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 Visit Pat's Porch (Patricia's online journal)
PAT
Wife, Mother, Grandmother
PAST
Pat was born in Greenville, South Carolina, in her parents’ home, with a doctor and an African American midwife
in attendance. She attended Stone Street School in Greenville and grew up among close relatives, beginning
with her sister Sarah Jane, several years older than Pat; Uncle Shuford and Aunt Blanche, also Uncle Horace
and Aunt Nell, on her mother’s side; and a host of uncles and aunts and cousins on her dad’s side. She
played a lot with her cousin Barbara and also with the neighborhood kids, among them “Sister” Healy. Pat’s
dad was a mechanical engineer who worked with an engineering firm in downtown Greenville. “Lunch” was “dinner”
in those days in South Carolina, and so Carl would come home for dinner and then return after work in the
evening for “supper.”
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Patricia Axtell
Spring Valley UM Church
article
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All this changed during World War II when Pat’s dad accepted a position with the aluminum producer
Reynolds Metals Company at their headquarters in Richmond, Virginia. Greenville was a small place
in those days, and Richmond was a big city. It took some getting used to for Pat. She attended junior
high at Westhampton School and then went on to Thomas Jefferson High School, which loyal Richmonders
believe to be better than the Ivy League colleges. Pat grew up going to plays and concerts at the Mosque
and putting on white gloves to have lunch at the Miller & Rhoads Tea Room downtown, where Eddie Weaver
played the organ.
Pat’s life was uprooted again when Reynolds transferred her dad to Corpus Christi, Texas. Across the bay
at San Patricio they needed Carl to help build a pair of plants to make aluminum from Jamaican bauxite. In
Corpus Christi Pat attended WB Ray High School and watched over Caesar, her big gray tabby cat. She went
on to Del Mar Junior College. She met Oliver in the fall of freshman year. After completing one semester of
college, Pat abandoned her dreams of becoming a teacher and married Oliver in Corpus Christi the next April!
(Caesar came with Pat, but after a few days, he left in a huff and returned to her parents’ home.)
When the company Oliver worked for, Celanese, transferred him to the company’s headquarters
in New York, Pat became a Suburban Housewife in the Borough of Fanwood, New Jersey, population about 9000. Every
work day her husband disappeared at dawn, leaving Pat on her own until about seven o’clock in the evening. Snowed in
during the long winters, with no one to talk to but little children, Pat had to learn to cope with the “February defeats.”
One of her best friends was the proprietor of the local hardware store, who helped all the women in Fanwood keep their household
running while their husbands were out of reach in the city.
Pat’s adventures in those New Jersey years included getting shot at while driving to the swim club one afternoon.
The bullet shattered the back window of her station wagon. She will never know whether they were aiming at her
and missed or whether they just shot out the window for fun...but from then on she took another route to the club!
Pat was elected a Municipal Committeewoman in the Republican party several years running, and what with politics,
the church and the neighborhood, she made a host of friends during her 20 years in the East. It shocked her, then,
when Oliver came home and announced that Celanese was moving its headquarters to Dallas, Texas. But Pat accepted
the change gracefully when she learned that in Dallas she’d have a much younger house, on a much bigger lot! Pat enjoyed
entertaining new friends in her North Dallas home, including the kids that Steve brought home from Austin while he was at UT.
PRESENT
Coming soon.
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