SUSANNE BOUTWELL graduated from the Kent School in Denver in 1933, and attended Smith College for two years. After her marriage in 1937, Army life kept her on the move, and in addition to living all across the United States she resided in the Canal Zone and in Germany and France. During World War II she lived in Denver, close to her parents. Summers were spent at the family cabin, named "Dreadful Manors," which was located on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park near Allens Park, Colorado.

Sue's life was always filled with music and art. During the war, working from a tiny snapshot, she created an oil portrait of her husband, wearing a combat uniform and seated in a jeep. In 1949 this picture, titled "Army Engineer," won a blue ribbon in an exhibition at the Savannah Art Club. While in Savannah, she continued painting and also did many pictures of friends and family in pastels. In Germany, during 1954-1955, she focused more on music, and added the accordion to her previous interest in piano. A move to California in the mid-1950s brought her back to art, but now mainly in watercolors.

At the Presidio of San Francisco, the Erlenkotters began a lifelong friendship with Bill Zacha and his family. Sue's loan of $500 to Bill early in 1959 financed the down payment on the property that became the Mendocino Art Center, and she served on the Art Center's Board of Governors for its first 25 years. She and her husband acquired a cabin in Mendocino, and eventually transferred their primary residence there by the 1970s.

In the 1960s Sue became interested in early music, and this was her passion for the rest of her life. In the mid-1960s she arranged a series of West Coast Recorder Society Seminars at the Art Center, and these were followed by classes and performances in Baroque music and Renaissance dance. During this period she became a member of an early music ensemble called the Consortium Antiquum. In 1971 she was a founding member of the Mendocino Troubadours, a group that gave concerts through 1978. Sue was one of the organizers of the Sunday Afternoon Concerts that were held in the Helen Schoeni Theater of the Art Center from 1976 on, and was the coordinator of these concerts from 1979 through 1984. A Mozart Festival, held in 1978, was the first of Sunday Afternoon Concerts' annual spring festivals, which were presented subsequently as Mendocino Coast Music Celebrations.

By 1997 Sue had been overtaken by Alzheimer's disease, and it was necessary to move her from Mendocino to a nursing home in Mar Vista, near her family in Southern California. She spent the last eight years of her life there, much beloved by family and friends.