THE PATTIES

As a chld, all I knew about the Patties was what I heard from Uncle Hugh, my grandfather’s younger brother, Hugh Lawrence Pattie.  He was retired from the “Frisco” railroad, where he had supervised a crew laying track and building bridges.  He and Aunt Ceil lived in Amarillo, but, using his pass on the railroad, he made frequent visits to Fort Worth for Masonic activities.  I remember him dressing up for a Shrine dance with his fez on his head or wearing a fancy gold-braided uniform with a hat with a feather as a Knight of Pithias.

He always stayed at our – already crowded – two-bedroom house.  I do not how we rearranged beds for him.  My mother complained that even though he was helpful, making beds and washing dishes, she wished Uncle Hugh did not come so often.  I was always glad to see him.  Uncle Hugh came in dancing and singing and ready to party.

I do not know why Aunt Ceil did not come with him. Rumors were that Aunt Ceil was strict. She did not let Uncle Hugh smoke in the house.  Maybe she was not much fun to live with.  Uncle Hugh's visits to Fort Worth were brief times of freedom for him. Aunt Ceil had a sister and two brothers living in Fort Worth, but instead of visiting his in-laws, Uncle Hugh preferred to come to our house.  Aunt Ceil -- Lucille Gibson Pattie – was Uncle Hugh’s cousin.  That made all her nieces and nephews my cousins, too.  They all lived in Fort Worth, and I knew the Gibsons and Cassells (her sister Frances’s children) better than I did my Pattie cousins.

The Gibsons and the Paties came to Texas from Kentucky about 1900.   Besides coming to see us, Uncle Hugh used his pass on the railroad to go back to Kentucky every year.  He told me about happy hours he had spent as a boy in the loft of the big tobacco barn on his grandfather’s farm.  He also described the fun of swimming in the Ohio River as if he had lived on its banks. 

Uncle Hugh was a Romantic.  He insisted the Patties were originally from France.  The name sounded French to him.  He said that the family were Huguenots who fled to Louisiana from France to avoid religious persecution.  (Of course, no one in our family could be Catholic!)  He speculated that his grandfather had been in business in New Orleans.

In his old age Uncle Hugh assembled a family history, which I typed up for hm.  In my college dorm room I hunched over my 1898 Smith-Corona typewriter.  Pounding those heavy metal keys was like driving a truck, especially difficult when making five carbon copies.  Among Uncle Hugh’s papers I found a letter from a lady in Virginia who had researched Pattie genealogy.  Ellie Ludlow Pattie rebuked Uncle Hugh sharply, saying, “Your grandparents were from Virginia. I’ve seen their marriage license in the courthouse in Caroline County.”  

On my big trip around Europe in 1983, I stopped at a posada in Ebora, Portugal.  In the elegant dining room of this government-run hotel, I sat with two young men from Chicago.  As if it was enough of a surprise to meet two fellows from Chicago in this remote place, one of them was named Sebastián Patti.  He told me, “My family is Sicilian.  There is a town named Patti in Sicily.”

Now it is my turn to be a Romantic.  I fantasize that some Italian stone worker went from Sicily to decorate one of the great houses being built all over England in the 17th and 18th Centuries.  He married an English girl and over the generations the family become 90 percent English.  That’s more likely than Huguenots going to New Orleans.  My brother Don still insists that the name was originally French.  Some people cling to their favorite myths, refusing to believe evidence.