b. 1942

by Eugenie (Genie) Waddell Carr, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Winston-Salem, NC, 2016

Suzanne Baldwin Borum “Zanne” Baker was born into a family of Episcopalians. Like her mother, she was active in the Episcopal Church in tiny West Point, Va., (“small as your thumb”), including singing in the choir. That tradition of service has continued.

Graduating in 1964 from Westhampton College, the women’s college of the University of Richmond, that same year Zanne married Leslie “Bud” Baker, who became a Marine, then a banker. The Bakers’ move to Winston-Salem in 1969 was “a little daunting,” she says. “I had been an Episcopalian, and I wanted to remain one.” Bud was a Lutheran, so the liturgy wasn’t a huge change for him. They joined St. Paul’s, where the Rev. E. Dudley Colhoun “got me into my role of wanting to do something for the church.” He asked her to join “that committee that gives money to people” (Outreach Funding Committee). “It helped you realize that church is more than going to church on Sunday.”

Zanne quickly realized something else: “Nobody said ‘no’ to Dudley,” she said with a smile. “He asked me to be on the flower committee. I didn’t know a thing about arranging flowers, but (the committee members) did a lot of training for people like me.”

The Bakers have three grown children: Rod, Ben, and Leslie. Ben has a son, Henry, 4. As the children came along Zanne continued her church activities. One Sunday she read that there was going to be a bazaar, “and there was going to be a nursery! I went to the crafts workshops and made so many friends. The bazaar is such a great community. You find community within community.”

“Drafted” onto the Ecclesiastical Arts Committee, Zanne helped plan for the Chapel and other spaces in the early 2000s. She and Bud became friends with Ren Brown, head of St. John’s Museum (now Cameron Art Museum) in Wilmington, NC. “I saw a beautiful stained-glass window there. I had never cared about stained glass in my life, but I just fell in love with it.” This new passion led to her being asked to chair a committee to get stained-glass windows for the Chapel. She got to know Rowan LeCompte, a well-known stained-glass artist in Wilmington whose work includes a number of windows in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.

Beyond her church work, Zanne taught math and science in elementary school. She helped adults who were dyslexic, earned a master’s degree at Salem College, and taught reading in middle school. All this introduced her to a Smart Start school in Winston-Salem, where she remains passionate about starting children’s education “at zero” and improving the education and skills of those who teach young children.

Zanne has long served on the advisory board of the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Salvation Army. “It works,” she says. “They don’t do drugs. They don’t get pregnant. And there’s a huge music program, in conjunction with the Winston-Salem Symphony. It’s known that working with music improves children’s academic abilities.”