Patricia Howard

Patricia (Pat) Jean Foster Howard, 77, of Waco, died Wednesday, December 9, 2009, in Waco, Texas, after a sudden, brief struggle with leukemia. A memorial service will be held at 11:00 am on Tuesday, December 15, 2009, at First Baptist Church, Waco. A reception will follow.

Mrs. Howard was born in Quinton, Oklahoma, on March 19, 1932. She attended Hoover High School in San Diego, California, and Paschal High School in Ft. Worth before coming to Baylor University, where she majored in English, German, and education and minored in music and history.

Originally a voice major, she was allowed to give a junior recital of German lieder, an exception for a music minor. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953 and a Master of Arts in 1972.

Mrs. Howard taught English and history in the Waco Independent Schools for a number of years. At Waco High School she taught English, advanced placement English, and humanities as well as sponsoring the creative writing club.

In 1972 she joined the Baylor English faculty, where she taught courses in English literature, world literature, composition, and advanced expository writing. She retired from Baylor in 1998.

Over the course of her thirty-five-year teaching career, Mrs. Howard taught approximately 9,000 students, and her former students include nationally and internationally recognized artists, musicians, professors, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and politicians.

In 1983 she received an Outstanding Faculty award from Baylor. She received Circle of Achievement awards from Baylor's Mortar Board in 1983 and 1996.

Her professional activities included reading scholarly papers at national and international conferences, including the College Conference on Composition and Communication and the Seventh International Conference of the British Comparative Literature Association at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

She published on such diverse topics as Walter Pater, Hermann Hesse, Icelandic saga, and eighteenth-century landscape architecture. In 2004 she was selected to be the bearer of the mace in the Baylor summer commencement exercises.

In retirement, Mrs. Howard continued her research interests. To say she was a voracious reader is an understatement--for many years of her retirement, she read on average four to six books a week, many of them complex scholarly volumes. More significant, though, was the scope of her reading: for example, she enjoyed reading on history of architecture, Greek culture, quantum mechanics and string theory, Chinese philosophy, history of the English language, Japanese art, Byzantine religious icons, Victorian thought, Flemish painting, intellectual history, and all kinds of literature in translation.

She especially enjoyed interdisciplinary studies, combining, for instance, poetry and music or psychology and art. She also enjoyed traveling, particularly by herself, in order to pursue research interests.

Toward the end of her career and in her retirement, she went to England several times to do research at the British Library, at Cambridge University Library, and on site at cathedrals and Elizabethan manor houses throughout England and Scotland.

Mrs. Howard attended Columbus Avenue Baptist Church for seventeen years and was a member of First Baptist Church since 1968. She taught in the college Sunday School department, sang in the choir, and occasionally acted as accompanist at Columbus Avenue.

At First Baptist, she accompanied hymns for the Abner McCall Sunday School class for over thirty years. Her lifelong interest in music--particularly of the baroque and classical periods--was evident in her work as a vocal soloist during her earlier years and her love of listening later on. At age fifty, she began practicing yoga, a pursuit she continued throughout the rest of her life.

Mrs. Howard is survived by her husband, Ken Howard; their two children, Don Howard of Austin and Catherine Howard of Houston; one grandchild, Lincoln Howard of Georgetown; and two sisters, Barbara Maley of Ft. Worth and Sharon Pearson and husband Kenneth of Arcadia, Florida.

Memorials may be made to the Baylor English Department, 1 Bear Place 97404, Waco, TX 76798 or to the Ken Howard Endowed Scholarship Fund in Choral Music, % Baylor University, 1 Bear Place, Waco, TX 76798-7050.