To Patti - wish I could tell you one more time

Thirteen years ago this week, I was given the privilege of sharing a few words with readers each week in what was then the Portales News-Tribune.

We’ve been through some big changes since then, including a consolidation with the Clovis News Journal to become the regional Eastern New Mexico News.

About 675 columns later — yikes — it’s still great fun, and I hope to keep going for a long time.

But this 13th anniversary is bittersweet, because this gig would never have happened in the first place without a recommendation from my friend Patti Dobson, and it’s the first anniversary to pass without being able to send her a note to say thanks.

I beat Patti to this planet by less than two months, a fact I didn’t know until I read it in her obituary this summer, following her sudden and unexpected death on July 19.

I don’t remember when we first met, but it was decades ago at Eastern New Mexico University, maybe even when we were both students.

Later on, we crossed paths on too many occasions to count during her years in the Communication Department at ENMU, where she taught journalism classes and chaired her department.

Our encounters were always moments that felt like sunshine breaking through clouds. Patti was just that way. If you spent 30 seconds with her and didn’t go away smiling, you weren’t paying attention.

Back in October of 2011, when Editor David Stevens was on the lookout for a new columnist, he reached out to Patti, who happened to be our mutual friend.

Luckily for me, Patti gave David my name. I’ve always been grateful.

I wish there was a way to count all of the connections Patti Dobson has made possible in the lives of people she knew. That one — which ended up meaning the world to me — was only a small one of thousands.

In his book, “The Tipping Point,” writer Malcolm Gladwell identified three types of people most likely to get a job done in any given situation. He called them Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

While I could argue that Patti was all of these, first and foremost she was a Connector, or in Gladwell’s words, one of “a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances.”

Gladwell never met Patti Dobson (at least I don’t think they ever met, but knowing Patti, it’s possible they did…), but he certainly described her when he wrote that the ability of Connectors “to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.”

Oh, Patti, how I wish I could tell you in person one more time how much I have appreciated you all of these years and for all the many connections you made for me, especially the one that allows me to be writing these words today.

Friends of Patti are working hard to raise $25,000 to endow a scholarship at ENMU to help carry on her extraordinary legacy.

If your life was touched by this wonderful woman — if she made some connection that gives you as much as this one continues to give me — I hope you’ll consider a donation in her honor.

Those may be made online at enmu.edu/donation, or by mailing a check to the ENMU Foundation, ENMU Station 8, Portales, NM 88130. Be sure to write “Patti Dobson scholarship” in the notes or on the memo line.

Fly high, my Connector friend. You were one of a kind.

Betty Williamson tips her grateful hat to the one and only Patti Dobson. Reach her at:

[email protected]