Syria’s Slusser, 91, active

AERIN CURTIS / Madison Eagle

Syria nonagenerian Mary Slusser enjoys the bucolic view from her Shotwell Hollow home.

Mary Slusser embodies the idea that a person can never be too old to stop learning.

The 91-year-old Syria resident is taking time away from her third book to work on a paper that she describes as being “too complicated” to put in her book on the history of artwork in Nepal. She spoke to The Eagle while getting ready to return to her office at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. so she could get back to her computer and her notes.
The book and the paper are on her experiences living in Nepal and working with antique temple woodcarvings. She moved there with her now-deceased husband H. Robert Slusser in 1969 after living all over southeastern Asia and Africa.

Early history

Her husband was an economist who worked for the U.S. State Department with the United States Agency for International Development (U.S. AID) and was sent to offer economic advice in different developing countries.

“(My husband) was part of the State Department and being a dutiful wife of the old generation I trudged along – in those days women didn’t have careers, if they were married they followed their husbands. So although I had all these fancy degrees and things I just went with him,” Slusser said in an interview last month.

However, Slusser’s life has been far from traditional in several ways. She grew up in a small town in Michigan where she recalls being one of the first three students to go to college. She did her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan where she worked to put herself through college graduating in 1940.
“My father worked for General Motors and my mother made dresses and we lived OK (during the Great Depression),” said Slusser. “We weren’t poverty stricken, but we had no money to send kids to college – I had to earn my way.”

After college Slusser went on to earn her doctorate, and about the same time she became reacquainted with Robert Slusser who was studying at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass. on the GI Bill. They had first met at the University of Michigan.

Travel and work

Slusser’s first books were a two-part art history text of the Katmandu valley area of Nepal based on the time she spent there while her husband was on assignment with the State Department. The Shotwell Hollow resident also wrote cultural studies for the U.S. State Department.

“I did work at the State Department for awhile,” recalls Slusser. “In fact (my husband’s) first really distant appointment was in Vietnam and I was (then) working in the State Department. When they learned I was leaving they asked me to do a study on Laos and Cambodia, they called it Indo-China then, and Vietnam and I agreed to do it. When I got out there I realized that it was too much, that they were all different countries, it wasn’t Indo-China. So I did a study on Laos and Vietnam and I didn’t do one on Cambodia.”

Slusser was asked to do the studies on the different countries for several reasons, including her doctorate in archeology from Columbia University in New York City and her experience having studied anthropology and art history in college. The two traveled with the State Department from 1950 until 1969, when they first went to Nepal.

“Actually Nepal was where we really settled down for a while, the minute we landed there I saw these temples and thought, ‘My gosh, these are fabulous things.’ So that’s where I was really able to settle down and really use my background in anthropology and art history,” Slusser said.

After spending two years in Nepal and gathering information about the county, Slusser approached the Smithsonian Institute about publishing a travelogue on Nepal. However, when her husband was reassigned to the county she decided to write a “real book” on the subject, she said. This process started her 40 years of work on the history of the county and its art.

Thoughts on Madison County

While living in Nepal Slusser first heard of Madison County from Peace Corps volunteers. Upon returning to America, she and her husband kept a cabin at Rag Mountain Estates in Syria until 1999, when she moved back to Washington, D.C. However, in 2005 Slusser moved to her current house on Shotwell Hollow Road, also in Syria.

“I love the view (from my house),” Slusser said of her new location. “I really fell in love with Madison County it’s a wonderful place, I try to contribute to it, to the library and the rescue squad and those things – I can’t really be part of the community because I’m not here that much, but I feel like I’m a part of Madison County.”

Currently, she is working through the Smithsonian on her third book on Nepalese artwork and anticipates it being published this coming January or February. She has been a research associate there since the 1990s, following a stint there in the 1970s prior to the publication of her first books in 1982.

UP CLOSE

Who: Mary Slusser.

Initially wanted to be: A veterinarian – she changed her mind about being a vet when she found out that the amount of time she needed to work to pay for attending the University of Michigan would keep her from being able to do the laboratory work necessary for the pre-vet science classes.

Favorite book: “Arabian Sands,” by Wilfred Thesiger. “It’s his account, in the early 1900s, of walking through the empty quarter of the Arabian desert,” Slusser said.

More important to develop beliefs or knowledge: “I think the most essential thing in the world is to gain knowledge because if people were knowledgeable there would be no such thing as a Taliban (or) American’s hating Muslims because they don’t really know anything about the Muslim people,” said Slusser. “I think knowledge is the key, the most important thing.”

By Aerin Curtis
Eagle Reporter

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