Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409200007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Kevin Kittredge
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Twenty years, a house, two careers and three children later, the divorce is almost final.
Both say the separation is amicable, if hardly painless.
``I regret the heck out of the loss of the family,'' Bill Gruenhagen said. ``I'll always regret the loss of Susanne.''
Said Susanne Gruenhagen: ``I think we were just friends all along.''
He was the son of a Virginia Tech professor. She was the PKA dream girl.
The early '70s college environment notwithstanding, they were hardly hippies. ``I was probably the other kind,'' laughed Susanne Gruenhagen, who was on Tech's homecoming court, and was the university's representative to the Apple Blossom Festival. ``I kissed Frank Gifford,'' she recalled of the latter experience. ``It was OK.''
They were married at Blacksburg's Christ Episcopal Church. The reception was at the University Club.
Afterward, Bill Gruenhagen went to work at an insurance company in Roanoke, while Susanne Gruenhagen worked on her master's degree and taught freshman English at Tech.
Soon she was raising a baby - her oldest girl, Carice Anne, now 16 - as well.
It did not seem like a burden at the time, she said. ``I even jogged two miles every day.'' Carice was followed by Mary Ayres in 1981 and Laura Fitzgerald in 1985.
Over the years, they followed two career tracks - Bill Gruenhagen switched from insurance to sales for a pharmaceutical company, while Susanne Gruenhagen taught community college in Danville. She currently teaches at Sand Hills Community College in Pinehurst, N.C.
To friends, they looked like a perfect couple, with their two good jobs and three beautiful daughters.
It wasn't quite that way.
``You have to dig down'' to understand the fissure, Bill Gruenhagen said. ``Basically she was unhappy and wanted out. I didn't.''
``I decided, I guess, I was getting older, and I didn't like the way things were,'' Susanne Gruenhagen said. The Gruenhagens spoke to a reporter in separate telephone interviews. ``That I didn't have to be normal and do the things I didn't want to do.''
What makes Susanne Gruenhagen happy, she has found, is her work.
``I really really love what I'm doing right now,'' she said of teaching. ``Work is a place where I always felt that I knew where I was. The other places, maybe I haven't.''
The long ago beauty contests, meanwhile, make her blush. The one-time Salem Christmas Queen has changed in recent years, she said, and become much more of a feminist - ``Although there's some things I like very much about being a woman.''
She also is working on a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction.
Susanne Gruenhagen lives with the girls. Bill Gruenhagen still sees the children frequently, however, and helps out with rides to lessons and the like. ``It causes problems, but that's just the way it is,'' he said of the separation.
For the record, he sees a society grown too tolerant of divorce.
``Too many books and too many talk shows and too many people saying, `You've got to be who you are, regardless of other people.' I don't think that was Susanne. I just think divorce is too acceptable.''
His own parents celebrated an anniversary this month, Bill Gruenhagen said.
Their 54th.
``They still fight and fuss,'' he said. ``But they wouldn't know what to do without each other.''
by CNB