuti wrote and acted in the troupe’s productions, which were parodies of well-known shows — “Souse Pacific” for “South Pacific” or “Guys and Dolls in Hot Water” in place of “Guys and Dolls.”
Benvenuti told The Ark in 2019 that her fellow Pelicans had fun, remembering when a copyright-protection agency representative visited a troupe rehearsal to ensure no copyrights were being violated. After watching their rehearsal, the representative left, telling troupe members, “Don’t worry about it, they’ll never recognize it.”
“I’m sure there were people who said, ‘Oh my God,’ but mostly they would say, ‘Next year, I’m going to do that,’” Benvenuti said.
She left The Ark in 1997 but stayed involved in the community, including taking over her husband’s seat on the Richardson Bay Sanitary District board after his death in 2013. She was appointed to the district board in 2014 and served until 2022.
Daughter Courtney remembers her mother as brave and unafraid, such as the time Benvenuti went bungee jumping about age 60.
Benvenuti was an “incredible, dedicated” mother and wife, Courtney said, supporting the kids at sporting events and ensuring everyone had their own birthday cake and party, even though several of the family celebrations fell within days of each other.
Courtney also said she couldn’t remember a time when Benvenuti was in a bad mood, and that Benvenuti imparted on her strength and self-confidence.
“If I put my mind to it, I can do it,” she says she learned from her mom.
“She loved her life, and she loved the life that she and my dad built together,” Courtney said. “And every day was a happy day for her. It truly was.”
In addition to Courtney, who lives in Atlanta, Benvenuti is survived by daughter Loren Katzman of Petaluma and son Christian Benvenuti of Nevada; grandchildren Jake, Sam and Joe Katzman, Gina Benvenuti and Georgia, Spencer and Annie Graves; two great-grandchildren; sister Kay Welch, brother Dick Goodman, sister-in-law Bettie Runnals and other extended family members.
A private memorial service is planned. Donations in Benvenuti’s name can be made to the Alzheimer’s Association.
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