- Date Of Birth: June 15, 1933
- Date Of Death: December 23, 2015
- State: California
Patsy Pauline Lowery was born at home in Wanette, Oklahoma, on June 15, 1933, to W. K. and Ollie Reed Smith. Died at home in Taft, California, on Dec. 23, 2015.
After a few years around Oklahoma and Texas, Patsy made her first trip to California by train in 1942, in a train car crowded with GIs. Her parents came out to work in the booming WWII shipyards in Vallejo, California. A sick grandfather took her family back to Oklahoma until 1947, when the Smiths joined up with 11 other families for the long drive to the Kern County oilfields, where her father landed a job with Victory Oil Co. in McKittrick, California.
About the long trip to California with 11 other families, Patsy said, “It was like a wagon train.”
Settling in Fellows, California, in 1947, Patsy met her future husband Herod Lowery, Sr., who was living two doors down from her family. They wed on June 15, 1950, and had two children.
Patsy was a 1951 graduate of Taft High School and also attended Taft Community College. She played a lot of six-on-six girl’s basketball at Taft High School, at a time when girls were not really allowed to play sports. Even as an adult, when playing pickup basketball in her driveway with her son’s friends, Patsy’s two-handed set shot was nearly always nothing but net.
Not one to be a housewife, Patsy loved to work. In Taft in the 1960s, she worked for State Farm Insurance on Kern Street. After moving to Santa Maria in 1965, she was the office manager for the Value Fair department store, starting out as a greeter at the store’s grand opening in 1967 for $1.25 per hour. Added to her bookkeeping duties a few years later was handling the affairs of the family’s Texaco gas station.
