Obituary of Suzanne Corrales
Published March 22,
2006 in the Ventura County Star, Ventura, Calif.
Suzanne
Erin Corrales passed away peacefully in her sleep at her home in Ventura in
the early morning hours of Sunday, March 19, 2006, with her loving mother,
husband, daughter and her daughter's boyfriend at her side, after a nearly
four-year fight with cancer.
Suzanne's accomplishments in life include raising a daughter who recently
graduated from University of California, Los Angeles; winning three national
business journalism awards; and membership in the Phi Beta Kappa national
honor society.
A nearly lifelong California resident, Suzanne has lived in the Ventura
County cities of Ventura and Oxnard since 1993. She had previously lived
briefly in Los Alamitos and for many years before that in Whittier. She was
born in Chicago, Ill., on June 13, 1954, and in 1956 moved to Santa Barbara
with her parents, Kathleen and Donald Rathz. She attended Hope Elementary
School, La Colina Junior High School and San Marcos High School, where she
wrote news for the school newspaper and as an academically outstanding
student gave the commencement address. She later attended Santa Barbara City
College and then the University of California, Santa Barbara. She graduated
from UCSB with high honors and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Recently, she
also attended Ventura College in pre-nursing studies.
Suzanne spent her last 22 years of professional life as a news reporter and
editor. At the time of her passing, she was news editor and vice president of
Inside Information Group Ltd., an Oxnard and Ventura, Calif., business news
and information company, which she had co-founded with her husband and
longtime companion, William Donovan, in 1990.
Before co-founding Inside Information Group, Suzanne had been a freelance
news reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a staff reporter for the Long
Beach Press-Telegram, where she first covered the city of Downey and then
became the newspaper's legal affairs reporter in the early 1990s.
In 1993, Suzanne left the Press-Telegram to join the news staff of Inside
Information Group when it relocated from the Long Beach area to Oxnard. As
news editor, Suzanne had the chief role in determining the content of the
company's newsletters, supervising freelance writers and writing much of the
news herself. She won awards for investigative news reporting in 1996, 1998
and 2002 from the Newsletter Publishers Foundation, which gives awards for
the best journalism in business-to-business news publications in an intense
annual, international competition.
Notwithstanding her professional accomplishments, Suzanne is probably best
remembered by those around her for her quiet calm, kindness and wisdom, which
found their best expression in the parental guidance to and confidence she
helped instill in her daughter, Kristina Corrales. With Suzanne's
encouragement and support, Kristy was avidly involved in leadership and
sports in high school and went on to graduate from UCLA in 2005 and landed a
job in the advertising business.
Suzanne was a member of Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Ventura. She was
an avid reader of fiction and journalism; loved movies, the theater and
national parks (especially Yosemite); and in recent years, enjoyed skiing and
traveling abroad.
"If asked to name the one quality which stands out more in Suzanne than
any other, I could not pick between these two: the quality of parenting with
which she raised her daughter or the quiet determination and courage with which
she fought cancer for nearly four years," said her husband, Bill.
Suzanne is survived by her husband, Bill of Ventura; daughter, Kristy, who
resides in Los Angeles and Ventura; mother, Kathleen Rathz of Oxnard; brother
and sister-in-law, Mark and Lorri, and their daughter, niece Caitlin Rathz of
Oxnard; uncle John and aunt Helen Hartnett of Ojai and their children, her
Hartnett-side cousins; aunt Ellen Mangano and her husband, Joe, of Chicago,
Ill., and their children, her Mangano-side cousins. Suzanne was preceded in
death by her father, Donald Rathz; and former spouse, Rick Corrales of Los
Angeles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for the Los Angeles Times,
father of Kristy Corrales.
Visitation will be from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, March 24, with recitation of the
rosary at 7 p.m., at the Ted Mayr Funeral Home, 3150 Loma Vista Road,
Ventura. Funeral Mass will be celebrated at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, March 25, at
Our Lady of the Assumption Church, 3175 Telegraph Road, Ventura, with
Monsignor Vincent Puma and the Rev. Anthony Selvan officiating.
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