The sprightly and spirited Pat Richeson peers over her iMac in the chaplain's office. She retires on May 9 and, in case you missed her retirement party, check out Adam White's send off.

Retire? Spirited ‘Ms. Pat’ Redefines the Word

Chaplain’s assistant will remain familiar presence on campus

JENNIFER McMANAMAY
College relations staff writer

Pat Richeson's "Autumn Dream" is a photographic transfer. The piece was displayed in the Elston conference center as part of the 2006 "Art After Hours" faculty-staff art show.


An avid photographer, Pat Richeson and her Canon were omnipresent at Sweet Briar events for years. This is one of the many scenic shots she has taken on campus.


Another of Richeson's favorite photos, Lucy is one of her four cats.

Being a spirited and spiritual place, spirits tend to stick around the chaplain’s office at Sweet Briar. They are the lively echoes of staff and students — and the occasional cat or dog — who worked and laughed there, made their marks on how things are done, and moved on to something new.

Patience “Pat” Caldwell Richeson, an assistant to three different chaplains over 17 years, promised more than the suggestion of her presence after she retires on May 9. She was reflecting on, among other things, how her beloved Sweet Spirits has flourished since it was founded by former chaplain Guy “Chap” Brewer.

Applications to join the peer mentoring group are at capacity, and Richeson is thrilled with the current Sweet Spirits’ enthusiasm.

To the Rev. Adam White, her boss of the past two years, she said, “And it better keep going after I’m gone, or I’ll come back and haunt you. I’ll ride right through here on my broom stick.”

White wasn’t fazed. He will safeguard the Sweet Spirits, whom Richeson has come to think of as “little nuns” to her “Mother Superior.”

The joke is they are not so nun-like, she confesses, but they do good work through such projects as Habitat for Humanity and the annual Unsung Heroes Banquet for College employees.

To the Sweet Spirits, Richeson is “Ms. Pat.” They work with her in the office, witness to both her genuine mentoring and her puckish humor. Madeline Davis ’10 says Ms. Pat sets an example by “working hard and being open,” but she is something of an instigator, too.

White, Sweet Briar’s genial, guitar-playing and somewhat famously distracted chaplain, bears the brunt of Richeson’s teasing, but it’s not all just for laughs. “She calls him ‘son,’ ” Davis said. “She’ll say, ‘Come here, sonny, you need to do this.’ ”

Brewer, who was chaplain from 2001 to 2006, said working with Richeson was a “trip,” for reasons ranging from her artist’s sensibility to her obsession with felines. He recalled one of her “quirkier” feats was talking him into an office cat. He likes cats, he explained, just not at work.

But after a bunch of mice leaped from Richeson’s desk drawer one day, Callie reported for duty over Brewer’s protestations of allergic students and fur on his good clothes. Callie ensured the latter by sleeping on his chair every night, but he had to concede the students loved the little calico — even if they had to wear masks to pet her.

“Students would come by on the pretext of seeing me, but it was really to see the cat,” he said by phone from his new post at the Anderson University School of Theology. “Pat enjoyed the torture that cat brought my life.”

When Brewer heard that Richeson wants to rededicate herself to art in retirement — she is a former dancer and earned a bachelor’s in studio arts from Sweet Briar — he said, “that’s a great path for Pat. I hope she lives to be a hundred.”

She has an emotional and spiritual deepness about her that helps her “see more than the average person sees,” he said. “And she respects it. She doesn’t want to disturb what she sees. She brings a great beauty and an ability to beautify.”

Richeson said her plans to “retire and re-fire” include taking classes at Sweet Briar, starting with Carrie Brown’s introduction to creative writing course next semester and a studio art class in the spring. She wants to see if the “juice is still there” now that she’ll have more time for art.

There are collage, photography, sculpture and painting projects waiting in the recesses of her home. “I’m going to have to do an archaeological dig to find the missing parts to finish work on them,” she said.

Richeson was running the Clifford School of Dance with her mother when she entered Sweet Briar as a Turning Point student in 1986. Previously she had taken dance classes at the College to stay in shape, and audited an art history class. She began to work at Sweet Briar in 1991, the year she graduated.

“I was on a roll, so I wanted to keep going,” she said, relating next how she was able to transfer in as a sophomore.

She had entered then-Mary Washington College in 1958 but was lured away by a young U.S. airman, with whom she recently celebrated her 49th wedding anniversary. She and Tom Richeson began dating as seniors at Amherst County High School.

“The plan was he’d do his four-year hitch [in the air force] and I’d do my four-year hitch, but we decided we couldn’t wait,” Richeson said.

Not wanting to disappoint their parents, they married in secret. Richeson wore her ring only when she was alone until baby sister Ella — well known to Sweet Briar as professor of dance Ella Magruder — caught her wearing it one day.

Richeson recalls the youngster bolting for the door, yelling, “Oh Mama, Patsy’s got a ring!”

Though she grabbed Ella, who was at the time “old enough to be aggravating,” and extracted a promise of silence, her mother eventually caught on. With the cat out of the bag, she left a year later to join her husband who was then stationed in Germany.

Richeson, who taught Ella dance long before she was Professor Magruder, said their mother encouraged in her four children an interest in the arts. And while she said dance was wonderful, Richeson is ready to immerse herself in the visual arts.

“I love doing it. I absolutely love losing myself in it,” she said. “So you know where to find me if I’m lost.”