Patricia Jane Loomis

Born May 27, 1926 in home in Port Angeles, Washington. She married April 16, 1989, in Portland, Oregon. She died September 7, 2016 in Portland, Oregon.

• Became a teacher because her mother and aunts were teachers.

A Seattle Childhood

Patricia Jane Loomis was born on May 27, 1926, at home in Port Angeles, Washington, the elder of two daughters of Edward Byron Loomis and Beulah Grahm, and grew up in Seattle from about 1932. Her sister Jean later described young Patricia as “the oldest, was very good and obedient... asked way too many questions about everything in school... and even then was probably a perfectionist.” Watching her Aunt Fern teach convinced Patricia she wanted to become a teacher herself.

Teaching, Marriage, and Motherhood

Patricia trained at Western Washington College of Education, where she met medical student Ray Stewart Lobb in the college library in May 1946; the two married and Patricia taught kindergarten in Louisville, Kentucky, while Ray attended medical school there. She continued teaching — elementary grades, home tutoring for homebound students, and a year teaching deaf children by the oral lip-reading method — through the family's moves to Bremerton and then Portland, largely supporting the household through Ray's residency and the early years of his medical practice.

Divorce and a New Life in Hawaii

Patricia and Ray divorced in the early 1960s, and Patricia spent the following years as a working single mother in Portland, substitute teaching — by her own account facing rowdy classrooms that once left her kicked and spat on — while juggling her children's schedules, PTA commitments, and household finances virtually alone; a diary she kept of a “typical hectic day” in 1963 runs from a 6:30 a.m. wake-up to a midnight bill-paying session. In 1968, after a broken engagement, she and her sister Jean took a trip to Honolulu meant to be a brief vacation. Patricia never went home. She rebuilt a career there, first substitute teaching and tutoring, then from 1973 as a magazine circulation representative for national publishers including Curtis Publications and New American Library, work that let her travel.

A World Traveler

Over the following two decades, through long relationships with several partners, Patricia became a serious world traveler — becoming a certified scuba diver, touring Europe repeatedly, and in 1973 spending over a month on safari across Kenya, Tanzania, and Rhodesia, watching lions and wildebeest from the floor of the Ngorongoro Crater and touring Victoria Falls. She crossed much of Asia and the Middle East on other trips, and in the winter of 1989–90 spent four months aboard the cargo ship SS Marjorie Lykes on a working voyage that called at Ascension Island, Durban, Madagascar, and the Gulf of Kutch in India, delivering U.S. food aid along the way. Throughout, she kept up visits to her daughter Jean's family in Sweden, returning again and again over the decades to see her grandchildren.

Return to Oregon and Later Years

Patricia moved back to Portland in 1988 and married Morris Stansbury the following year. She ran unsuccessfully for local office twice — a Honolulu neighborhood board in 1987 and the Portland School Board in a 1995 special election, drawing on “forty-eight years' experience in education” in her campaign. After watching her mother's difficult final illness, she wrote publicly in support of Oregon's 1997 death-with-dignity ballot measure. She continued travelling to see her family in Sweden into her eighties. Her funeral program remembered her love of cooking, music, floral scents, photography, and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Patricia died in Portland on September 7, 2016, at ninety.