“The first real sign of summer,” I wrote in Worcester Magazine in 2019, “is when my downstairs neighbor, Aunt Pat (not my actual aunt), throws open her windows and blasts Patsy Cline so loud that all the neighbors can share in her revelry. She cranks up other artists, too — Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley — but really, it’s Patsy that matters. There’s something strangely comforting about her smoky voice seeping up through the floorboards: “I go out walkin’ after midnight/Out in the moonlight/Just like we used to do … ”
Aunt Pat — real name, Patricia Collins — died of natural causes in her home at the end of April, at 82. She was a native-born Worcesterite, and lived in the city her entire life, 50 years in her three-decker apartment, and managed to become something of an Official Worcester Character.
According to her obituary, “Pat was the owner of the former Lincoln Street Video as well as a day care provider and a foster mother to many children over the years. Pat was a faithful member of St. Bernard’s Church at Our Lady of Providence Parish, attending the Saturday 4 p.m. Mass and assisting the church by passing the offering basket. She formed many deep friendships over the years with people who treasured her wit and unique storytelling ability. She loved her daily walks, scratch tickets and keno, and often enjoyed her time listening to country western music, especially Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, on her porch, which she named ‘Pat’s Lounge.’”
It’s going to be odd for summer to set in and not hear Patsy Cline crooning from outside my window. It also seems odd that we won’t be hearing any of her always dubious, often outrageous shaggy-dog stories. To be fair, several of them were a bit off-color and couldn’t be recounted in a family newspaper. Other stories seem to lose something in translation without her telling them. For instance, Pat often told the story of how, when she first moved into her apartment, she used a rope and pulley system to pull her enormous dog Tippy up to the second-floor balcony, in order to sneak him past her then-landlord, who didn’t allow dogs in the building.
Were there, perhaps, easier ways to get the dog into the apartment? Indubitably. Did this even happen? Who can say! But it doesn’t matter, really: Aunt Pat could tell a story that you knew from the get-go was utter balderdash, and it would still be hilarious. And if you couldn’t prove a single detail, then so much the better.
For example, one story Pat told a few time in recent years was about a brief stint she spent working as a waitress at the original Lamplighter. The story changed a bit from telling to telling: Sometimes she was briefly employed at the gentleman’s club, sometimes she was just filling in a shift to help a friend. According to the story, they were cleaning up after closing, when a man came into the club, intent on robbing it. What happened instead was Pat served him a beer, and then they go to talking, and after a while nattering, Pat convinced him not to rob the place, and he left peaceably.
Is there any way any of that can be proved? Nope. Does that matter? Eh. Not really. What matters is that it’s an Aunt Pat story, a tall tale that adds a strangely mythic wrinkle to Worcester’s history. But still, there was always one story that got to me, because it’s almost as oddly plausible as it was unlikely: The tale of the song, “Don’t Forget I Still Love You.”“Don’t Forget I Still Love You” was a hit country ballad that came out in 1964, recorded by Bobbi Martin. Aunt Pat claimed that she had written the lyrics and mailed them to a record label, with hopes of having them turned into a hit song. This, if you spend some time around the music industry, is inadvisable, as most such submissions are left unopened. Producers and labels don’t want to creates a situation which could leave them open to plagiarism charges, especially as — let’s face it — a lot of popular music can be pretty similar.
Pat heard “her song” on the radio and says she believed it was stolen without giving her credit. For the record (pun not intended), the lyrics are credited to someone named Guy Louis, who also wrote other near-forgotten gems, including songs for Billy Jones and the Teenettes and, later, Connie Smith. But “Don’t Forget I Still Love You” was probably Louis’ biggest hit, making it to #19 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and being covered numerous times.
Did Aunt Pat really write this song? It seems unlikely, but oddly, it’s one of the stories she always told the most consistently, even if she didn’t have a lick of proof that she was the song’s true author. Occam’s razor says it’s likely not true, but you can’t help wondering. Maybe there’s a grain of truth in the story. Maybe.
And that’s how Aunt Pat got you. You’d be caught up in the story, and even though the holes in the story are the size of a Lincoln Street pothole, there’s a little part of you that kind of wants to believe. It doesn’t rally matter, after all. It’s just a story.
Aunt Pat is a story now, too: the woman with a thousand absurd yarns that you didn’t even pretend to believe. But here’s the thing: People who knew her are now retelling those stories, even if they lose something in translation. We’re telling them now. They’ve become a piece of the weird, unlikely story that is Worcester, and I have a feeling that, true or not, they’ll live on for a long, long time.
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