Patricia Pillsbury Dawson (1930-2023) – Obituary
PATRICIA JANE PILLSBURY DAWSON (1930-2023) formerly of New Jersey; Texas; Aspen and Crested Butte, Colorado; and Novato, California.
Patricia left us in her sleep on the morning of March 27, 2023, after a prolonged battle with dementia. She was 92 years old. She is predeceased by her brother Franklin Pillsbury III, mother Harriet Pillsbury, and father Franklin Pillsbury II.
Patricia in 1944, stylin’ at fourteen years old.
Patricia was born July 1, in Newark, New Jersey. After completing high school, she attended Sullins Jr. College in Bristol, Virginia, and graduated in 1949. She married Charles Craig Dawson in April 1950, and they spent their early marriage years in Boonton, New Jersey, before relocating to Richardson, Texas, in 1957. There she worked as a teacher and as the Director of the Bataan Street Community Center. The first three of her four children were born in New Jersey, and the youngest was born in Texas.
At the behest of their high-school and later Aspenite friend, George Parry, the Dawsons visited Aspen throughout the early 1960s. As had many before, they fell in love with the place. “Concerts in the park, jeep rides, skiing!” Patricia journaled.
The couple grew tired of Texas. Charles proposed “starting a new life,” and Patricia committed. In 1966 they built a gorgeous mountain house, nestled in a grove of spruce trees in the Castle Creek valley a few miles from Aspen. The family lived there for about two years, sold in 1968, and built another fine house on the Roaring Fork River about a mile east of town.
Patricia loved fashion and cosplay, this sendup of her days as an Aspen hippie was a family favorite.
Soon after moving to Aspen, Charles and Patricia threw themselves into the burgeoning hippie counterculture—the wardrobe, the partying. As hipsters flowed into town, Patricia operated the Roaring Fork home as a boarding house for a revolving cast of ‘60s characters. Her charges remember her as a benevolent landlady, and, for the younger ones, a surrogate mother. It was a time of carefree fun, yet with a confused undercurrent that tested traditional ideas of marriage and child rearing.
In 1972, Patricia and Charles separated and sold the Roaring Fork house. Patricia moved to Crested Butte, Colorado, with her two youngest sons. In those days, “the Butte” was more affordable and replete with the mining-town, ski-town funk that had made Aspen so attractive.
Patricia in Crested Butte, 2010, dressed up for the Black&White Ball cultural event.
In Crested Butte, Patricia left most aspects of hippiedom behind, while living in a cabin, cooking on a woodstove, and maintaining the sense of style and joie de vivre she’d developed during the halcyon Aspen days.
Over thirty-plus years, she was highly involved in the Crested Butte Mountain Theater and the Center for the Arts, helped in the fight against the AMAX mine, served as chair of the Crested Butte Planning Commission, and worked as Mayor W. Mitchell’s assistant.
Throughout Patricia’s years in Aspen and Crested Butte, she found great joy in skiing. Here she’s carving her way down Aspen Highlands in 1970.
One of Patricia’s many flower paintings.
Patricia lived an extraordinary life filled with adventure, laughter, and love—and she flourished as an artist. Her ceramics and paintings exist in many private collections as well as gracing the walls of her surviving family: Louis Dawson (Lisa) of Carbondale, CO; Charles Craig Dawson Jr. (Norma) and Tapley Dawson (Maggie), both of Novato, CA; and Tomas Dawson (Nancy) of Colorado Springs, CO; as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Found tucked away in one of Patricia’s journals, Pablo Neruda’s poem, Night On the Island. A verse:
Perhaps very late
our dreams joined
at the top or at the bottom,
up above like branches moved by a common wind,
down below like red roots that touch.
