A BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA EXTRA

I have learnt that it was not Suze Rotolo but Susan Zuckerman (now Susan Green) who attended the April 1961 meeting of the New York University Folk Music Club and met Bob Dylan there. A high school friend of hers, Judith Zahler, was a member and invited her along to hear a new singer in town. They found that they had both chatted with him - he "looked all of 15 years old at that point" - just the previous week at the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village.

At NYU, there were only about six in the audience, sitting on the floor and listening to someone who "sounded utterly unlike any folk performer we’d ever witnessed before." Susan began following Bob around town - for example, to afternoon hootenannies at the Cafe Wha, where he played harmonica as backup for musician Fred Neil - and told Suze about him.

When they went to Gerde’s Folk City together, Susan was dazzled by Dylan while Suze had a crush on Mark Spoelstra. But a few months after Susan returned to college in Vermont, where she lives now, Suze hooked up with Bob.

Suze and Susan picketed Woolworth’s every Saturday while still in high school to protest lunch counter segregation in the South, shook Eleanor Roosevelt’s hand as teen volunteer ushers at a SANE rally in Madison Square Garden, and traveled to the August 1963 March on Washington aboard a theatrical union bus.

Susan Green last saw Bob in 1976, when she joined his Rolling Thunder Revue as the tour herbalist.