Businesswoman made friends everywhere

Sara Perlich Bye could dress up for a Symphony Ball fundraiser one day, then switch to camo and go duck hunting with her family the next.

"She was the most extraordinary mother," said her eldest daughter, Elizabeth Sweeney.

Bye — a former model, interior designer, greeting card saleswoman, outdoorswoman and devoted mom — died unexpectedly of a heart attack in her Minnetonka home on Sept. 27. She was 79.

"Sally and I have been together — since conception — 80 years," said her identical twin, Sue Platou. "I told Sally when she was cremated that half of me went with her."

Bye's death came as a shock to her family because she seemed in such good health.

She socialized regularly. She walked every day. She went on annual canoe trips to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area with a group of longtime friends.

And until she was 72, she went on lengthy bike tours, Sweeney said.

Sally and Sue launched modeling careers capitalizing on both their beauty and the fact that they were twins. They worked auto shows and their photos appeared in newspapers and magazines.

Sally met her first husband, Neal Perlich, at the University of Minnesota. "That's where she learned about hunting and fishing because he was a real outdoorsman," Sweeney said of her dad.

"Sally was open to just about anything."

The couple had three children.

"Family was at the forefront of everything," Sweeney said. She remembers her mother as a fabulous cook, known for her duck dinners.

"She would pull the trigger — maybe," he said. "Mostly she just loved being out there and taking photographs."

Perlich said he'd turn to his mom when he faced a crisis, like the time "some grade issues" drove him home from college.

"When the thunder was loudest, she would come to me," he said. "She was very nurturing."

Sally and Neal Perlich were big football fans and made many friends through the U. She loved socializing, and became a fundraiser for the Minnesota Symphony. In 1980, she and her twin sister became co-chairs of the Symphony Ball fashion show, Sweeney said. She also volunteered at Children's Heartlink, a charity that Sweeney went on to run for 11 years.

Sally and Neal Perlich divorced in 1997 after 38 years of marriage. She picked herself up and at the age of 57 went back to work as a greeting card representative, a job that took her around Minnesota, where she made friends near and far.

"They were so much in love," Platou said. "Practically every day he wrote a love letter to her, which she had under her bed."

Billy Bye died in a boating accident during a family fishing trip on Bay Lake, near Brainerd, in 2009.

"You knew she had her heart broken and she never really recovered from that loss," Sweeney said. "Yet she kept going. She was not going to stop living her life," Sweeney said.