Every morning, Ruth Patrick pinned a hibiscus to her lapel.
She raised them, luscious blooms of pink and red, at her home in Baton Rouge. When she left town, she traveled with the flowers in Tupperware containers.
Her family said years later, strangers would sometimes recognize the woman from the weekly Channel 2 nutrition programs in the ‘90s not from the copper hair or the striking, carefully selected clothes, but from that hibiscus on her lapel.
“So many people said, ‘I always think of hibiscus when I think of your mom,’” her daughter Terry Patrick-Harris said. “That’s kind of what she was known for. Her signature flower.”
Patrick, a former food and nutrition specialist with the LSU AgCenter, chief of nutrition education at Pennington Biomedical Research Center and local television personality, died Monday. She was 95 years old.
Friends and family remembered her as a woman of determination, confidence and poise, who balanced her ambitious career with the demands of raising a family in the 1950s and ‘60s.
“She wasn’t the first, but she was a local person who, with a family of four, went back to school, got a Ph.D. and had a huge career, and was a role model for a lot of young women in Louisiana,” her son William Patrick III said.
On the same weekend Patrick-Harris graduated from high school, Patrick graduated from LSU with her doctorate in food science. She held graduation breakfast at her home the next morning.
“That was a very busy weekend,” her daughter said.
Patrick was born into a poor farming family during the Great Depression, her children said. She worked in the cotton fields of northeast Louisiana and borrowed money to attend college at age 15.
She later transferred to LSU, where she met her future husband, William Patrick Jr., also a renowned academic.
“Education was very important in our family,” Patrick-Harris said.
She went on to serve as a food and nutrition specialist with the LSU AgCenter and the chief of nutrition education at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, opportunities that allowed her to travel around the state and teach people about food science, her son said.
“She knew every little highway in Louisiana because she traveled to 64 parishes,” Patrick said. “She knew everybody somewhere. There was no parish that she didn’t have a friend and know people in.”
Tara Smith, LSU AgCenter executive associate vice president and director of the Louisiana Cooperative Extension Service, said the AgCenter is “deeply grateful” for her contributions.
“Ruth Patrick leaves behind a legacy that will continue to shape the LSU AgCenter,” Smith said in a statement. “Her deep roots in our organization were matched by her commitment to improving the health and well‑being of Louisiana families.”
Her son said some of the proudest moments of her career came during her time with WBRZ, where she hosted weekly nutrition programs.
Patrick was a beloved figure, undaunted by the “pressure-cooker” atmosphere of the newsroom, veteran WBRZ reporter Margaret Lawhon said. She brought homemade peach ice cream for the staff to enjoy after the 5 p.m. news.
“She arrived on the scene at a time when people paid attention to women like that in a new way,” Lawhon said. “It was like, wow, she is very confident, she is accomplished, she is comfortable within her own skin, and she’s just doing her thing, and here we go.”
Patrick neither scolded the journalists nor molded herself to blend in with the chaotic environment, Lawhon said.
She simultaneously accepted them and “maintained Ruth throughout,” Lawhon said.
“She was herself,” Lawhon said. “She never felt like she had to be somebody else. That made her an outstanding person and somebody you wanted to look at and say, ‘I can be like that. I can be my best, even when it’s tough.’”