Obituary of Mary Josephine Patterson

She could write chilling stories of injustice, and quickly switch gears to the strange tale of the building of a Biblical-style ark using wood taken from abandoned buildings in Newark. On the day of the worst terrorist attack in the nation's history, she calmly put together a sharply-written narrative woven from notes and phone calls of an army of reporters deployed throughout the region, and then spent the next ten years documenting the emotional anguish and scars carried by the families of those who perished on 9/11. Mary Jo Patterson, an award-winning journalist and writer who was a member of The Star-Ledger team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news in 2005, died Sunday after a long illness. She was 70. A top reporter at the state's largest newspaper for 30 years, Patterson found compelling stories among the rich and the poor, the powerful and the forgotten, and the young and the old. "She was the heart and soul of the paper," said David Tucker, a former managing editor. "She was what a reporter ought to be." Born in Buffalo, Patterson was the fourth of five children of James and Marguerite Patterson. She was graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University and earned master's degrees in comparative literature and journalism at Columbia University. Before working at The Star-Ledger, she was a reporter at The News-Tribune in Woodbridge, and then for a time at the Albany Times Union, before returning to New Jersey. Her husband, former Star-Ledger political writer David Wald, who met his wife while both worked for the paper, said Patterson went into journalism because she wanted to be more involved in public life. "She had a curiosity," he said. "She wanted to know how things work." Tucker called Patterson the "go-to" person on every major story of the day. "Whenever there is a big breaking story, it's controlled chaos. You get that rising panic that maybe we won't make deadline. But seeing her writing was always just so reassuring," he said. "I remember her bent over her keyboard on 9/11. She had an intense, incredible focus. Even if the details were horrific, the writing was tremendous. The story had no blemishes and nothing was out of place." 10 years later: remembering 9/11 Even the simpler stories reflected an eye for detail and color, as well as her ability to catch seemingly ordinary things others might easily miss. There was the young woman from Newark, brutally attacked by a troubled 16-year old, making her way back to recovery: Her shoulders, usually stooped, are straight. Her mind, frequently invaded by flashbacks, is clear and focused as she vocalizes with her voice teacher on this wintry February day in Newark. As for her scars, she seems unaware of them. There are 56 of the jagged lines, brutally etched into her face and almost every other part of her body two years ago by a homeless teenager wielding a paring knife... The piece on the arrest of internet child porn suspect: The sun was just starting to come up when State Police detective Chuck Allen and the eight troopers on his team assembled on the snowy front lawn of their first target, a house in suburban Morris County. After weeks of intensive prepping and only a couple of hours' sleep, he was a little tense. His knock on the door would mark the beginning of a nightmare for the family sleeping inside... Even a routine obituary became a work of art in Patterson's hands, like the time she wrote about a centenarian's long-planned death: When Bertha Lee Jones was approaching her 100th birthday, she decided it was time to plan her funeral. Mind you, she wasn't ready to die. Her health was just fine. But given her age, it seemed like a sensible thing to do. And she had strong opinions on the subject. She instructed her granddaughter to dress her in the blue gown she had once worn at a dinner in her honor at the Bethlehem Baptist Church in McKeesport, Pa., where she had once been a deaconess, choir member and president of the Ladies Official Board. She selected four spirituals for the service. Then she went on living, for nearly 10 years. Last Saturday, two months and two days before she would have turned 110, Mrs. Jones died at the House of the Good Shepherd nursing home in Hackettstown, where she had lived since 1998. Patterson could be by turns biting, acerbic and wildly funny, more than once wondering out loud about what she considered a questionable assignment suggested up by some editor, "What genius thought this one up?" At the same time, she served as a mentor to many reporters in the newsroom. Retired Star-Ledger Editor Jim Willse recalled meeting her for the first time when he first came to the paper and began talking to reporters one-on-one. "She stonewalled me. She didn't have much to say. Finally, I started talking about myself in hopes I would draw her out, without much success," he said. "After she was gone, it dawned on me that she had just done a 'reporter's job' on me—the creative silence." He chuckled as he remembered the meeting in his office. "I learned more about myself than I did about her," he said. "I said to myself, 'this is going to be just fine.'" LD F1 NEWS PATTERSON PORTUGAL KRAUSS Mary Jo Patterson in the Star-Ledger newsroom after a trip to Portugal for the newspaper in 1996. (Rich Krauss | Star-Ledger file photo) Kitta MacPherson, a former colleague and now a journalism professor at Rutgers Newark, said Patterson could do anything at the paper. "She was unflappable. She was a star at the paper from the time she came until the time she retired," said MacPherson. Some of the stories that resonated deepest with her, she said, were those about the abuse she uncovered in the state's foster care system. "That meant a lot to her. At the core was this sense of justice—dead children dying at the hands of abusive parents or foster parents. Those got to her," MacPherson said. "She was angry." Patterson's first-day account of the fatal dormitory fire at Seton Hall University was part of a package that won first prize in the American Society for Newspaper Editors competition for deadline writing in 2001. She was also a member of a reporting team awarded the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award in 2006 for a series of stories on the Patriot Act. And her profile of Gov. Jim McGreevey helped The Star-Ledger staff win a Pulitzer Prize in 2005. Following her early retirement from The Star-Ledger, Patterson wrote for the metropolitan section of The New York Times and contributed articles for the websites and alumni magazines of Drew University, The College of New Jersey, and Rutgers. She also authored a book on the history of the New Jersey Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. She also focused much of her time on her other true passion—gardening—becoming an Essex County Master Gardener and helping launch a project with the National Park Service that brought back some of the historic gardens at Glenmont, the home of Thomas Edison in Llewellyn Park in West Orange. In addition to her husband, Mary Jo Patterson is survived by her children, Molly Wald of Kanab, Ut., and Benjamin Wald of Newark; her sister Temple Weste of Hilo, HI,; brother James (Andy) Patterson and his wife Marian of Cleveland; and brother Charles Patterson of Clearwater, Fl. She is also survived by seven nieces and nephews and four grandnieces and nephews. She was predeceased by her parents and her brother John Patterson. Graveside services will be private. A memorial service will be held on Sunday, April 24, at the Codey & Jones Funeral Home, 54 Roseland Avenue in Caldwell, with visitation from noon to 2pm and the service at 1 pm. Obituary written by her friend, Ted Sherman.