I met Jim in 1983 when I was looking for a job in advertising. I’d recently graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with an MFA and I wanted to be an art director. This was back in the day when we didn’t have e-mails, and handwritten letters were the way to go. Most ad agencies sent back form letters—but J. Walter Thompson wrote back a note with a direct phone number. I started to keep in touch with the creative department’s head of personnel, Garland Goode. My mother, for some reason, was adamant about my getting an interview at Thompson. She must’ve known.
After months of persistence, I got Garland Goode to look at my portfolio. She showed it to Jim while I was waiting out in the lobby.
Ten minutes later she poked her head out the door and said, “Mr. Patterson has been looking for someone like you for a long time.” (Little did he know, ha-ha.) My mom got some skin in the game too. Garland called her and said I shouldn’t take the job I’d been offered at Ogilvy and Mather because “Mr. Patterson wants to hire her.”
It only took thirteen years for him to ask me out on a date.
The day Jim and I were married was probably the worst (weather) day of the summer of 1997. It stopped pouring just long enough for us to say “I do” on the seventeenth green at Sleepy Hollow Country Club. We chose it because Jim had written a novel called Miracle on the 17th Green. It had seemed like a cool idea, and, except for the weather, it was.
We had invited his sisters and my two best friends as our witnesses, along with another friend, a judge, who wore a black robe and golf shoes (nice touch). The ceremony was intimate and very special. Jim held an umbrella over our heads the entire time. I don’t think I felt a drop of rain.
He was so thoughtful about making our wedding day memorable. He traipsed around New York City looking at hotel after hotel to find just the right room for our wedding night. As I knew he would, he found a spectacular one, on Central Park South. It had the most stunning view of the park.
The day before the wedding, he went by the hotel just to make sure everything was perfect. It wasn’t. Actually, it was a disaster. Turns out the sultan of Brunei was staying in the room and he wouldn’t leave (he was an owner of the hotel). So we got the next best room in the place and a lot of gifts for our inconvenience.
Jim gave me a present every day of our honeymoon on the islands of Maui and Lanai in Hawaii. So sweet and thoughtful and, of course, creative. I still have them all.
One more quick memory. I’ll never forget a very special day in the summer of 1997. Jim had rushed out to the drugstore to buy an early pregnancy test. While I was busy in the bathroom, I could hear him popping a bottle of champagne even before he knew the results.
Jim was right. Jack was in the house.