Maria Sutsos, mother of 5, co-owner of hunting club, dies at 84

In her 80s, Maria Georgeades Sutsos still drove six days a week from her Sonoma Valley home to the hunting club on San Pablo Bay that she and her husband started in the early 1960s.

Sutsos died June 9 in a Terra Linda hospital at the age of 84. She was remembered as a determined woman who reared five children and who for 49 years helped run the Black Point Game Bird Club, first with her husband, Mike, and later with her son, Michael of Sonoma.

“We’re talking drive and dedication,” said her daughter, Helene Henry of Sonoma. She said her mother loved her family and her independence, including her ability to drive herself places.

Sutsos was a native San Franciscan who graduated from high school in 1948 and was married about a year later. Her husband and she were introduced to each other by their parents, as was then customary among Greek families, her daughter said.

“That was it. They were together 54 years,” Henry said.

The couple moved to El Verano to a home where Maria Sutsos lived for the rest of her life.

In 1964 the couple began the hunting club on the bay near Highway 37 and Lakeville Highway. During hunting seasons, the family spent many weekends there, as Maria Sutsos helped her husband operate the business.

She had to be regimented in order to care for both family and business. But when her two daughters were older, she enjoyed the spontaneity of telling them to get ready to go for “a ride.”

“Sometimes we’d end up in Eureka,” Henry recalled.

Sutsos’ husband died in 2003.

In her later years, she had a routine of visiting her various children for dinner three nights a week. She was known to many of their friends as “Yaiyai,” or “grandmother.”

She was an excellent cook and passed down to her daughters her traditional Greek recipes, including lamb and spanakopita, a spinach pie enfolded by crispy, flaky phyllo dough.

The land of the hunting club is now part of a waterfowl refuge. But Sutsos continued until February to regularly go and help at a new club that her son operates off Highway 37 near Skaggs Island.

She was a 1947 member of the Maids of Athens, a Greek young women’s organization.

Along with her son and daughter, survivors include three other children, Pete Sutsos of Colorado, Phillip Sutsos of Montana and Kathryn Bruno of Sonoma; a sister, Eftehia Bountouvas of San Francisco; and a brother, George Georgeades of Mill Valley. She had 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

The family plans to hold a private service later this year. Memorial donations may be made to Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael or the Golden Gate Salmon Association.