Patricia Jane Loomis

1920s–1930s

Born 27 May 1926 at home in Port Angeles, Washington, the elder daughter of Edward Byron Loomis and Beulah Grahm. The family moved to Seattle in 1932, and she grew up in West Seattle.

1940s

Graduated from West Seattle High School in 1944 and went to Western Washington College of Education, where she met Ray Lobb in 1946. Married in 1947 and taught kindergarten in Louisville, Kentucky, while Ray studied medicine; their first daughter was born in 1949.

1950s

Daughter Cathy was born in Bremerton in 1950, and a son in Portland, Oregon, where the family settled in 1951. Earned her education degree in 1952 and taught third grade.

1960s

Divorced after 1962 and supported her children as a substitute and home teacher, earning a master's degree in deaf education in 1968. In July 1968 she went to Hawaii on vacation and stayed.

1970s–1980s

Worked in Honolulu as a magazine publishers' representative, traveled the world, and learned to scuba dive, then returned to tutoring and teaching. Moved back to Portland in 1988.

1990s–2010s

Married Morris Stansbury in 1989 and sailed with him on a four-month cargo-ship voyage. Ran for the Portland School Board in 1995, visited her family in Sweden into her eighties, and died in Portland on 7 September 2016.

A Seattle Girlhood

Patricia Jane Loomis was born on May 27, 1926, at home in Port Angeles, Washington, the elder of the two daughters of Edward Byron Loomis and Beulah Grahm. In 1932 the family moved to Seattle, and from 1934 they lived on West Alaska Street in West Seattle. Her mother and several aunts were teachers, and when her Aunt Fern, who was also one of her own teachers, let her write on the blackboard, Patricia decided she would be a teacher too. Her sister Jean remembered her as the one who "was very good and obedient," who "asked way too many questions about everything in school," and who "even then was probably a perfectionist." Patricia herself recalled being tall, skinny, and buck-toothed, a good student with strict, protective parents.

There were good times, too: summers on Vashon Island, a dog named Queen, May Day baskets left on the neighbors' porches, and games of Tarzan in the woods. Around 1938 she went to a fishing derby with her father and won a silver teaspoon for a five-pound salmon. She earned the Fire Maker rank in the Camp Fire Girls and went to Camp Sealth on Vashon. At West Seattle High School she played in the accordion band (she later said she was the only member who wasn't Italian), did make-up for school plays, and joined the Latin and ski clubs and the Torch Honor Society. In 1943 she helped found a Teen Canteen at the Hiawatha Fieldhouse and told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that it would take "giving the students the kind of entertainment they want to go to and not just something their mothers send them to." Her 1944 yearbook said she aspired to be a "School-Marm."

Bellingham and Ray

After a year at the University of Washington, Patricia transferred in the fall of 1945 to Western Washington College of Education in Bellingham. It was her first time living away from home, and even the dormitory rules at Edens Hall (no men inside, in by ten, lights out at eleven) felt like freedom. She became vice-president of the Blue Barnacles swim club and secretary of the student Board of Control, played her accordion at dorm parties, won $5 for the best photograph in the Klipsun yearbook, and in 1947 became the founding president of the Wesley Club for Methodist students.

On Mother's Day afternoon, May 12, 1946, she met Ray Stewart Lobb in the college library. By October they were engaged, and at a dance at the YMCA the DJ played "It's the Talk of the Town" in their honor. Ray left for medical school in Louisville that winter, and Patricia spent the spring of 1947 writing to him, practice teaching second grade, spending Easter with his family in Ferndale, and planning a wedding. She finished her course that June with a wartime emergency teaching certificate, and on June 24, 1947, she and Ray were married, with her father singing at the ceremony and walking her down the aisle.

Teacher, Wife, and Mother

In Louisville Patricia taught kindergarten at Beechmont School for $1,600 a year while Ray studied medicine. Her supervisor wrote that she "finds the humor of situations which are often difficult for inexperienced and young kindergarten teachers." Their first daughter was born there in January 1949, and when Ray graduated in 1950 Patricia bought him a typewriter with $70.55 from her teachers' retirement fund.

The family spent the next year in Bremerton, where Cathy (Meghan's mother) was born in July 1950, and settled in Portland, Oregon, in 1951. Patricia finished her bachelor's degree in education in 1952, a son was born in 1955, and that year they bought an eleven-room house on NE 31st Street. Patricia modeled for the Patricia Stevens modeling school, taught third grade at Sacajawea School, where her principal thought her strongest subject was science, and put in more than a hundred hours as a Providence Hospital volunteer in 1962. She always felt she had worked to help carry the family through Ray's training and the start of his practice, and in February 1962, just as, in her view, that was paying off, Ray asked for a divorce.

On Her Own

For the rest of the 1960s Patricia supported her children as a day substitute teacher in the Portland schools and a visiting teacher for students confined at home. On November 18, 1963, she wrote down a "typical hectic day": packing three lunches before school, subbing in an unruly third-grade class where she was kicked and spat at, driving downtown at lunch to collect and deposit the alimony check, a dentist appointment, a neighbor's child who had swallowed detergent, a parent-teacher conference, running the PTA's film projector, paying bills at half past nine, and housework and homework for her own classes until 1:30 in the morning. She taught Sunday school, directed a junior choir, led Camp Fire and 4-H groups, and spent summer weeks at Camp Magruder on the coast and the Methodist camp at Suttle Lake. She was also a Red Cross water-safety and first-aid instructor for twenty years. In 1968 she earned a master's degree in deaf education from Oregon College of Education and spent a year teaching deaf children to lip-read and speak.

That summer, after a broken engagement, she and her sister Jean took a vacation to Honolulu together. Patricia arrived on July 10, 1968, and never moved back.

Honolulu and the World

In Hawaii Patricia volunteered at the Hawaii School for the Deaf and Blind and worked at whatever came along: managing condominium buildings, taking the 1970 census, and running a surgeon's office. From 1971 she became a publishers' representative, overseeing the distribution of magazines and paperbacks in Hawaii for Curtis Circulation (1973–81), New American Library, and others. Working part-time for several companies at once left her free to travel, and travel she did. She learned to scuba dive and sail in 1971, and snorkeling in Hanauma Bay became a favorite pastime. In 1972 she toured Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, Macau, Bangkok, and Manila. In the summer of 1973 she flew to Morocco and then on safari in Kenya and Tanzania, lunching on curried zebra above the Ngorongoro Crater before going on to Victoria Falls, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Greece. In Bali in 1974 she was welcomed into a village family's cremation festivities and wrote a long account of it home to her father. When she wore an eye patch after eye surgery in 1973, she decorated it with jewels borrowed from a belly-dancer friend.

She went often to Sweden, where a daughter had settled, and in 1981 was there for a grandson's baptism. In 1985 she went back to teaching as a tutor and substitute; the director of Hawaii Tutoring Services praised her "remarkable ability to motivate even the shy, unconfident, and unenthusiastic students." She ran for the Ala Moana neighborhood board in 1987, and she counted fourteen people she had introduced who went on to marry. In 1987 her rent tripled and she had to leave the apartment she had lived in for years, and in 1988 she decided to move back to Portland. Before leaving, she listed the things that brought her joy, among them plumeria, Dvořák's New World Symphony, the rainbow over Manoa Valley, snorkeling with fish, and finding a penny.

Portland Again

Patricia moved back to Portland in the summer of 1988 and on April 16, 1989, married Morris Stansbury. That winter they sailed on the freighter SS Marjorie Lykes, which was carrying American food aid: they went ashore at Ascension Island in a small boat, visited Durban, anchored off Madagascar, and spent days in the Gulf of Kutch, in India, where Patricia made care packages for the two Indian children helping the ship's cook. In 1995, citing "48 years' experience in education," she ran for the Portland School Board and finished fourth of four candidates. That May she spent three weeks in Russia and then went on to see her daughter's family in Sweden. In 1997, remembering her mother's suffering at the end of her life, she wrote to The Oregonian in support of death with dignity while Oregon voted on Measure 51.

She kept going back to Sweden, staying for more than two months in 2009, at eighty-two. Her funeral program remembered how she loved cooking, music, floral scents, Hawaii, Camp Magruder, writing letters, talking, photography, and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and how she sang "Evening Star" while doing the dishes. Patricia died in Portland on September 7, 2016, at ninety, and was buried at Willamette National Cemetery.