Father: Joseph Thomas Patton
Mother: Ida Mae Pekruhn Patton

My mother was a saint. She made sure we always had food on the table and kept as clean. My dad was a bit of a run – around. He did a lot of drinking and gambling and, I understand, some of womanizing. Sometimes he would go on binges and we wouldn’t see him for days.

So my mother always took the money and hit it under pillow cases or under the rug. We had no checking accounts; we paid all our bills with cash.

But the first bill that usually got paid was my father’s bar bill. After he got off work at the steel mill, he would go across the street to the bar and have a few boilermakers. At the steel mill, my father worked as the first helper in the open hearth. He worked at Weirton Steel in Weirton, West Virginia.

Today, I have 40,000 shares of Weirton stock that are worth about $24.00.

I’m the middle child of three. My brother Dave is about a year older than I am, while my younger brother is fourteen years younger than I am. Donnie was a surprise!

As far as we know we were the only Pekruhns spelled without a C. My grandfather immigrated to America from Germany.

I taught at Bradford junior college in north Boston; the university is now closed. I also taught at Bowling Green state university in Ohio. I taught at Rutgers then, I went to the University of Massachusetts, from where I retired in 1992.

I taught dance. I always wanted to be a dancer as a child, but my mother wouldn’t let me take lessons. We didn’t have very much money. So when I got to college and had the opportunity to take dance classes, I took it as many as I could. I taught mostly modern dance but I can do social dance, folk dancing, square dancing.



“Somehow, I loved the Taste of Mud”

Basically, my childhood was a lot of fun. We used to have a group of kids who would all play Johnny – kit – the dash can, or read – rover. We went hiking in the woods, and climbing up waterfalls. We lived in Steubenville Ohio, which is right across the state line from a Weirton West Virginia. It’s halfway between Wheeling, West Virginia, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

As a kid I remember making in eating a lot of mud pies. My mother used to get worried and sometimes complain to the doctor who said: “that’s OK. A kid has to eat a peck of dirt before he grows up.”

My mother shot back: “but she eats that much in a week!”

Somehow, I loved the taste of mud.


“I Was an Ornery Kid”

Another strong memory is when and Mary came and took me over to Weirton. I was only going to stay for a couple of nights, but a week later she had to bring me home. I was perfectly content to be there.

I remember that they had to single beds that were pushed together, but were latched. One morning I woke up and I was on the floor. The beds had split apart. I was a really small child and just slipped between the cracks.

One of my mother’s favorite sayings was: “what will the neighbors think?”

One time, I came down to answer the phone in my slip. My uncle John was there and he saw me. My mother was appalled!

These days, slips are like dresses. Social appearances meant a lot to my mother.

But I didn’t like having to keep up appearances. I used to ask my mother: “what difference does it matter what someone else thinks? It’s my life, and it is what I think and what I feel about myself that is important.”

I was ornery as a kid. If you told me not to do something, you can bet your sweet bippy that I was going to do it.

One time my friend Suzanne and I ran away. We each had a quarter. We had a racetrack in town. We stopped at Wiggin’s market and each got 25¢ worth of candy. In those days that was a lot of candy.

About 4:00 we started to get hungry and we thought we had better go home. We each got punished; I was sent upstairs to my room without any dinner.

While my mother sat on the steps to the back porch I sneaked down out of my room and opened the refrigerator. My mother said: “is there a mouse in this house?”

I said: “yes, and it is a very hungry mouse!”

Ma’am laughed and she let me eat.


“I Got a Lot of Whippings as a Kid”

I got a lot of whippings as a kid. Before each spanking I had a small pillow that I used to hide inside my britches. When my mother hit me with the yardstick I would laugh, and laugh, and laugh. When she realized that I was well padded, she laughed also.

When I did something my dad didn’t like he would take off his belt, and whack me with that. In my day, girls didn’t wear blue jeans to school; we wore dresses. So if I did have some marks on my legs, I would cover them up with long stockings.

My career was guided not from the encouragement by my family, but from teachers. Luckily, I was able to get jobs and afford to go to school. Room and board and tuition was only about $200.00 a semester. Whatever catalog you went in under was the one you graduated with. In other words, the fees never changed. Today, the fees go up every year.

I worked my way through college and through graduate school getting jobs and 50¢ or $1.00 an hour.

In a graduate school, I got a job teaching social dance for the YMCA at $20.00 an hour! The minimum wage then was $1.00 an hour. The people who ran the program liked what I was doing so they got six couples together and I talked to nights a week. And, they used to take me out for dinner after class! I made $40.00 a week teaching dance in graduate school.