Jimmy Maynard

I was saddened and shocked to see Rick's osbituary in the N&O this weekend. While Rick and I did not communicate frequently we did touch base on a regular basis. We last communitcaated a little less than a year ago about the passing of our classmate Tim Brannan. Following our 50th reunion in 2011 Rick and I got together at his " farm" in Chapel Hill for a wonderful three hour "catch up " lunch and I was introduced to all of the menagerie of animals iincluding  the potbellied pig, Irma. In fact, on that day i was attached by  a peacock for the first time in my life. We had talked abouit haviing a follow up luch at my home in Pinehurst in 2020 but the pandemic intervened and I truly regret I will not have another opportunity to spend time with my old friend. What an interesting and full life and my life was enriched by our friendship.

Jim Maynard

William E (Billy). Marshall

We were as close as any brothers could be… Starting in the seventh grade at Daniels we were in lockstep through high school, same fraternity in college, through graduate school, marriages, divorces,children and careers. We always knew significant and insignificant details about each others life. We visited innumerable times and talked on the phone much more. We always called each other when there was a Broughton Memory and discussed the passing of our classmates...But we never mentioned if it were one of us? His loss is devastating. He had a favorite expression "tell me the good news and the bad news" The good news is he had a fabulous life as evidenced in his obituary. Then again, as with all obituaries, it only hit the highlights and the quality of life he enjoyed, endless laughter and fascinating stories would take a book to describe… If his incredible mother, Stella, was still alive she would write it. When she died at 94 Rick was 74 and he said to me "that's 20 years from now, I hope I live that long". He made it four more years… So it brings to mind the last line of the quote we learned at Broughton which began "Ask not for whom  the bell tolls…" REST IN PEACE MY BROTHER 

Charles Styron

“Dr. Rick” I called him over the past 30+ years, and he called me “Chuck” in return—a name to which I refused to respond. And the banter never waned, except that we also talked about many things quite thoughtfully over the years. 

Rick’s and my friendship started in earnest rather late in High School. In the spring of our Junior Year (I think), Rick and I tied for the most magazine sales in our class fund-raising project. Each of us sold about $950 worth of subscriptions—an obscene amount of money in those days. As a result, the two of us subsequently got hustled unwittingly by a snake oil salesman who wanted us to ply our talents for him in some shady scheme. Luckily for us both, we realized just in time that we were being exploited for a scam, and we dropped out of it. It took a while, nevertheless, to shake this guy off conclusively, and we became close friends in the process.

In the summer between our Junior and Senior years, Rick and I bought a bottle of Chianti one day and took a long paddle around a verdant swamp about 75 miles east of Raleigh. It was full of cypress trees and moss, and it’s a wonder that we didn’t get lost. When we got back to Raleigh at the end of the day, we called his father, Jack, and I told him that Rick had been bitten by a water moccasin and was in desperate shape. It was a stupid, thoughtless joke, and I rectified it almost immediately. Although Jack never said anything to me about the incident at a later date, he must have wondered just exactly what kind of friend to Rick I really was. To this day—although the entire incident lasted only about 30 seconds—it remains one of my profoundest regrets. What a terrible, thoughtless joke to share with a father—terrible! Still, it was a sizable tribute to Jack’s generosity that he never appeared to have held it against me. (I don’t think that Stella, his mother and a friend of my own mother, would have been nearly so kind.) Rick, meanwhile, was totally unphased.

Rick and I also played a lot of golf together during that summer at Cheviot Hills out near Gresham’s Lake. We were both fair players, shooting in the low 80’s with a very occasional round under 80. One day we invited Jimmy Thompson, aka “Red Dog,” to play with us, and he torched us so badly that it still burns. Jimmy was a very slight fellow on the Golf Team, and he was hitting his drives out of sight—straight down the middle of the fairway. We never asked him to play with us again (which probably wouldn’t have interested him anyway); it was too embarrassing. After beginning college, I basically retired from golf except to play very occasionally with my father when visiting home. Rick continued, however, got much better, and became a “scratch” player for many years during his residence in Chapel Hill. 

The times that Rick came over to dinner at my parents’ house were memorable. My father was politically conservative and was vocal and articulate. His discourses (and occasional modest diatribes) used to intimidate me into comparative silence, but Rick met him head-on and gave him better than he got. It was a spectacle, and my father loved it. I’m not sure that he would have loved it if I had been similarly outspoken and cogent myself, but he really respected Rick (even though he didn’t buy anything that Rick was peddling). It was a rare treat to watch the two of them go at it together—a real seminar. 

Rick spent a year at Dartmouth after we graduated from NBHS, and we visited late into the evening one fall day when the Harvard Cross Country team visited Dartmouth for a meet in early October. Even though I got very little sleep the night before the event, it turned out (seemingly miraculously) to be one of my better meets for the year. Rick also visited me one weekend in Cambridge, MA, during our Freshman Year, and we went to see David Gullette, another Raleigh native who was a Senior at Harvard. David was a spectacular actor in those days—still is, living now in Newton, MA, and performing regularly—and he had previously won the Boylston Oratory Prize on two or three occasions. In his bedroom in Dunster House, Rick and I cajoled him into a rendition of Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech—the one that David had recited in his winning performance the year before. I can still see David, standing on his bed, sounding off in stentorian style, and Rick and I glued to him like the young admirers we were. Those were Halcyon Days for both of us . . . endless and full of promise.

Rick transferred to UNC in Chapel Hill after our Freshman Year, and he and I lost touch for a good while after that. In the late 60’s or early 70’s, when I was a student of City Planning at UNC and he was in Medical School, he and I and Lance Walker met briefly in passing one day on the sidewalk in Chapel Hill. Except for that meeting, we probably didn’t see each other again until the late 80’s. He and Barry Greenspon attended my wedding to Nancy Frumer in October of 1989 in Boston, and he gave me a good roasting at our Rehearsal Dinner. Our meetings together also became more frequent after that. Nancy and I would usually rendezvous with him for an evening whenever I visited Raleigh to see my folks, and this continued even more consistently for years after he married Karen. After my daughter, Charlotte, was born in 1995, she would always be part of the gathering as well. She called him “Uncle Rick,” and she bonded with his youngest daughter, Sophie. Sometimes we would meet in Chapel Hill at his fabulous farm replete with peacocks, llamas, an open air plant nursery, and outdoor sculptures, and sometimes we would meet in Raleigh. After my mother died in September of 2008, however, my visits to Raleigh became less frequent, and Rick and I communicated more by e-mail and telephone. The one constant, of course, remained the banter: “Hey, Old LawGuy [his e-mail moniker], I need your counsel with a medical matter that has licentious legal entanglements . . . ” And off we’d go, one quip after another. I’ll miss that youthful nonsense immeasurably and don’t have many outlets like that one anymore. Yep, I’ll miss you, Dear Rick, I’ll really miss you.

HAIL, RICK IAN SUBERMAN, HAIL

William Stroupe

Rick was always so grounded in who he was and where he was going in life. He displayed admirable self-confidence without a trace of cockiness. His accomplishments are testaments to his commitment to live life to its fullest, and the comments by his classmates reflect how well he got along with others. We all miss him.

Larry Lovvorn

During the fifth grade at Sherwood Bates Rick and I lived in the Glenwood Apartments (or somethin like that).  We were the only two boys there about our age and played after school.  His parents were wonderful to know as a young person.  I moved at the end of the year and transferred to Frances Lacy so our contatcs stopped until Daniels.  I did not have the close relationshop mentioned above but we still comunicated through Broughton.  I was alwasy amazed at all his accomplishments in one lifetime.  It ws a plesuire, Rick.

Lance Walker

Though it's Goodbye Rick, I won't forget

Wally Jones

I was shocked to hear my great friend had passed, as I am sure we all were! What a great man, and good friend he was. I have such great memories of him, begiining with him driving that pea green Skoda in high school, probably the only one in the US during our days at Broughton, and certainly the only one I had ever seen, until I specifically began my search to find one, the first time I went to Prague in 1999! I had such great memories of my times with Rick over the years, and will never forget the summer I spent in Nags Head, after he had purchased  Nags Head Inn(?), and turned the restaurant into a Papagayos at the beach! What an innovative thinker he was, and would certainly qualify in my book, as one of the most interesting men I have ever known. i could go on with many other stories, but suffice it to say, we have lost a great one here!  Wally Jones

Mark Fountain

Although I was in the NBHS class of 1962, I remember Rick fairly well.  But I never saw nor heard of the "pea-green Skoda" mentioned more than once among you above.  Does anyone have a photograph of it?  Was it pre-war or post-war?  Skoda made good automobiles before the war and up until the coup d'etat of 1948 (defenestration of Jan Masaryk); they now make very good automobiles again.  I rented one and drove it all over eastern Germany in 2008.  The various-language Wikis provide sample photographs which you can sort through, but you'll have to go beyond English.  Many thanks, Mark Fountain