ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 16, 1997 TAG: 9704160046
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP THE ROANOKE TIMES
"We found her everywhere at the church," friends said of 102-year-old Lucy Mae Patterson.
If anyone at Hill Street Baptist Church needed a bit of church history, all they had to do was see Lucy Mae Patterson.
At 102, she was the church's oldest member. Today at 2, the church holds her funeral. She died Friday.
Maxine Hunt, Hill Street's music director, said Patterson had to be the church's most faithful member.
"We found her everywhere at the church ... early prayer meeting, late prayer meeting, cooking dinners, cleaning the church. She was just willing to do anything that was asked of her."
Patterson was already singing in the senior choir when Hunt, a retired teacher, was a little girl. Patterson was in the choir 70 years - until about a decade ago.
She was one of the first members of the church's missionary society and a leader of its flower club, which took floral arrangements to the sick - straight from members' gardens, until not many years ago.
For more than 40 years, Patterson had a leading role in a church play, "The Old Ship of Zion." As the church's matriarch, she led the play's opening processional, wearing a bonnet and an old-fashioned ruffled dress and singing, "I've been on this road a long time, and I ain't got tired yet."
A few months ago, the play's author, church member Mary Jones, 91, went to see her friend Patterson at a nursing home.
"They said she was unconscious," Jones said, "I just patted her and I said, `This is Mary Jones, the old ship of Zion' ... and then she tried to say something." Jones couldn't understand her, but she was sure her friend knew she was there.
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