As Suzanne McKechnie Klahr explained in a November 20 interview, she grew up in a Manhattan home with a Scottish immigrant Christian father who was trained as an engineer and achieved business success and a Jewish mother who was a teacher with the Board of Education in Harlem.
Her parents did not stick together but that did not stop McKechnie Klahr from graduating from Brown University, going to work in Boston at a big law firm, Mintz Levin, where she particularly enjoyed the pro bono work ultimately matriculating at Stanford Law School during the dot-com boom.