Bill Patterson

Bill was named for his maternal great-grandfather, Bill Johnson, who was a travelling baseball player during the early 1900’s and a journeyman carpenter throughout his life.  Grandpa Bill is best remembered for his mumbly, quiet laugh, his two shortened fingers on his left hand (due to a machine accident), and the coolest toolshed a little boy could explore, complete with a bicycle-powered sharpening stone.  Bill’s maternal great-grandma, Bertha (for real?), or Nana (the only name most people ever knew her by), was a vaudeville stage actress, a Wisconsin bar owner, and the best cook in all of Arizona, famous for her pork roast and browned potatoes.  Bertha’s daughter, Rose Morache, was Bill’s maternal grandmother, whom Bill never met.  Rose danced competitively against Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in and around Chicago, often besting them at the local dance contests.  Rose‘s career was cut short by an early pregnancy and polio.  She died young at the age of 32. Bill’s paternal grandfather, George Emmitt Patterson, the son of Chicago’s first high-rise window cleaner, was one of Bill Patterson’s most favorite people in all the world.  George Emmitt worked his whole life at Stewart-Warner, in Chicago.  While there, George Emmitt introduced his secretary, Joan Linder, to his son, George Kenneth Patterson, a former up-and-coming golf pro and, later, a black market dealer in Germany during the Korean War.  Joan and George fell in love, married, and moved to Tucson, where George Kenneth labored as a data processer at Hughes Aircraft.  There, they raised three closet hellions, Jeff, Robert, and Bill.

When Bill was young, his neighborhood was new, chock-full of countless empty lots.  Bill and his childhood best friend, John Peate, would roam the streets on their stingray bicycles, discovering new and bolder shortcuts through various vacant plots and dry arroyas.  Each new house construction brought new playgrounds to explore and places to play bike tag or perfect skateboard tricks – an unfinished basement, a recently plastered pool, a second story just ply-wooded.  Back alleys and storm culverts were always beckoning to be mapped.  Tree forts, bottle rockets, kite wars, and 7-11 sports Slurpee cups – all these held Bill and John Peate hypnotized and excited as they anticipated yet another day of endless adventure. 

As Bill grew, his delight in life grew with him.  Roger Hardy, Amy Blake, David Henson, Chop Salgado, and Robbie Olsen all showed Bill things that he adopted into his own life – faithfulness, compassion, encouragement, friendship, selflessness.

Upon graduating high school, Bill ventured to San Diego, where he attended Point Loma College, an idyllic small campus built above Sunset Cliffs.  The community at PLC [Robbie Olsen (again), Curt Summers, Tommy Gassaway, Karen Day, Jana Marshburn, and so many others] helped bring Bill out of his introverted ways and set him on his path to recognize the best in others and connect with that part.  Surfing became Bill’s passion.  And, it was there upon those cliffs that the World War II pillboxes were discovered and the first seeds sown for The Rusted Lantern.

Bill returned to Arizona and received his BA in Elementary Education from Arizona State University.  Friends at ASU continued to help shape Bill into the man he always hoped to be.  Ken Sanford, Jerry Joseph, Mary Ann Sanders, Dave Burba, Celeste Walls, and tons of others, had great impact on Bill’s life.  Basketball became Bill’s second passion, which eventually led him to New Zealand where he did his student-teaching, milked cows, and played basketball for $100 a game (and a bottle of champagne, if Wellington Teachers College won).  Philippa Fairclough became a lifelong friend, and the whole experience broadened Bill’s perspective of the world and his place in it.

Following college, Bill framed houses and apartment buildings in the inferno-like heat of Mesa, Arizona, working as the roof man for Waite Construction in the relentless glare of the continuous brilliant sun.  No shirt.  No hat.  No sunscreen.  And no sense, with no thought of how ignorant he truly was.  Two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew became a daily staple, along with three gallon jugs of ice water.  Four A.M. start times created 12:00 noon end times and an entire afternoon of full-court one-on-one basketball with David Bullock.  These were the days of immortality, with boundless energy and no fatigue. 

Oakland, California beckoned and, in 1984, Bill began his career as a classroom teacher.  Alethea Williams still recalls how Bill was her favorite teacher and how well he did that first year with the sixth-graders at Webster Elementary School.  Credit goes to Bill’s principal, Willie Hamilton, for standing tall and making a difference where real-life heroes were few.  Bill spent eight years teaching in the flatlands of Oakland, seeing far more during those years than any action movie could depict.  Along the way, the kids of Oakland adopted Bill and he was blessed to watch several of them grow up, as he met weekly with as many as ninety students to play basketball and coach softball teams and eat burgers at White Castle and talk about hopes and dreams and how to effectively navigate through the many obstacles that Oakland presented.  Donald Hall, Antquenette McClendon, Deborah Chiles, Anissa Green, Roy Garland. Joy Little, Jimmy Butler, and all the others had such promise, but little hope or means to escape Oakland.  These were the best of teaching years for Bill.

Change came when Bill met Stacie East, from Detroit, Michigan, at a wedding in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1987.  Stacie was attending the University of Chicago and, later, would go on to Yale Law School, in New Haven, Connecticut.  Bill had little understanding or appreciation of what a big deal all that education was.  He just knew Stacie was beautiful, had a killer body, and was fun to talk with.  Bill would see Stacie again, the following summer, in Chicago, wearing a beautiful, yellow summer dress and enjoying an evening of Italian food at Medici’s and a futile game of Pictionary at the row house of mutual friends.  Their first official date took place the next summer, starting in Atlanta, after Bill’s nationwide tour of baseball stadiums.  What began as a drive to Palm Beach ended up being a nine-day date that culminated with Bill driving home across the Heartland wondering if Stacie was “the One.”  Six cross-country visits later, Stacie and Bill became engaged and Bill left Oakland behind for Connecticut, where he enjoyed his first and only New England autumn.

Bill and Stacie got married that November and, again, in December.  The November wedding, in New Haven, was in front of a justice of the peace and witnessed by Ken Sanford and his wife, Jennifer.  Post-nuptial celebrations included a rousing afternoon of duck-pin bowling in Milford and a trip to the old-fashioned soda fountain in Danbury.  The December Detroit wedding was a fiasco, with a major blizzard and much of the two families staying away.  John Peate had to bribe the bakers $100 to bring the wedding cake to the “celebration.”

The honeymoon was two-part.  First, the newlyweds rode an ice cutter through Lake Huron to Mackinac Island where only about six people were present on the island (because of the blizzard).  No motorized cars are allowed on the island, so the couple rode for 45 minutes in a horse-drawn wagon to the other side of the island and stayed at a condo with no working heater.  Three days and nights in front of a continual blazing fireplace reduced the 30-foot long, roof-high woodpile to a few scattered sticks.  The second part of the honeymoon took Stacie and Bill to St. John in the balmy waters of the Caribbean Sea.  Nine blissful days were enjoyed at a secluded up-scale house on its own cove, with crystal seas and clear skies and limitless snorkeling and a lazy hammock right outside our wall-less living room.

After returning to New Haven from their honeymoon, Bill and Stacie loaded up their belongings in a U-Haul truck and trekked across the country to California.  Stacie took an internship in San Diego, and Bill returned home to the only place where his soul touched down.  Both Stacie and Bill found jobs in San Diego.  Keona was born in 1999 and Nalani, in 2002.

The Patterson clan has enjoyed many wonderful years in San Diego, where they have hosted Memorial Day Block Parties, Winter Holiday progressive dinners, backyard concerts, pool parties ad infinitum, and many unofficial wiffleball hitting contests.  All the Pattersons continue to grow into the people they truly want to be.  Stacie has practiced law for 20+ years and recently began hosting an Internet podcast show called Radio Reflections.  She also is the invaluable manager to Bill’s budding career as an author.  Keona is studying pre-engineering at her high school with the goal of one day designing roller-coasters.  She is heavily involved in water polo and takes great joy in defending the opposition’s set player.  Nalani has hopes of going to M.I.T. and a career writing code.  She enjoys competitive cheer and can throw her body through space like a carefree cat, always seeming to land on her feet with the greatest of ease. 

And Bill?  He currently teaches fifth grade at Benchley-Weinberger Elementary School, near Lake Murray, in San Diego.  Bill also just finished his twelfth year of hosting Writers’ Corner, an after-school writing class where students develop their writing “voice” and culminate their time by reading publicly at the Shelter Island bonfire pits on random Spring Wednesday evenings.  Bill continues to surf regularly and balls weekly with the young-bloods at the San Carlos Rec Center basketball courts.  He plays tennis as often as he can with fellow author, Gordy Page.  Bill also enjoys frequent urban hikes with Don Wopperer, another teacher in San Diego. 

Bill currently is working on two sequels to The Rusted Lantern.  Look for The Bay Window, and The Key to Room 308 to come out in the next year or so.  Two more books are planned for the series:  The Looking Glass and The Tunnel to the Sea.    A dark mystery involving the streets of Oakland, called The Stars Above, is also due to be released.