Mike Patterson
There were people at Moody who, years later as I reflected on them, became large in their own ways as time passed. They did not take on enormous proportion when we were there with them. It was all there, of course, but we just did not recognize it like we were going to as the years rolled by. With each passing decade, weight was added to their image, and now we recognize what characteristics were resident there but blind to us in those days.There are others, however, who loomed large amongst us. Not that they were necessarily spiritual behemoths but they possessed greatness in stature, nevertheless, from the uniqueness of their personalities or something memorable about them. That is, time was not really needed to add anything. They were legends in their own time, we might say. One of them was a man that few will forget, Moody heathen Mike Patterson.
Patterson had a twin sister named Laurel who was in the Class of 1965. Moody paroled him into society in 1967. All I remember about Laurel is that she seemed to be sane, unlike him. She was relatively quiet next to him (Who wouldn't be?) and had hair as black as midnight that contrasted with her fiery red lips. Now here is a factoid that should make you think: the Pattersons have a sister who is an only child. Come again? That is because Mike and Laurel were adopted out of foster care at age four in Chicago. Their mother, who had been a college basketball player with her own twin sister, released them for adoption after having had a WWII relationship. She died when they were six. The couple named Patterson, from whom they took their last name, were godly Christians. The dad studied opera under Jerome Hines, and the mother harmonized on the night club circuit with her sisters, sort of like the Andrews Sisters, which probably had something to do with Mike always finishing the hymns in chapel in either fifths, sevenths, ninths, or thirteenths and Laurel singing in Women's Glee and chapel as well. Mike was on the risers unhooking cummerbunds during Men's Glee concerts and also sang in that little ensemble that Wendall Borrink led in the Crowell Hall lobby at noon on WMBI before Moody went contemporary. I don't ever recall seeing Patterson study for a single minute, yet he always authoritatively philosophized about any subject like Aristotle. You could also see him almost anyplace because he roved all over the halls at all hours (this is why he never studied), and you could hear his hyenic laugh rolling up the Smith Hall canyons to all floors in the evening hours. Patterson floated about like a student-at-large. He seemed to be omnipresent with no particular purpose. He was just there. Always there. He appeared all over the place like an apparition. Sometimes you could hear his thunderous howl going down the elevator shaft in Smith Hall. That was because he was on TOP of the elevator and looking in the grate down at the normal people who rode IN the elevator. I know this because I was up there with him. So was Chuck Wright, Dick Schueler, Dave Parker, and many others who had the courage to pry open the elevator doors on the 8th floor and leap into the darkness of the shaft and land on top of the box that suspended itself by two cables eight floors above the Chicago earth. Patterson is the only person I know who could take a glass from the dining room and get his mouth around the rim. Like a python, he could somehow disconnect and unlock his jaw and could have probably inserted the exhaust pipe of a CTA bus if he had tried. And he was as strong as Kong, whom we all thought he greatly resembled - from his strength, not his looks. He was always doing that thing he did of going around and suspending people above the earth. Sometimes two or three or more of them at a time would go up as he would for no good reason just hoist them in the air and hold them high while he walked around with them with their pants bound tight as he spread his glass-swallowing lips like Mr. Ed and whinnied that Patterson horse laugh. He could take fully loaded suitcases and wave them around over his head like they were flags. His imagination was prolific. His driving endurance was legendary. Once he drove virtually from LA to Dallas nonstop as I slept. During the whole trip he popped boxes of those little trumpet-shaped cornucopias calle Bugles. He would lift one from the box, lay it on his lips, toot it like it was a bugle, turn his head toward me, open his mouth with a click, jut his jaw forward and smile a sort of Gomer Pyle simpleton look, and then suck the little corn horn into his throat like a chameleon licking an insect off of a stem ten feet away. That was followed up with the horse laugh. For 1500 miles I saw that. I couldn't wait to get out of the car. He entertained himself with this little moronic litany because at the end of that road was Carolyn Ellis whom he eventually married. He and I were as tight as bark, but when Carolyn came along, that was pretty much the end of it. Women have a way of obliterating everything when they do that bunny thing with their eyes like that seductive little hare in Bambi when she stared at Thumper, dropped her eyelids to half-mast with those mascara-thick lashes found on any female rabbit in any pet store, and whispered to him in a very spiritual, I've-just-been-passing-out-tracts-on-Chicago-Avenue, breathy voice, "Helllllooooo." Patterson was Thumper. Carolyn would breathe that "Come hither" look, and his right leg would involuntarily start twitching and tapping like he was holding an electric fence, and off he would mindlessly go in a trance-like, brain-numbing state of twitterpation. She led this helpless tower of strength around like he was going forward to be saved again at Moody Founders Week. When he saw her, he dropped us like he just finished the tenth rep of the third set of curling a lead anvil. Now here is the part that is really hard to believe. Four churches in Chicago, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and California acturally hired him to do youth work. Lord knows how many of them threw him out like they have done with a lot of us. But then one day good old Southern Baptist predestination kicked in for Patterson, and by a streak of good luck (as we Calvinists like to say), he landed in the city of Santa Barbara, California, where he has been since 1972. He got into insurance almost immedialtely and has been trying to keep policy holders from dying ever since. Today he roves all over California like some kind of king and lord as Regional President of Vice for Sequoia Insurance Company out of Monterey. Between him and Laurel, they manuafactured nine children, all of whom look very much alike. They are virtually interchangeable.
Now his sister, Laurel, was a woman in her own element as well. She came to Moody after a year at Swedish Covenant Hopital in the nursing program. With her, she hauled in some real mental horsepwer because she did Moody in two and a half years and then raced back to Swedish Covenant to get more training in not laughing when the doctor looks at a trembling male patient, who is hoping against hope, and chants those famous words, "Miss Patterson, please hand me a rubber glove so I can examine Mr. Smith". When she could do that without a smile, the idea at that point was to head to the mission field. But she got on this serve-your-country thing and went into the Navy during the Viet Nam days instead. Through all that business, she met a Jewish man who later became a Christian and then her husband. She reproduced herself four times in that marriage. But, as many things have come down on all of us that we never expected, Laurel ended up divorced after ten years or so. She also went out of fellowship right then and there too, as we liked to say at Moody, and she didn't go to church for two years. But the Lord got Laurel back on the track again, and the years slipped by as she raised her children. Then a few years ago she met through Classmates.com a grade school friend, and today she and Jack are married and living in the Bay Area of San Francisco. All these years, Laurel has worked in the medical profession. For a while it was surgery, then serving in God's waiting room with hospice, then a regular old doctor's office nurse who got to do the rubber glove thing, and has now finally graduated to filling out long term insurance forms for geezers. Patterson is a maniac; Laurel is an ecumaniac. She has been in every denomination known to mankind - Bible Church, Baptist, E-Free, Presbyterian, CMA (Church of Mostly Arminians), Lutheran, you name it. In about a year and a half, she and Jack are going to hang up their employment guns. Do you think she will get in the rocker on the porch and tilt back and forth and recall the happy days of handing over the latex glove with a straight face? Look at her picture, and then answer that question.
I am going to paste in a web page about Laurel and her family - www.geocities.com/mysunshineboy/index.html. This web page is primarily about the death of Laurel's son, Doug, in 2003. But you will see other pictures of her there, including her children, her first husband and her present husband, Jack.