Beloved wife, mother, grandmother, former Claremont resident

Susan Joy Quaney, beloved wife of the late Robert Quaney and mother to Thomas Quaney and Amanda Quaney Jones, died February 4 following a brief time of illness.

Susan was born Susan Joy in Los Angeles on November 14, 1929, to Hollis and Deborah Joy. She spent her early years in Glendale, California, living in a house her father built, along with her parents, younger sister Debby, and older brother, Wilkes.

The family moved to Coronado, California in the late 1930s, where she attended school and graduated from Coronado High School in 1947. At that time Coronado was predominately a military town, being right beside North Island Naval Base.

During World War II, the entire community would black out their windows and the whole town would go dark for fear of bombing raids from the Japanese, whose submarines were just off the coast of San Diego.

While living at home and attending secretarial school in San Diego after the war, she met a young naval officer stationed on North Island, her future husband, Robert Quaney.

They were married April 20, 1952, in the North Island chapel. Following Robert’s naval air tour of duty in Korea during that conflict, the couple moved back to the Los Angeles area, where he eventually earned degrees in industrial engineering.

After her husband accepted a position as a professor at Cal Poly Pomona, they eventually settled in Claremont, where they raised their two children.

She returned to the workforce as an administrative assistant at Cal Poly Pomona, then, after her husband’s 1987 retirement and a move to Carlsbad, California, at University of California, San Diego.

She retired from UCSD but loved working so much that she took a part-time job in a local real estate office in Carlsbad, where she continued working into her late 80s. After her husband’s death in 2022, she moved into a retirement facility in Encinitas, California, where she died on February 4.

“Susan will be fondly remembered as being kind to everybody, interested more in what others had to say and were doing than she was in talking about herself, and always ready with advice, solicited or not, which much of the time was spot-on,” her family shared. “She and her husband were true soul mates having been married for nearly 70 years. Both were 94 years old when they passed, and she passed exactly two years and three days after he did.”

She is survived by her son, Thomas Quaney of Colton, California; daughter Amanda Quaney Jones and son-in-law Darcy Jones, granddaughter Melissa Langer Haag, and her husband, Patrick Haag, and grandson Matthew Langer, all of Cardiff, California; her one surviving sibling, H. Wilkes Joy of Los Gatos, California; and a number of nieces and nephews.

Her younger sister, Deborah Joy Martin, preceded her in death in 2021.

There are no plans for a service at this time.