Head West Young Lass

When Horace Greeley (1811-72) advocated the migration to the west, chances are he never had women in mind when he popularized the phrase “Go West, young man.” However, a century after his passing, Patricia (Grabowski) Rayman discovered the reality of her childhood avocation as she tells, “I would look out my bedroom window and somehow I sensed I was being drawn westward.”

 

 

Born in New Jersey of Polish-Russian ancestry during the start of the baby-boomer generation, Pat is a roundly pleasing petite woman who stands a shade over five feet tall with blonde streaks running through her semi-short brunette hair. With a humble personality that illuminates, she subliminally bridles those who only distinguish others by appearance, social, economic or knowledge statuses, consequently challenging the discriminatory minds to search within themselves to see those true inner beauty qualities of all human beings.

 

 

 

Initially educated by professional artists from New York City, and later completing her degree in education from Baltimore’s Maryland Institute of Art, Pat declined career opportunities to apply her creative skill as an illustrator for an eminent greeting card company on New York’s Madison Avenue as well as to remain and teach art education within her roots.

 

 

After a summer teaching post ended where she worked with special children, she ventured to Delphos, a rural agricultural city located in the Northwestern central corridor of Ohio, and has taught elementary and middle school children for over 32 years for the public schools. However, her teaching is not limited to children, yet continues to teach art workshops locally and out-of-state.

 

 

 

Patricia Rayman not only practices what she teaches, but has realized years later, “Those first two years in art school—and being taught by professionals—made the transition to education a success for me and for my children.” For me, the why is no longer a wonder, but a pride because she has been showered with hundreds of awards for her own art and photography.

 

 

Concurrently over the years, she has been selected as Big Sister of the Year for her involvement in a young girl’s life which allowed this child to bud from a thorny environment and blossom forward with noted local and national achievements. She was also selected Tri-County Woman-of-the-Year for her volunteerism and an undaunted willingness of providing encouragement: Art is ageless, not only to the young, but even among nursing home seniors.

 

 

Pat has been recognized by the Ohio Senate for her humanitarian contributions which goes back to her younger years working with emotionally and physically handicapped children. In addition, she also received an Outstanding Achievement in Education award as the founder of Art-to-Art: Building Friendships Through Art, a national art-based education program which bridges the gap with the subjects of Geography, History, Reading, Writing, and Communications through Human Relations. Her so-far life’s travels reads like a Who’s Who list; in fact, she was included in Who’s Who In America in the past.

 

 

When I met Pat, it was late spring of 1974. The country was in an economic upheaval with interests rates rising to levels untouched in the recorded past, inflation continuing its rapid increase, unemployment rising and The House Judiciary Watergate Committee was formally notifying President Richard Nixon that his defiance of subpoenas might constitute a ground for impeachment which lead to his resignation in August. Although I was working in the newspaper industry, none of these events worried me because she captured the heart, mind, and soul of a young man in search of a life partner.

 

 

To this day, I still cannot understand the astrophysical reason for her journey West, some 700 miles away from her roots, with no immediate family or friends because I know Pat would have realized Frank Sinatra’s sung words to the hilt and “…made it in New York,”nevertheless I have seized that inner mental reservation by the plainly put words of St. Paul: “We walk by faith, not by sight.” She has provided me with the freedom to explore those less traveled roads where others could only savor; I could feast upon an affluence of real world knowledge gained from my own belief that life’s real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes, and through her eyes, I saw my ability to embrace adversities, to envision possibilities while traveling among the skeptics, and soaring through the undergrowths others would pass by.

And finally, each day becomes more vivid as I recall a line from one of Lou Rawls’ songs: “You’ll never meet a love like mine as long as you live,”and I can only exclaim: Yawantabet!!

By Ben Rayman

Editor’s note:  The Art-to-Art program started with three schools, one each in Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin began to soar and thusly in 2006 peaked itself at a 42-state, over 400 school participation. Furthermore and using numbers based on the print medias where the program’s participating schools were located and its annual national show sites, an unaudited twenty-year history to and about the program falls within a potential exposure of 50 million. The Art-to-Art program is not in physical operation as of this 2009 writing, its rights and future are still maintained by its founder.