by Shiuly Begum
Franklin K. Lane High School-click here for web site

Shiuly Begum  and Sue Bildner

“As my grandchildren say, Grandma Soupie is twenty one for the next forty years,” said Sue Bildner who agrees she hasn't changed much since her childhood.

When Sue Bildner was little she dressed in a costume each year to go to synagogue. She still gets dressed up every Halloween. This year she came dressed as a chicken with a chicken head and rubber feet and claws. As she was waiting for her friend, a car stops across the street. A man and women came out with their little boy. The boy was so scared that he screamed no, no, and all the other children were afraid when they saw her. Two years ago,  Sue came dressed as a witch. She had full face make up on with a green nose and black hair down to her waist. As Sue was waiting by her building, her friend came up to her and said, “ 'What are you doing here? ' ” She told him who she was. Then he explained that she was almost arrested because two young men call the police and said that there was a witch walking in the street. 

As Sue Bildner gets older, she carries the memories of her childhood. Sue and her father used to go to a field of flowers and pick sunflowers. She used to fill up baskets of sunflowers and bring them home. The sunflowers were dead by the time they reached home. To this day, she remembers stories of how she and her friends talked on the phone almost everyday, met each other and sang their camp songs. When she was eight years old, she went to a Girl Scout camp and ate venison. "The venison tasted like chicken,” she said. "These are the things that stand out in my mind, the friends I made at Girl Scout Camp and the fun we had." Sue still spends time with her childhood friends. One of her friends owns a house in Cape Scout. They go there for a week and ride in the boats.

“To me it was a greatest thing to do in this world, to help a child learn,” Sue Bildner said. Sue loved attending school.  While she was in the third grade and had the measles, she cried because her parents didn't want her to be in school. Sue loved school so much that when she was four years old her father used to say, " 'She's going to be a teacher some day because when ever a kid comes near her she's teaching him.' ” And she did become a teacher. She taught for forty years. Basically she taught kindergarten and sometimes first and second grade. “I loved every single minute and I miss teaching," Sue Bildner said. When she taught in kindergarten, a girl used to say that she wants to go to the bathroom. So Sue said," Come on sweetheart,” but the girl refused to go in school because her mother told her never to use the bathroom except at home. So she wet her pant and her mother came to school. The mother explained to her that it is ok to go to the bathroom in school. During the WWII, Sue was a little girl. “I remember when I was in school we used to have alert shelter drill where we had to spread out against the wall and put our coat over our heads.” But it never meant anything to her as far as the war because she was too young to understand. Later when she was a teacher, she had to do drills with her students. They had to go under the table in case of anything.

Sue Bildner has two sons. One is an attorney and the other is a graphic artist. Sue has five grandchildren. They call her grandma Soupie because when her third grandchild was one year old, and pointed her finger at Sue, she said “ 'You soup!' ” “So I said, yes honey I'm Grandma Soup.” From then on the grandchildren called her Grandma Soupie, the neighbors and relatives as well called her Grandma Soupie.

Sue Bildner has been twenty -one for forty years.  She hasn't perceptibly changed  as much from when she was a child