Patricia “Patsy” Aldridge, a lifelong educator, linguist, advocate for children and women, and devoted mother and grandmother, died peacefully Sept. 3 in her home in Watkinsville, Georgia, with her two daughters and sons-in-law by her bedside.
Patsy was born in Boone, North Carolina, on Dec. 7, 1935, to Ala Marintha Kilby Young McGuire and Roger Wright “Pat” McGuire.
After graduating high school in 1953, Patsy attended Appalachian State University Teachers College and the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude.
Nominated for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Patsy removed herself from the competition to marry Cecil DeGrotte Eby Jr. in 1956, the same year they began summering in Deer Isle, Maine.
In 1959, her first daughter, Clare Virginia Eby, was born. In 1962, Patsy studied at the University of Salamanca. In 1964, her second daughter Lillian Turner de Tormes Eby was born.
In 1969, Patsy completed her master’s degree in linguistics at the University of Michigan where she then pursued further graduate work in library science, graduating in 1979. She then worked at the Adrian, Michigan, Public Library.
In 1983, she married John Watson “Jack” Aldridge and also became assistant librarian for the English Language Institute in LSA, retiring in 1998. In 2001, she moved to Madison, Georgia, to help raise her granddaughter, Turner Alexis Pascoe, born June 11, 2001. In 2012, she moved in with Lillian and her family in Watkinsville, Georgia.
Patsy was predeceased by her husband, Jack Aldridge, and her first husband, Cecil Eby; sister, Tharon Young Sapp; and brother, Phil McGuire. She is survived by her brother, Roger W. “Buddy” McGuire; sister, Ala Sue Wyke; and by daughters Clare Eby and Lillian Eby, granddaughter, Turner Pascoe, and sons-in-law John Joseph Lo Presti and Jeff Fogelsong.
Contributions can be made to Project Safe at project-safe.org/donate/ or Reading is Fundamental at rif.org.
— Submitted by Lord & Stephens Funeral Homes of Athens, Georgia
