Bloom Still on the Rose : Isabel Patterson’s Retired, but She’s Far From Retiring

At 85, in a red-and-navy blue shawl, her blond hair shining in the sun, Isabel Patterson mingled with children at the Cal State Long Beach day-care center as if she, too, were a child.

She hugged the youngsters, watched them paint and sat down with them as they put together puzzles.

“This makes me feel good, real good,” said Patterson, whose donation enabled the Isabel Patterson Child Development Center to be built at her alma mater 18 years ago.

Since retiring from a real estate career in which she made a fortune, Patterson has helped youngsters and college students for more than 20 years. She has given $2 million to the university and $1 million to Long Beach City College.

It has made her one of the city’s leading philanthropists. “I hate that word,” she said, but cannot think of a better one.

As she walked one recent afternoon through the day-care center’s two domed buildings, and along its lawns and tree-lined play areas, she had plenty of young company.

“They all know her,” said Pamela Macdonald, the center’s director. “Whenever they see her, they give her their treasures, like gravel wrapped up in colored paper.”

Macdonald watched Patterson with rapt admiration.

“I have three role models in my life,” Macdonald said. “Eleanor Roosevelt, Ruth Gordon and Isabel Patterson. Isabel is an incredible woman. She cares. She believes in giving back. All her energies are spent to make things better.

“And she’s fun. She loves adventure.”

Known as the “Yellow Rose of Texas” because of the color of her hair and her birthplace, Patterson always liked a good party, even more than she liked catfish and grits.

In her real estate days in Belmont Shore, she was a dashing figure about town who bleached her hair, wore bare-backed dresses and dark glasses, and drove Thunderbirds. “They called me Mrs. Belmont Shore because I did so much business,” she said.

Even when she turned 75, she saw herself as “still a chick” who loved a good time. She has photographs from her birthday party at a hotel that year, some showing a male stripper. About 400 people attended, and Patterson danced more than a few times to “Yellow Rose of Texas.”

Rep. Steve Horn (R-Long Beach), a longtime friend, said, “She is a charming person, she is a very shrewd person, she has a great sense of humor, and, if you want to know what’s going on in town, she’s a good person to talk to.”

Patterson was on the Long Beach Planning Commission eight years, was a director of the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce and has been on the boards of directors of the YMCA, St. Mary Medical Center and, in her words, “just about every other one in town.”

Horn, the former president of Cal State Long Beach, said he will never forget the time he and Patterson attended one of the university’s football games at Anaheim Stadium. “Isabel talked to me at halftime and said, ‘Honey, someday I’m going to give you a million dollars.’ ” Horn said. “I said, ‘Isabel, I need $260,000 right now for a child-care center I want to build.’ And she wrote the check.”

Patterson has a less dramatic version: “I was in (Horn’s) office and he had a model of the child-care center. He was trying to raise the money so I said, ‘I’ll build it.’ ”

The center was opened in 1975 and enlarged in 1986 when Patterson gave another $300,000. It includes separate areas for doing artwork, reading and playing, and areas where goats, rabbits and chickens live. With nine full-time employees and 60 student assistants, it has been a godsend for students such as D. Ann Stefano, a single mother whose daughter is one of 250 children who get dropped off each semester.

Spotting Patterson outside the center on that recent day, Stefano thanked her and said, “This has made my life and my studies a lot easier.”

The day before her visit to the child-care center, Patterson sat in her condominium on the 22nd floor of the International Tower in downtown Long Beach. Her dog, Sweetie, a miniature Yorkshire terrier, was on her lap. She opened a music box on her coffee table, and it played “Yellow Rose of Texas.”

It was hard for her to comprehend how a girl raised in a family of modest means on a ranch in Hereford, Tex., could end up so high in the California sky.

“I never had any dream of being a millionaire,” she said in a voice that still has Texas in it. “All I wanted to be able to do was survive on my own money. I just wanted to make enough to be independent.”

With two years at Texas Tech, a government job and an eight-year marriage behind her, Patterson decided she wanted to live in California. She left Texas with $200.

After working at office jobs for the Army and Navy, she bought a duplex in Belmont Shore. She wanted a degree, so in 1949, at 41, she enrolled at the new Los Angeles-Orange County State College, which became Long Beach State College and, eventually, California State University, Long Beach.

After graduating, she taught second grade for four years while unknowingly sowing the seeds for a real estate career. Each year, as a step toward security, she would buy an old house in Belmont Shore and, handy with tools, fix it up during the summer and rent it.

“They used to say that everything I touched turned to gold,” Patterson said, “But before it turned to gold I scrubbed and painted it. I could do everything except the plumbing.”

Her brother, Frank Wheeler, a Norwalk realtor, persuaded her to switch professions. She got a broker’s license, opened an office--Isabel Patterson Realtor--on Glendora Avenue and for 23 years dominated residential real estate in the Belmont Shore-Naples area.

“She is probably as well-known in Long Beach real estate circles as anyone,” said Richard Gaylord, the 1992 president of the Long Beach District Board of Realtors. “From everything I’ve ever heard, she was always straightforward, very honest and very hard working.”

Asked why she was so successful, Patterson quickly said, “Natural born salesperson.” She laughed and went on: “No, I loved Belmont Shore. See, I didn’t ever push. I didn’t have to. I had a reputation for honesty.”

In the late 1960s, while making out a financial report, Patterson was shocked to find that her property added up to $1 million. “I had a drink by myself,” she said. “That was the only time I had had a drink by myself.”

About that time, she had begun to fund scholarships for Cal State Long Beach football players. “She was the first person of any substance in this community to step forward and give money to the university--and those were times when nobody else was giving,” said Don Dyer, an attorney and longtime fund-raiser for CSULB athletics.

She said an aunt who had supported her at Texas Tech provided the incentive to give scholarships. “I went back there and gave her a check to pay her back,” Patterson said, “but she said, ‘No, give it to somebody else so they can go through college.’

“When I gave them the scholarships, I always told them that story about my aunt and told them that someday they should give a scholarship too.”

Patterson retired in the mid-1970s and decided to give much of her money to Cal State Long Beach and Long Beach City College. “It wasn’t doing any good in the bank, so I gave it away,” she joked.

Why she really did, she said, was to avoid a huge tax burden and “to help boys and girls get educated.”

“I’m a generous soul,” she said. “I was born that way, I guess. When I was a little child, if one of the other children wanted one of my toys, I’d give it to them. My mother made me stop it.”

Patterson has donated two trusts totaling almost $2 million to Cal State Long Beach, including the money for the child-care center.

At Long Beach City College, the interest from her $1-million trust provides $500 scholarships and book grants. “That has kept more students in school than you can imagine,” Patterson said. “I had a girl (who received a grant) come up to me at a City College luncheon and she started crying and said, ‘You saved my life.’ Her husband had left her and she was living with her 2-year-old son in a car.”

The college figures that she has given more than $600,000 to its students.

She also donates money to the Boys Club and the YMCA. “My money all goes to children, one way or another,” she said. “I never met a child I didn’t love. Maybe that’s because I didn’t have any of my own.”

She also has helped support the Long Beach Day Nursery. “Isabel is one of the jewels of the community,” said Mary Soth, executive director of the nursery. “Her commitment to children is her second nature.”

Plaques, proclamations and resolutions--most of them from the many organizations she has belonged to--are displayed throughout Patterson’s condo. “Even the bathroom,” she said with a laugh. “I just got through paying a man $40 for putting them up on the walls, and I know I’ve got 75 more. I can’t say I deserved them all, but I enjoyed them all.”

“Her generosity is really unparalleled,” said Art Levine, host of a cable television show that gave her the Straight Talk Community Service Award in December.

In May, she will receive the Humanitarian Award from the Long Beach region of the National Conference, formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

The honors, as many as there have been, are still far outnumbered by requests for money. One comes in every mail delivery.

“I just can’t give to everything,” she said.

Patterson said she has never thought of leaving Long Beach, but she did leave the big Spanish home she loved in Alamitos Heights, near the university.

In the mid-1970s, two armed robbers broke into the house. “One of them said, ‘We want the diamond ring or we’ll cut your finger off,’ ” Patterson recalled. “I went to the bathroom to put soap on my finger to get the ring off,” Patterson recalled. “And one of them followed me in.”

The robbers got the ring but not the other jewelry Patterson kept hidden in her flour cans.

Knowing she would never feel safe there again, Patterson moved to an apartment in the International Tower on Ocean Boulevard.

She used to rent the International Tower penthouse and auction it for Grand Prix parties that raised money for charity. She would serve the food and drinks as the party-goers looked down on the race.

“I had lots and lots of parties in my time,” she said. “Now I have a little vodka and 7-Up. One. My party days are over.”

With a trace of sadness, she said she no longer calls herself “a chick.”

“I had an angioplasty more than a year ago,” she explained. “Down from 140 pounds to 112. I don’t like it. If my face would fill out I wouldn’t have these damn wrinkles.”

She spends her days reading, going to lunch with friends, going to board meetings, giving money, working to raise money. Although retired, she still makes real estate loans through brokers. “That’s how I make my living now,” she said.

When she is home, she often goes out on her balcony, looks down at the coastline and wonders where the time has gone.

“Well, they’re ain’t nothing I can do about it, so I just forget about it,” she said. “No, I have an awful lot of good memories. I’ve traveled around the world. I’ve been to Hawaii 65 times.”

So it is just her and Sweetie and their million-dollar view.

“I’ve almost gotten married at least a hundred times, but I back out,” said Patterson, who was divorced more than half a century ago. “I haven’t been proposed to lately.”

It was late in the day and Patterson had to get ready to go out to dinner. Her hair, natural now rather than bleached, had just been done. She looked happy and full of energy, a yellow rose reluctant to wilt.