Brian David Patterson

WILLIAMS CLUBS / ACTIVITIES

Freshman soccer, freshman hockey, varsity hockey 1969-72, cocaptain 1971-72

LIFE SINCE GRADUATION

Petra Rockwell and I were married on 12/31/71 to allow me to compete in a holiday hockey tournament in Williamstown. Many dear Williams classmates attended our New Year’s Eve wedding in Buffalo. After a brief honeymoon in Woodstock, Vt., we returned to the Purple Valley and lived on Sabin Drive in the home of Economics Professor Willliam Gates for my final semester. After graduation we traveled for three months, driving to California, Alaska, and finally back to western New York, where I attended medical school.

After graduation from SUNY Buffalo in 1976, Petra and I moved to Los Angeles County, where I completed a three-year internship and residency in general pediatrics at UCLA Harbor General. Our son, Tyler, was born in 1977. Our plan after residency had always been to return to Buffalo, where our families lived, but opportunity and love of coastal living called. In 1979 we moved to San Luis Obispo, Calif., to accept a pediatric position in a general medical clinic full of enthusiasm and youthful energy. Within a few months the clinic’s medical leadership dissolved the professional corporation; I was soon to be unemployed. Petra was newly pregnant and Tyler a busy toddler. My impending unemployment and a growing family focused my attention, and I joined two other pediatricians experiencing similar circumstances. Together we launched Pediatric Associates Medical Group, serving San Luis Obispo County families and children for >40 years. I retired in December 2019, just prior to the pandemic.

Outside of consuming professional obligations and the considerable challenge of concurrently owning, managing, and operating a small business, my focus has been on family, faith, and friends. Petra and I have thrived over the years and will celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary on 12/31/21. I’d like to believe that our marital success was the result of intentional sustained effort to grow together and to choose each other’s company. We remain best friends and feel blessed each day. Our children, Tyler and Kyra, brought great joy, challenge, and humility. As a pediatrician, I found it much easier dispensing child-rearing advice before we had children of our own. Without question we have focused our thoughts, “spare” time, and treasure on loving and supporting them, their spouses, and our grandchildren. It has been a process we have embraced as a couple and led Petra back to university, where she earned her master’s degree in education and developed multiple parent education courses as an employee of San Luis Obispo Coastal school district.

Over the years there has been time for community service, old/ new friends, and various hobbies, including youth sports, hiking, gardening, skiing, swimming, river rafting, kayaking, travel, and reading. Most recently during the pandemic there has been attention to rehab for bilateral hip replacements and placement of a cardiac pacemaker for an arrhythmia.

In our time ahead we hope to do everything possible to remain physically active, support family and friends, and take some trips we have deferred too long. I look back at my time in Williamstown and am most grateful for the terrific four years of growth, for the exceptional and inspiring classmates I met, and desire to learn and growth that has defined my post-graduate years.