Patricia Fallon Dougherty, once a reporter for the Democrat and Chronicle, and the wife of longtime columnist Dick Dougherty, died Saturday in Penfield. She was 90. Dick Dougherty died in 2008; they were married for 52 years.
“Pat,” as she was known by newspaper colleagues and friends, was born in New York City. The family spent part of each year in Manhattan and part of it in Clyde, Wayne County, where Pat’s maternal grandparents owned a glassworks business along the Erie Canal. They were among the town's wealthiest residents, says Pat and Dick’s daughter, Carolyn Hines, of Aspen, Colorado. They shared a mansion with a family parrot, already in his 60s when Pat was a child, who had been passed down from her grandparents. The bird came to recognize the arrival of a telegram deliverer, Hines says, and would squawk “Western Union” when the doorbell rang.
Pat graduated from the University of Rochester in 1945, and then studied at the University of London and L’Ecole des Langues in Paris. Hines describes her mother as a “pioneering female journalist,” who began her career with the United Press International news service, reporting from Rochester, Buffalo and New York City. She was a reporter and columnist for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle from 1948 to 1951, when she left for Paris and a three-year stint with the Economic Cooperation Administration, a U.S. government agency that administered the postwar Marshall Plan. In that capacity, Pat wrote for Radio Free Europe and Voice of America broadcasts.
When she returned to Rochester, she resumed her reporting duties. She and Dick were married in 1956. In addition to Hines, the Doughertys also raised Dick’s sons from a prior marriage — Steven and Dick Jr.
Pat left the paper and took on the duties of raising a family. But she continued to work part-time and to freelance for years, becoming a popular restaurant critic for the Democrat and Chronicle. She reported for the Brighton-Pittsford Post and the Penfield Post. Over the years, she worked in public affairs and did writing for a variety of educational and corporate employers.
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Pat was an accomplished tennis player, who introduced Dick to the game, as well. And “she turned the Doughertys onto skiing,” Steve says. She had a great intellect and curiosity to match, he says. She was an avid book reader, and a lover of classical music — Beethoven, Chopin and Mozart, especially. “She didn’t care much for Elvis Presley.” She was, he says, “even known to smoke a corncob pipe when no one was looking.”
Pat was always independent. “She loved a good argument,” says Lawrence Howe of Webster, a former reporter who joined the Democrat within a month of Pat’s arrival. “She and Dick would get into it,” he says, because they both loved the back-and-forth.
She made regular appearances in Dick’s humor columns over a 25-year period. Not all the lines attributed to her were real, but the bonds they shared were. “When they were married,” Hines says, “they were so grateful to have found each other. They really enjoyed each other. Their affection was deep.”
Dick wasn’t much for housework, Howe says, but Pat’s gentle pushing and prodding were a great source of columns. In a 1998 column, after he brought Pat home from the hospital after surgery, he wrote: “The dog and I had hoped that one peripheral effect of her surgery might be an easing of the standards of home maintenance enforcement. So far there has been no change. That's my own fault. One of my big mistakes was to employ professional house cleaners, Dawn Marie and her sister, to get the place in shape before she got home from the hospital. That only aggravated the fastidiousness problem. They got the place looking spotless. Now we'll have to keep it that way.”
On rare occasions, Dick would turn the column over to Pat for a guest appearance. During the semifinals of the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament in 2001, Pat got her chance to poke fun at what Dick called the “sports cliché mongers” who broadcast the matches.
In 1995, when their beloved dog Feeney died, Dick, overcome with emotion, left the announcement to Pat, who wrote: “Feeney was often mentioned in this space and had been part of our family for 14 years (98 in people years, if the old formula is to be trusted). More than a pet, he was the child of our age.” The hardest part of his passing, Pat wrote, is that “we must start getting used to the awful emptiness and not hearing the thumping tail when we get up in the night.” In time, a new dog, Midas the golden retriever mix, found his way to the Dougherty home.
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When Dick was forced to leave the paper after heart surgery, Pat not only cared for him in their Brighton home, but pushed him to assemble a collection of columns, which she edited in book form. Dougherty Revisited, published in 2004, went into two printing. And on New Year’s Eve 2004, the day before Dick’s formal retirement, Pat wrote a farewell Speaking Out page piece: “Furthermore, the very fact of his retirement …while he has come to terms with its necessity, is a wrenching subject that again leaves him at a loss for words. But above all, we both want his readers and colleagues to know of our deep gratitude for their good wishes.”
At book signings all over Rochester, she wrote that day, Dick’s many fans had turned out. “Most people just said they would miss Dick's column,” and because of all the publicity around the book, so many people reached out to them both. “Last fall,” Pat wrote, “a stranger to us who was a Vietnam veteran and had emigrated to America from Poland after World War II, appeared at our door and proceeded unbidden to clean the leaves from our eaves. He said it was part payment on a debt to a World War II vet. More recently a carpet cleaner refused to charge us, calling the service a ‘retirement gift.’ And someone — we don't know who — left a bag of doggie treats for Midas with a note saying that Midas had seemed part of his family for a long time.”
Dick wanted no part of the book at first, but Pat knew it would be one last chance for him to reconnect with friends, and readers who would love to tell him what his work meant. She was right, as always. “Pat was very sociable,” Howe says. “More so than Dick. She would always drag him to events and then, of course, he’d get some great columns out of it.”
In addition to Hines and Steve and Dick Jr., Pat is survived by granddaughters Eva Dougherty (New York City), Annie Laurie Hines (Hamilton, Madison County), and Cameron Hines (Aspen, Colo.). In lieu of flowers, donations in Pat's memory may be made to: The Shepherd Home, 1959 Five Mile Line Road, Penfield, N.Y. 14526 (shepherdhome.org), or to GRROWLS-NY Golden Retriever Rescue, PO Box 6634, Syracuse, NY 13217 (grrowls.org). A memorial service is being planned.
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