For love of the arts

Patti Strickel Harrison of Wimberley gets a kick out of financially supporting the things she admires and loves, and that’s why her PSH Foundation has donated $8 million to launch the construction of the Performing Arts Center.

Growing up, Harrison’s home was filled with music. Her mother was a piano teacher, and Patti played tenor sax in high school. She never lost her infatuation with the performing arts.

Before and after World War II, her father owned car dealerships in Port Neches (during the war he worked in a defense plant). Her parents did not go to college, but they expected Patti and her younger brother to go. So Patti was enrolled at Texas State after graduating from high school — it was part of “the plan.” But the summer before she moved to San Marcos, her mother, father and brother were killed in a car wreck, leaving her alone.

She never thought of deviating from “the plan,” so she headed for San Marcos, she says of that time. From her dad’s dealership, she inherited a car and enough money for college. She attended Texas State in 1947 and 1948, and then the plan started fraying at the edges. She had planned to be a doctor, maybe a psychiatrist, and to transfer to the University of Texas to finish her medical degree.

But medical technology was new on the horizon, and that field interested her, too. UT didn’t have a degree in that field, so she tried Texas Christian and North Texas before burning out and heading back to Port Neches, where her boyfriend was finishing college. “I came back home, and he marries somebody else!” she says with a laugh and feigned indignity.

She began working for a pediatrician in Beaumont and hated the job. “I decided I needed to finish school, so I got one of the first medical technology degrees offered.” Years later, while working as a medical technologist at Hermann Hospital in Houston, she decided to go to medical school but was discouraged in the process by a physician who asked, “Honey, why don’t you just stay home and have babies?” Instead, she became technical director of the blood bank at Hermann, which turned out to be a good thing. She discovered her talents as a born entrepreneur and wound up forming clinical diagnostic companies whose sales were quite profitable.

Part of her success as an entrepreneur is no doubt based on her gift of persuasion, which came in handy as a college student. “I brought my car to campus when I enrolled,” she remembers, “and that just wasn’t done back then.” Mary Brogdon, the stern dean of women who was known for sticking by the rules, called Patti into her office to tell her to forget the car. “I really don’t remember what I said to Dean Brogdon, but I kept the car.”

And one spring afternoon, Patti and her friends piled into that big 1942 Mercury and headed out to see what they could find on the roads around San Marcos. “We somehow found ourselves in Wimberley, and I told them then that I’d live here someday. I meant it, too.” Some 29 years ago, she moved to Wimberley.

Harrison worked in research and diagnostics at Hermann Hospital for nine years. Then she partnered with some friends in New Jersey to form a company that went into competition with Johnson & Johnson. After six years, she sold that company and formed one in Dallas. “I was the first woman in sales diagnostics. I practically lived in my car,” she says, “but after a while I was desperate to get back to Texas.” She sold that company and started selling mutual funds. Before long she was forming another company with some friends. “I put up the money, and they put up the talents,” she says modestly, “and six years later I sold it.” Along the way, she adds that she “did well” in the stock market.

When she moved back to Houston from New Jersey, she needed a dentist and found Dr. Raymond Harrison in Houston. “He was also an expert on stereos and helped me buy one. A year later, we got married.” That was 1972, and one of the bonuses of the marriage was Raymond’s daughter, 13-year-old Mary Jane.

Raymond died three years later, but Patti and Mary Jane remained close. Mary Jane taught school in Houston for 17 years, then became executive director of Patti’s foundation in Wimberley. (Teresa Ward is now executive director.) After Mary Jane’s death, Patti established the Mary Jane Hamilton Memorial Presidential Endowment in Texas State’s College of Education.

Lately she has been occupied with renovation of a hotel in Las Cruces, N.M. She bought the run-down property a year and a half ago and gutted it. Meson de Mesilla — a hotel, gourmet restaurant and upscale lounge, opened in January. Friend Cali McCord manages it and sings nightly in the lounge. Patti calls the project “my last adventure.”

Well, maybe, maybe not. “Looking back,” she sighs, “I don’t know how any of this happened. I get bored easily and want to try new things. I guess the timing has been right. Timing is everything in this life.”

And she says the timing was right for the big gift to Texas State. “I have been trying to think of what to do for years, and the timing was right. I’d like to think that this gift will get other people off the fence to help, too.”

Harrison’s portrait will hang in the Patti Strickel Harrison Theatre in the new Performing Arts Theatre.