Jim Patrie (1934-2022)

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

My dad, Jim Patrie, died last Friday, April 15.  Something-something death and taxes?  I didn’t know they were supposed to happen on the same day.  Anyway, I hope you’ll indulge me while I tell you a bit about him.

 

He first arrived on the scene in Massachusetts in 1934.  Being born in the Great Depression and raised with seven siblings, yes, you might say he picked up some habits of thrift.  He…fixed things.  A lot.  Kept them working and useful far beyond what most other folks might do, ya know?  When I visited my parents in 2011 in Colorado on the way to/from Torrey, I was amused to see a kitchen broom he had repaired with a bunch of screws and a handle from a broken snow shovel:

 

 

A shovel-broom.  A shobroom?  Yep, that was Dad.  Our family has endless stories about his economizing nature.  His parents had a French-Canadian background and a lot of French was spoken in his house when he was growing up, so my dad was pretty fluently bilingual.  His dad was the janitor at the local catholic church and was on good terms with the monsignor, who ultimately helped pay for my dad to go to college at U-Mass Amherst where he earned a mechanical engineering degree.  After graduating, Dad worked a civilian job for a short time before he attended a Blue Angels airshow and thought, “hey, I could do that.”  So he signed up for the Navy and did that. 

 

Sort of. 

 

He had vivid memories of his days of flight training in a T-28 Trojan:

 

 

 

He said it was a very forgiving plane, because if anything got dicey you just firewalled the throttle and let 1425 horsepower lift you out of trouble.  He became a carrier-qualified naval aviator, but in the end found out that he literally could not stomach the kind of wild aerobatic maneuvers required to be a fighter pilot; he just got too sick.  Instead, he was assigned to a squadron (VR-1) that flew a transport aircraft ferrying military VIPs all over the globe.  This turned out to be a great experience: as the old saying goes, he joined the Navy and really did see the world.  He flew to all kinds of exotic places in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, before the world was as globalized as it is today.  The plane he flew, a Douglas R6D, was fitted out and staffed as you might expect for something that carries military elite around:

 

 

 

He’s fourth from left in both of those shots.  He once told me it took a crew of ten men two days to polish the plane’s aluminum skin. 

 

The VIPs he carried stayed in nice hotels at their destinations, and because he and his flight crew needed to be ready for sudden changes of itinerary, they got to stay in those same nice hotels.  There was a pretty generous cargo allowance for bringing back personal goods from overseas, and Dad and his fellow crew members definitely made use of it; the joke was that they were in the “VR-1 Worldwide Shopping Squadron.”  He once brought a camel saddle from the middle east back to the states for a friend…and then on the next trip brought it back to the middle east to exchange for a different color. 

 

Dad met my mom, an English woman who had initially planned to live and work in the states for just a couple of years, at a party in DC in 1959.  Here’s a pic he took of her, back when you could just drive your personal car onto a naval base and park it in front of your plane:

 

 

They married in ’61 and started a family that included me, my older brother and sister, and a few cats.  Dad said that the major downside of flying a globetrotting transport was that he was always jet lagged; he said he never felt quite perfectly healthy, so he left the Navy in ’62 when his service commitment was up and began a civilian life where he put his engineering degree to good use. 

 

I have Dad to thank for sparking my interest in motorcycles.  Some of my earliest memories involve riding around as a tiny passenger in front of him on his Yamaha RD-350, which looked exactly like this one:

 

 

I got to pilot that thing just once before he sold it, but it didn’t go so well.  After <ahem> getting my motorcycle endorsement, I spent a lot of time cruising around on his second motorcycle, a Honda 450 like this one:

 

 

He mostly used that bike for running errands, but on one occasion he loaded it with more gear than it was ever meant to carry and rode it solo from Minneapolis up to Churchill, Manitoba (there still isn't a road all the way there; at some point he loaded his bike on a train to complete the journey).  No wind protection, open-face helmet, and the...thriftiest riding gear he could scrounge up.  He said it was a hard trip, but damn if he didn't follow through with the whole shebang.

 

When I was growing up, my dad was the smartest person I knew.  His travels had given him a sense of the world, he was always well-read on current events and knew a good bit about history.  Between that and his engineering training and his jobs at a fire truck company (I’ve inherited his American LaFrance workbench and his slide rule), a medical equipment company, and a weapons factory (I’ve also inherited his GAU-8 dummy round), he absorbed a wealth of knowledge about many things, and he was always happy to share that knowledge with me. 

 

Outside of his day job, Dad enjoyed taking in a football game with a beer in hand now and then, but for the most part he was not one to loaf around and let the day go by unused.  I have fond memories of splitting huge piles of firewood with him on cool fall days using a sledgehammer, wedge, and sweat.  He was also a craftsman who executed uncountable home improvement projects, all of the finest workmanship and some of them on an epic scale.  When I was 17 he installed a hot tub in our basement.  The shell of the tub was a good 7 feet square, 3 feet tall, and weighed a few hundred pounds.  To get that giant thing into the basement was a major feat in itself:

 

• Dig a trench (by hand) just outside the basement wall
• Knock out enough bricks in the basement wall to slide the tub shell through
• Slide the tub shell through the hole (did I mention it weighed a few hundred pounds?)
• Brick up the wall
• Fill in the trench

 

The actual installation work was a whole other thing.  Excavating the basement floor, lining the pit with a ridiculous amount of concrete (which he and I mixed by hand instead of machine, because he was…thrifty), and then all the plumbing, tiling, lighting, and what-not. 

 

 

That’s him in 1988, working on the sauna next to the hot tub.  He had that same wooden stepladder from before I was born until he and my mom moved into a retirement community in 2016.  Did I mention he was thrifty?

 

Here's another home improvement shot from '92:

 

 

This was part of a project to extend the master bedroom and closet out into the attic on the far side of that wall.  That's a load-bearing wall, and with the drywall gone the next step was to take down the wall and replace it with an overhead load-bearing beam - without having anything collapse during the whole process.  A bit like doing open-heart surgery without having the patient actually die on you.  As with the rest of his projects, it all turned out beautifully.  

 

As you might have guessed by now, Dad was a master of all trades.  In addition to keeping the family cars running and looking good with services ranging from bodywork/paint to engine replacement, he used his skills and ingenuity to plan and execute the aforementioned home improvements.  He knew the relevant building codes backwards and forwards, and he served as his own architect, civil engineer, excavator, mason, carpenter, electrician, plumber, mudder, roofer, glazier, cabinet maker, painter, tiler, carpet layer, HVAC technician, landscaper, and more.  His incredible skills, creativity and intelligence made me want to be a mechanical engineer.  As I told him in 2014:

 

Growing up, I wanted to be a mechanical engineer because I thought they were smart.  Now I know better: it’s not engineers that were smart, it was you. 

 

Dad’s sense of humor was unparalleled.  He loved a good off-color joke as much as the next sailor, but was also a genius with sarcasm, punnery, and slapstick, and our family developed a long list of inside jokes; a lot of our time with him was spent laughing hysterically.  Even after my brother and I had earned PhDs in engineering, he was not above calling us “goddam idiots” (in good fun) when we did something dumb. 

 

Dad was an avid outdoorsman, too.  Summer vacations often involved towing a pop-up camper to the western US to visit many of America’s national parks, where we went on day hikes and multi-day backpacking treks amidst breathtaking alpine landscapes.  Here’s me and him halfway through a two-week trek around the base of Mount Rainer in ’89 (Mom is behind the camera):

 

 

That’s Mount Adams in the background.

 

Dad actually summited Mt. Rainer when he was a college student.  Later in life he climbed a bunch of other mountains with Mom and one or more of us kids: Whitney, St. Helens, Adams, Shasta, Kilimanjaro, and Ben Nevis are the ones that come immediately to mind. 

 

Dad and Mom scrupulously saved money and invested smartly over the years and were able to enjoy a lot of travel after they retired in ’99.  Through a mix of international flights and pan-American road trips with an enormous fifth-wheel trailer, they visited over 54 countries together.  In the ‘90s he read Endurance, the amazing story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s survival in the Antarctic; he was so enamored with it that on one of their voyages he and my mom traveled to South Georgia Island to visit Shackleton’s grave, and on another they went to London to lay eyes on the James Caird.

 

Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2010, and it was a long slow slide downhill after that.  He never had much in the way of the classic tremor, but fatigue and intermittent nausea plagued him more and more over time.  He still had the will to do home improvements, but not the energy, so during my visits after his diagnosis, he mostly retained the role of foreman while I provided the manual labor.  Here’s me tearing up their front sidewalk to do a brick inlay in 2015:

 

 

Those safety glasses I'm wearing have been around about as long as the stepladder I mentioned earlier; I could still sorta see through them. 

 

Mom died in 2017, and Dad was heartbroken.  They had been married 56 years and were constant companions in retirement.  My sister lived nearby and went above and beyond the call of duty to take care of him as his PD got worse and worse (you’d be surprised how much care an assisted-living facility doesn’t provide…).  My wife and I and my brother visited him several times each year.  This is me and him in 2019 on Davidson Mesa near Louisville, CO (Masako is behind the camera):

 

 

The pandemic was awfully hard.  In early 2020 there was an outbreak at his assisted-living facility, and 20 of his friends and neighbors died while the survivors endured a difficult degree of isolation as they tried to squelch the outbreak.  My sister was allowed back in to see him late that fall as a designated caregiver, and once we were all vaccinated, my brother and I were able to visit him again in June last year:

 

 

That’s me (left), my brother-in-law, and brother in the background, with Gross Reservoir (west of Boulder) far behind us.

 

Dad's motor control and sense of balance got worse as his PD progressed.  He fell more and more often in his final couple of years, and last December he finally fell so hard that he broke his hip.  It was surgically repaired the next day, but he never fully recovered.  He was in rehab near my sister’s home for a couple of weeks, and then on December 30 the Marshall Fire forced an emergency evac that moved him to a really awful facility much farther east.  He was miserable there for a couple of weeks before my sister could get him moved to a nicer place closer to where she lived so she could visit him more frequently.  The new place soon declared he had progressed as far with his rehab as he was ever going to and would need to transition to skilled nursing, so my sister found him a place in Boulder and got him moved there.  It was a nice place with very dedicated and attentive staff, but the weeks of pain, distress, bedrest, and constant changes in his living arrangements had pretty much wrecked him mentally and physically.  I was able to visit him in early February, and he was not the guy I had seen last June.  His motor control problems and severe PD-related swallowing difficulty had gotten worse, making it very hard for him to eat or drink without violent fits of coughing.  Bottom line, he didn’t eat or drink much, and was losing weight.  After a brief improvement in recent weeks, last Monday my sister reported that his swallowing had suddenly become so bad that he had stopped eating or drinking altogether.  On Wednesday evening the hospice nurse estimated he’d be gone in 2-5 days, probably the lower end of that; I booked a Friday flight for one final visit, but he died before I could get there.

 

Some time in the next month or two we’ll have a memorial ceremony and his ashes will be interred at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver, where Mom has been patiently waiting for him; we’ll also scatter a small portion of his ashes in a special spot in the Front Range where we scattered some of my mom’s ashes several years ago.  Someday I’ll have happy thoughts when I think of him, but it's gonna take a while.

 

Thanks for reading.

[lawnchairboy]

sounds like quite a man to me.

 

 

Peace to you and your family Mitch.

[lawnchairboy]

Mom is headed for a DAT scan this week to r/o PD.

 

 

[TEWKS]

Sorry for your loss, Mitch. It sounds like he had the life experiences of seven men, in other words a full life.  A very nice tribute to your father, thanks for sharing his story.

[Jake]

So sorry to hear about the loss of your Dad, Mitch.  I have always been impressed by how fondly you have spoken about him over the years on these pages.    Clearly you are very proud of him.  I am sure he was equally as proud of having you as his son.  I shall pour out a bit of my next toast in memory of him, to your love for him, and to seeing you again soon, I hope.  The happy thoughts don't take too long to wash away some of that pain, you can take solace in that.

[marcopolo]

Obviously, I did not know your father, but I sure got a good sense of him from your masterful tribute.  I can see why you'd be so proud of him.

[John Ranalletta]

Sorry for your family's loss, Mitch.  Sounds and looks like a helluva guy and great dad.

[Twisties]

Sorry to hear!  Quite a tribute!  Hugs.

[Lone_RT_rider]

My friend..... and I never use that word lightly. 

 

I know this was both tough to write, and cathartic for you at the same time. You've been kind enough to introduce me to your family over the years. This of course includes your interesting, intelligent and amazing father. The stories your sister and yourself have told me. We all have laughed so hard while these stories abound. The stories are something that still make me smile at a moments notice. I know enough about you and your family to know that even though you did an excellent job of painting a picture of your Dad, there is so much more that as in all families just takes time to absorb and get to know. Thank you for giving me that opportunity. 

 

Heal my friend.... let grief have it's way with you for a while. Let it purge through you so you can heal on the other side. It's painful. I never seems like it's going to end, but it will. This sounds cliché, but it's been true for me. 

 

"It never hurts less, just less often"

 

You Mitch Patrie..... and the quintessential good son.  Be at peace as soon as time will allow it my brother. 

 

Shawn

[Scott9999]

I appreciate you sharing this, Mitch.  Too much is lost mostly unnoticed when a man passes, particularly a man like your father. 

 

I also have great sympathy in your statement about future "happy thoughts".  This journey, particularly the last few years, has had to be difficult on you.  Not just caring for your dad, but watching the once brilliant, strong man, become less so with the depredations of age and his particular disease.   I've been where you are to some extent (i.e. when my own WWII Navy vet/father passed in 1996).  Your dad must have been a heck of a man.    (He deserves one heck of a Navy wake, too.🍻)  "Fair winds, and following seas ....".

 

May God grant you and your family peace in this difficult hour of your lives.   

[wbw6cos]

I am sorry for your loss, Mitch.   That was a good read about his life.  Thank you for sharing his story.

 

PEACE!

[scout6]

Sorry for your loss.  It sounds like he was a truly remarkable man.

[ltljohn]

Sorry for your loss Mitch. 

He was a man that had a life well lived.

[BrianT]

Great tribute by a great son.  Thanks for sharing his rich life with the rest of us.  You and your family cared for him as best as possible under the circumstances.  That's all you can do.  Take comfort in knowing that he's no longer in pain or suffering and with god's blessing, he's with your mom.  What was his favorite adult beverage of choice?  I'd be happy to have a drink in his honor.

[roadscholar]

Sorry to hear Mitch and a very nice tribute, haven’t read it all yet but enough to know he sure had good taste in cars and motorcycles. 

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

Shawn, Jake, all of you guys - thanks for your kind words.  

 

5 hours ago, Lone_RT_rider said:

I know enough about you and your family to know that even though you did an excellent job of painting a picture of your Dad, there is so much more that as in all families just takes time to absorb and get to know. Thank you for giving me that opportunity. 

 

Heh.  I'm glad you got to meet him, if only for a little while.  And you're right - as long as my post was, it was difficult to keep it that short.

 

1 hour ago, BrianT said:

What was his favorite adult beverage of choice?  I'd be happy to have a drink in his honor.

 

Thanks, Brian.  It shouldn't be any sort of surprise that his go-to refreshment was almost always budget-friendly beer.  Old Milwaukee, Rhinelander, Schmidt, that sort of brew - and always in returnable bottles, back when that was a thing.   

[Hosstage]

Your tribute to your father sure hit me, it was very nicely done.

I'm sorry for your loss, it seems he was a hell of a man. You are lucky to have had him so long in your life.

Godspeed to Jim Patrie.

[Sonor]

So sorry for your loss Mitch. It is wonderful that you knew so much about your father to be able to pay him this tribute. Hold on to what you know, write down what you remember as you go forward, memories are something that sometimes pass with age. Peace be with you and your family.

[Jake]

12 hours ago, Joe Frickin&#x27; Friday said:

  It shouldn't be any sort of surprise that his go-to refreshment was almost always budget-friendly beer.  Old Milwaukee, Rhinelander, Schmidt, that sort of brew - and always in returnable bottles, back when that was a thing.   

 

I mean, there HAS to be a Stroh's or two in that mix.  

[TracerBullet]

My condolences on your loss Mitch. Your tribute was amazing

[MichiganBob]

A life well lived.

Everyone has a story but you don't know what it is unless it's shared. Thanks for this gift. Shalom aleichem. Take good care.

[Rinkydink]

God bless you and your family Mitch. You dad was obviously one of the greatest generation. They certainly don’t make them like that anymore. A great tribute you penned honoring him. The hardest thing I ever did was to watch the big C slowly take my parents away from me. My father was a very strong big strapping man and watching him struggling to step off a curb was indeed very hard to take. Raised very poor he had an eighth grade education but my family never did without what we needed.
 

Your parents are together once again. Peace to you and yours. 

[szurszewski]

My condolences on your loss. 

 

Thank you for sharing those memories. Sounds like he had an amazing life and you had an amazing dad.  You seem to clearly appreciate both of those things, so I hope that’s some solace to you in your time of grief. 
 

 

[Polo]

It's fortuitous that I came back after years of absence.

In reading this, I see a lot of good memories for you to remember your Dad, and smile.  Hang on to those memories.  His passing is sad for you, no two ways about it, but I dare to venture that you have a lot of good times to hang on to.

Nonetheless, sorry for your loss; receive my sincere condolences.

[RandyShields]

Wonderful tribute Mitch.  Thanks for sharing.  Great photo history.

[ESokoloff]

Mitch, sorry for your loss.

That was a great tribute about a great man.

The Apple didn’t fall far from the tree. 

[DaveTheAffable]

A life well lived, a son well raised, a remembrance well written.  Thanks for sharing Mitch.

[Chris K]

Sorry for your loss Mitch. Thank you for giving us a glimpse of your dad and a life well lived. I see a lot you in your dad's story!

[Wayne Johnson]

Thoughts and prayers to you and your family. Your tribute and memories of your mom and Dad show what great parents you had. They will always be with you and the pain will ease over time. Remembering the good times will help

[ERdok]

Wow! What a great tribute to your dad. Condolences to you and your family.

[greiffster]

Mitch,

Sorry for your loss and thank you for sharing a bit of his wonderful life.  Wow, you two look alike.

 

 

[Mike]

Mitch, thank you for sharing this. It’s a wonderful tale, and a reminder that one of the greatest gifts we can receive is having amazing parents. Wishing you and your family peace as you mourn his loss.

[beemerboy]

On 4/23/2022 at 10:03 PM, DaveTheAffable said:

A life well lived, a son well raised, a remembrance well written.  Thanks for sharing Mitch.

Well said, Dave, and Mitch, please count me in with condolences to you and your family. Both my parents were born in 1927 so I got a big chuckle out of your reference your father being "thrifty." Dad managed to impart that to me and I thank him for that to this day.

[LBump]

Ditto what others expressed... !

 

What is truly remarkable is the quality of relationship you had (and continue to have) with your father.

Many thanks for sharing your feelings and memories. Condolences.