My Mother

For Mother’s Day 2020, I would like to share memories of my mother, Patti Jeanette Raiza Kirkpatrick Cooper, who died January 20, 1989. I’ll start by offering the eulogy I began writing when she entered hospice care on January 10. It took two memorial services to do her justice. The first was January 22 at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Flower Mound, Texas, built on the old family farm. All the family attended this service and the reception that followed. Later she was interred next to my father’s grave. That night Lilli (17), David (15), and Shelby (10) flew home to Arlington VA to return to school.

Steve and my brothers and I flew to Amarillo for the second service, the following day at Polk Street United Methodist Church. Many friends came over from Borger. She had lived in Amarillo since 1972 with her second husband, Hugh Cooper, who died in 1986. My eulogy was read by the pastor of each church:

One of my mother’s favorite verses in the Bible was First Corinthians 13:13—“Now faith, hope, and love remain—these three things—and the greatest of these is love.” Faith, Hope and Love characterized the life of my mother.

Faith in God. My mother believed in God without reservation and studied the Bible faithfully. She contributed her musical talents to churches throughout her life and was active in church women’s organizations. She saw to it that her children attended Sunday School, Youth Fellowship and Church Camp. She and my father were faithful in their financial support, too.

Faith in marriage.  My mother loved her husbands and liked being married. Her faithfulness to my father, William Davis Kirkpatrick, endured 37 years. After his death in 1970 she contacted an old beau, Hugh Cooper, whose family had conveniently maintained the same address in Amarillo since 1927. She and Hugh married in 1972 and enjoyed fourteen happy years together until his death in 1986.

Faith in her family. Patti was born into the loving family of Harry and Burt Raiza and brother Rex and thrived in small towns near Dallas—Bluffdale, Granbury, Lewisville—where her father was a blacksmith and a miller. Inheriting her mother’s musical gifts, she studied piano and graduated from Denton High School at age 16. After obtaining a teaching certificate from North Texas State, she launched a ten-year career in public school music. With her marriage to Will Kirkpatrick in 1933, she began to realize the dream of having children of her own.

How devoted she was to Joel, Harry and Martha! Not only did she make most of our clothes herself, she was always there to provide emotional support and mental stimulation. Somehow, she managed to inspire academic achievement without demanding it and to convey the notion that “anything worth doing is worth doing well.” Her faith in her children gave us the self-confidence to achieve our own goals.

Hope for education. Unable to finish college for economic reasons, Patti always hoped to attain a college degree. By the time her children were all in school, she was commuting twice a week 80 miles to  Canyon, while continuing to teach thirty piano students. Her moment of triumph came in 1954, when she graduated from West Texas State College with a BS in Education, the same month that her son Joel graduated (as valedictorian) from Phillips High School. With such an example before us, we children found it unthinkable not to finish college and go on to graduate school. Certainly, everyone she met got a chance to hear how proud she was of all three children and all seven grandchildren.

Hope for travel. Mother was an innately curious person who read widely. For the first half of her life, her travels were largely confined to Texas, a state she adored. A trip to the Pacific Northwest in 1953, which yielded college credit for geography, whetted her appetite to see more of the world. As her children established their own homes, she made frequent trips to St. Louis, Boston, New York and Washington DC. In her heyday she traveled to Hawaii, Scandinavia, the Panama Canal, and the Holy Land. Wherever she went, she could sit down and play “Kitten on the Keys.”

Hope for prosperity. As a survivor of the Great Depression, Mother was always “making do”—making pajamas out of feed sacks, giving herself home permanents, canning peaches. She invariably saved little packages of peanuts, jelly and even salt and pepper from her airplane trips. After years of living in cramped company houses, she was so overjoyed when the house in Phillips was enlarged, that she had our minister conduct a special ceremony to “bless this house.” Later she took pride in her “brick house” on the farm and her “two-story house” in Amarillo. She also derived special pleasure from endowing the Burt Duke Raiza Piano Scholarship in memory of her mother at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.

But the greatest of these is love. Patti’s love for her family and friends were dominant chords in the composition of her life. The love she received so abundantly as a child and then as a wife was transformed into a nurturing love for her children and her students. Her love extended to her grandchildren, her nephew and his family, a host of cousins, and a multitude of friends. Patti was a prolific correspondent who kept up with childhood friends and distant acquaintances. Patti enjoyed membership in the American Association of University Women and the MacDowell Music Club in Borger, and the Book Review Club in Amarillo. Her friends in the Co-Workers Class at Polk Street United Methodist Church were dear to her. One friend remarked, “Patti was a good neighbor and a good friend.” Another observed, “She always seemed to be in a pleasant frame of mind. She was a great consolation when I lost my husband.

If a person’s imperfections make them lovable, then she had a few of those, too. There was something about her that made people want to help her. She was always getting rides home when she walked too far. Friendly and trusting to a fault, she ended up with four vacuum cleaners, because she found it difficult to say “no” to salesmen.

Transcending all else, my mother’s love of the Lord was what sustained her through difficult times and brought her joy in times of triumph. She always remembered to praise the Lord and thank Him. So now, we who are left must take comfort in God’s all-encompassing love, and praise Him and thank Him for the remarkable life and the inspiring example of my mother, Patti Raiza Kirkpatrick Cooper.

My eulogy was not the only one that day. After the service at Trinity Presbyterian Church, at the corner of Morriss Road and Kirkpatrick Lane, there was a reception in the house that she and Dad had built in 1968. It had been repurposed by the church for offices and classrooms. Trinity’s sanctuary had been built only a few years before in what we used to call the “Meadow” of the farm that was in our family from 1866 until 1984. This 1970s photo shows me in the front yard of my Mother’s house, gesturing to the Meadow, which is now surrounded by houses.

My brother Harry gave his eulogy himself at the reception. He began by reciting, in Russian, a poem from Boris Pasternak’s novel, Dr. Zhivago. Harry had learned Russian at the Army’s Monterey CA Language School and had served as a translator in Germany. He rendered the title of the poem as “What is happening in my century?” Here is Harry’s Eulogy:

It certainly was Patti’s century, from the Wright Brothers flight in the year of her birth to the Inauguration of George H.W. Bush on the day she died.  We expected her to see 2003, but it was not to be. Even so, we are celebrating today a long and happy life. To clarify part of Martha’s eulogy, where she speaks of Mother’s pride in her children…there are two brilliant, talented, accomplished children, my sister and my brother. Then there’s the black sheep.

Martha and I were talking last week about Mother’s favorite hymns. I started singing “In her heart there rings a melody!” Let me tell you how it was:  The 1940s. The Presbyterian Church in Borger. The women in short skirts…and hats! Patti played piano for the Sunday School. Ben Turpin led the singing. Ben was what would now be called an “activist.” My Daddy said he was full of…enthusiasm. He wouldn’t just lead a song, he would exhort in a way more Southern Baptist than Presbyterian: “In my heart there rings a melody! There rrrings melody!”

And up front Patti was giving that piano the business. The runs up and down the keys. The elaboration. Yes, Martha, her favorite hymns were ones such as “Old Rugged Cross” and  “In the Garden” where she could add those decorative, warbling obligatos. But whether she realized it or not, this was her song…”In my heart…” It was the joy of music, the joy of living, the joy of life.

After my father died in 1970, Patti and I became involved in a real estate venture that also included Joel, Martha and, not the least, Steve. This venture, to be successful, required cooperation, negotiation and diplomacy from all of us. We were successful! The deal closed on New Year’s Eve, 1971. I was here on the farm with Mother. I brought in champagne and insisted we drink a toast and smash the (K-Mart) glasses against the fireplace. She went along with this silliness.

Her years from the time she was three-score-and-ten were among her best. She would often just light up on seeing new places and meeting new people. In 1974 she accompanied me and my friend, the late Jørgen Kalom, a native of Denmark, on a tour unavailable to most tourists. We visited and dined with many people in their homes in Copenhagen, the Danish countryside, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Paris.

On the island of Fyn, we stayed in a manor house that had started accepting guests to help pay the bills. Before dinner we wandered around the many grand rooms with their portraits and suits of armor. Suddenly I heard the piano. Mother had found the music room and “Melody in F” resounded from the walls. It was a baroque, 18th century room and she was in her long dress at the piano. In this rich example of old European civilization, I thought: “Patti, you’re a pretty good cultural representative yourself.”

Patti always tried to be a good Christian. She read widely in general and loved reading the Bible in particular. If she sometimes clutched her Bible too tightly, and wandered into some all-too-human frailties…well, she always had the goal of a good Christian life. She honored her father and mother. She was devoted to her brother Rex and his family. She loved us all. Very much.  “In my heart there rings a melody, There rings a melody…of love!”

Despite calling himself “the black sheep,” Harry was by far the most colorful member of our family. I loved him dearly, as did all his nieces and nephews. Harry died in 1993 after a long battle with AIDS. The next decade was busy for me–teaching 20-25 piano students, getting kids off to college, completing my Masters degree (now who inspired me to do that?), and seeing Steve’s mother, Marie, through her final illness. In 1999 Joel retired from neuropathology at the Texas Medical Center. By 2003, the centennial of my mother’s birth, he and I found more time to write and agreed to record more memories of our parents. Here is what I wrote about my mother in 2003:

My mother was born in Bluffdale, Erath County, Texas on August 24, 1903. Her father and grandfather were blacksmiths, who had come to Texas from Michigan in 1899. Like her mother, Burt, Mother loved to play the piano. By 1912 the family had moved to Lewisville, where her father, who had gained skills with machinery, was a miller. Mother boarded with a family in Denton, the county seat, in order to attend Denton High School. She graduated in 1920 at age 16. Though family finances were tight, she took college courses at North Texas State and Texas Women’s College in Denton and Tarleton State in Stephenville. She spent most of the roaring twenties teaching public school music in little towns like Ozona in West Texas.

During the years she taught school, she had several “beaus,” but it was Will Kirkpatrick, a man from her hometown, Lewisville, who finally persuaded her to marry him. They eloped to Fredericksburg OK and married on August 21, 1933, three days before her 30th birthday. Their first house was in Borger TX, before moving to a succession of West Texas oil camps. Both my brothers were born in Odessa; Joel in 1936 and Harry, in 1937. In 1941 they moved to Texroy Camp, between Borger and Pampa.

We went to Sunday School at Presbyterian Church in Borger, Texas each Sunday, rain, snow or shine.  Pappy didn’t go.  He stayed home and listened to church services on the radio and cooked Sunday dinner- roast beef or baked chicken with potatoes and vegetables, and always a cake.  Mom dressed us up in Sunday best and loaded us into our 1940 model two-door Chevrolet sedan and drove the six miles from Texroy camp into Borger. We might not stay for church, but we always went to Sunday School. There would be a general meeting of fifty or more people before we broke up into classes by age groups. Then we would meet all together again for the closing.

Mom always played the piano, an upright, while Mr. Turpin led the singing. He owned a furniture store in Borger and was about Mom’s age. He had a good voice and was adept at leading hymns. And Mom was great at dressing up those songs with extra chords and embellishments. “The Old Rugged Cross” was a favorite, “The Little Brown Church in the Vale” another.  Mr. Turpin would get us boys to hammering out the refrain on that: “Oh come, come, come, come; Come to the Church in the Wildwood…”

I developed my affection for religious songs at that plain white, wood plank church in Borger.  I’m pretty sure that Mom and Mr. Turpin never did anything else but church music together, but even as a child I could tell that they liked each other and liked working together.  And I could tell that Mr. Turpin thought Mom was a good-looking lady as well as a talented pianist.”

More of my memories:  Mother was forty when I was born and always sensitive about being older than my friends’ mothers. If she had kept quiet about her age, no one would have guessed. Her energy, social skills and enthusiasm for teaching exceeded most people’s and continued all through her life.

Mother was my first piano teacher. I can’t remember not knowing my lines and spaces. When I was 8, she got busy finishing her college degree and found me another teacher. But not until Hurshelene Journey-McCarty started teaching at Frank Phillips Junior College when I was 12, did I start practicing seriously. Even during the tensions of adolescence, Mother and I could find joy in playing Brahms’ piano duets. Overhearing dozens of the lessons she gave each week in our tiny house, I learned ways to reach the resistant and inspire practice.

One of the songs I remember Mother playing was Felix Arndt’s Nola, a foxtrot, composed in 1915 and played in the 1950s by Liberace, one of her favorites:

Her interests were not limited to music. The subscription she gave me to monthly art portfolios from the Metropolitan Museum in New York instilled my lifelong habit of visiting museums. She encouraged me to enter essay contests and was very pleased when I won a $25 savings bond for an essay on citizenship I wrote in eighth grade.

Mother was honest like Daddy, but often indirect. She preferred to suggest and imply, rather than make straightforward requests. Her experiences eking out a living as a schoolteacher during the Depression made her frugal to the point of hoarding, but she could also be generous to friends and family members. Mother was hard working and thorough, but not a tidy housekeeper. She could be a good listener who was highly perceptive in personal relationships. On the other hand, she loved to talk in a stream-of-consciousness way about whatever was on her mind, which could be a bit tiresome. She had a vivid imagination and an excellent memory, especially about her own life experiences. She was a gifted teacher, particularly adept at explaining difficult concepts in concrete terms students could readily understand.

Here is a memoir my friend Marjo wrote of my parents in 2003:

I remember Patti both as my best friend’s mother and as my first piano teacher. Most of my memories are intertwined with music and love. I remember Patti as cheerfully and demonstratively people-oriented; I also remember her as busy with an active piano studio, 3 children, a husband, a cat named Elvis AND going to college to finish her degree.  I remember her as fun-loving, as a relaxed housekeeper and one of those people who if it weren’t for the last minute, a lot would not get accomplished.

Patti was so different from my mother that it took me a while to realize that although she possessed a great heart and her house was never completely tidy that didn’t mean she had checked her brain at the door. Patti was holistically progress-oriented and unflaggingly encouraging with her piano students and rewarded us with shiny stars of achievement: gold for excellent, silver for good, blue for average, and red for needing improvement. As a piano student I always received a preponderance of gold stars with a sprinkling of silver. For a long time I thought I received those stars just because Patti liked me because Martha and I were friends. I remember one day glimpsing another piano student’s gradebook and noticing that most of the stars were red or blue and realizing that I had earned my stars (mostly thanks to my mother’s rules about daily piano practice).

I remember Bill as gruffly, even curmudgeonly, humorous, full of stories about Phillips and Borger’s early days, and with an encyclopedic knowledge of Texas Panhandle ‘off the beaten track’ roads and people. I remember Bill sitting in his recliner, petting Elvis, one of the most beautiful cats I’ve ever known with long hair, fluffy tail, and lying there displaying his perfectly matched stripes across his front legs. Bill was a good cook, a rarity in the 1950’s. I remember watching him making ‘egg in a hat’, a poached egg placed in a round cutout in the middle of a piece of toast. In contrast to the way things were done at my house with a toaster oven and little metal cups for poached eggs, he made toast in a pop-up toaster and poached the egg in boiling water, a kinetic as well as gastronomic experience.

I had fun at Martha’s!

I also remember how cool I thought it was that your bedroom furniture didn’t match, like mine and most of our friends did, since yours wasn’t a ‘bedroom suite.’ It was years before I learned the term ‘eclectic’ and if you’ve looked at Country Living, all the rooms are now eclectic!

I also remember how laughter-filled your home was in Phillips, Martha, and how glad I am that your home with Steve is also laughter-filled!

How proud my mother would be to know that her great grandson, Ben Barker, will begin studies at North Texas University in Denton this fall on a full scholarship. Just listen to him play:  https://photos.app.goo.gl/3DFcc6U3jcH69upi8 Take the A Train

https://photos.app.goo.gl/bBXfQFWuoLN3buYG7 Misty

Having looked and not found a single picture of my mother and me together, I submit this pair. Am I becoming my mother? Hope so.