Patricia (Pat) Sousa: 1929 – 2022

Way back in 2010, writing at age 80, my friend Pat Sousa wrote an autobiographic account of her long working-class, lesbian life -- and I published a sort of dialogue between her times and mine in a Gay and Gray essay at Ronni Bennett's Time Goes By.

Pat was nowhere near done with life; she lived to be 93, leaving us last October. Today we are attending a memorial in her honor. 

And so I want to bring forward again her own account of her remarkable life. She was brave, inquisitive, and patient with younger friends scurrying about. Here's Pat's life, in her own words.

"I was born at home, with the help of a midwife, near Hayward, California, on July 12, 1929. That's exactly what my birth certificate says, "near Hayward...”

“I would call the neighborhood 'city lots' but in those days, that meant quarter acre lots...and everyone had vegetable gardens, chickens, rabbits...everyone. It was the depression!

“...We were low class. Now I guess the word is working class. Everyone was poor, but everyone got by. Like many others in the neighborhood, my mother and her sisters worked at Hunt Brothers Cannery, which was only a block away.”

”I never did very well at school. I had a very hard time with learning to read. Looking back, I wonder if I had some hearing loss even then, or some kind of learning disability. Who knows? But I really struggled. By the time I was 16, just starting 10th grade, I was impatient to go to work, earn a living, have some money in my pocket. So that's what I did, I quit school and went to work in the canneries. Within a year, I'd settled into line work at Owens Illinois glass factory, although I'd had to fudge my age a little in order to get hired...

“No one would believe me if I told you how shy and quiet and serious I was when I started at Owens. I was a 'mind your own business' kind of person. It took quite a few years before I began to speak out and express myself...it was a slow process. But gradually I got more confident. I became active in the union, I was a shop steward, and even union president. Part of that 'growing up' included going back and earning my GED. Owens encouraged people to be educated and was very supportive about that.”

”Owens was a community in itself - there were almost 2000 employees altogether and we did shift work, one week on days, one week on swing, then a week working graveyard; that's how they did it in those days, and that was my life for the next 30+ years. Owens had a women's softball team, and Owens had women like me! I made friends, buddies; I didn't feel so alone...

“In those early days at Owens my hair was short - they all knew...but the word "lesbian" was never used. You were 'butch.'

“I remember reading The Well of Loneliness...I thought, 'wow, they write books about it!' There was so much I was in the dark about...

“My social life centered at Owens. There were gay bars that you could go to, Last Chance, Pearl's, but I was cautious, not wanting to get caught in a pick-up, a raid, which were frequent particularly in the 40s and 50s. Owens had a policy that what you did away from work was a reflection on your work...so if you weren't 'a good citizen' you could get yourself fired.

“My buddies and I were attracted to straight women. That's all that we knew; that's just how it was. We always hoped they would stay with us 'forever,' and some were lucky; my buddy Mick and her partner Erla were together about 30 years until Erla's death. Most of us, though, would end up with broken hearts. We all did the best we could.”

”I knew from my experiences at Owens that there was no reason a woman could not be a crew leader or even a manager. We were training the men, and they got the promotions. There had never been a woman in management at the Owens Oakland plant.

“In the early 70s, with Equal Opportunity, I filed a grievance to become crew leader. There was a lot of haggling back and forth, management would come up with reasons against, and I'd respond; it kept on and on and finally they said, 'OK, Pat, we give up,' and I became the first woman crew leader at that Oakland plant.

“A few years later I was finally promoted to management - no more shift work, no more hourly pay! My final position at Owens before retirement in 1984, was as a 'service engineer,' visiting our customers' facilities, mostly at that time wineries all over northern California, and trouble shooting whatever problems they might be having with the manufacture of our various commercial containers.”

... “And every day I give thanks to the Creator; I give thanks for everything. I walk in my garden and every little growing thing is a miracle. There has to be something larger than a man or a woman, larger than 'God' to create all this! It's a shame we don't spend more time in awe about what's all around us, and appreciating it rather than destroying it. So I give thanks for life, for the life of every one and everything around me.”

Pat is survived by hundreds of friends, including special friend, Laura Tow.