Word: ryans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...latter-day TV raconteur. "She was a quiet girl, and pretty. And it always used to disturb me how tired her face was in repose. There seemed to have been plenty of reason for it. As I recall it, if you went into the cafeteria, there was Pat Ryan at the serving counter. An hour later, if you went to the library, there was Pat Ryan, checking out books. And if you came back to the campus that evening, there was Pat Ryan working on some student research program. Yet with it all, she was a good student, alert...
...work hard as I grew up." But there were a few pleasures, too: amateur theatricals with the two Rains sisters on a neighboring farm, occasional trips to Long Beach, a little girl's pride in raising a prize-winning sow, bareback rides on the Ryan plow horse. One memorable day Will Ryan drove up grandly in the family's first car, a used model T with fancy isinglass curtains. "Everybody piled in-the neighbors, too-and he took us for a ride...
After nearly two years, Will Ryan died of silicosis. On the day of his death she decided to drop the name Thelma and styled herself Patricia, in memory of her father. "He always thought I was all Irish anyway," she says...
Round Trip. Bill and Tom Ryan were in Los Angeles, working their way through college, and Pat, at 18, was completely on her own. Says she: "I have made my own decisions ever since my father died." Among the young girl's big ambitions, two predominated: travel and a college education. "I always wanted to do something else besides be buried in a small town ... I wanted to start with an education." For a year she attended nearby Fullerton Junior College, stopping off on her way to school to sweep out the First National Bank of Artesia and returning...
...years, the call of college became irresistible, and Pat collected her bus ticket and went back to Los Angeles (by way of Niagara Falls, at no extra charge). Bill and Tom made room for her in their tiny apartment near the University of Southern California. One morning Tom Ryan took Pat to the U.S.C. job-placement office. "This is my kid sister," he said. "Can she work her way through college...