Patricia "Pat" White

Patricia “Pat” White, 86, passed away on February 4, 2025. Pat was born in Buffalo but raised on Sherwood Road by her parents the late Frederick M. and M. Ruth Howland.  In the early 1940s, as a little girl, she met David White, who lived cross-lots on Goose Lane. They married in 1961 and enjoyed sixty-three years together on Center Road. 

Pat’s passion in life was choral music. She even remembered singing for a meeting of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Venice Center at the age of five.  After High School, she studied music education at SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music. She began teaching at Southern Cayuga Central School in 1972.  For the next twenty-four years she taught music, chorus, and music theory.  She was the choral director for a number of school musicals and took many students to sing at All-State competitions.  In her final years of teaching, she developed music curricula utilizing computer technology, becoming the Music Technology Chair for the NYS School Music Association.  Even after her retirement in 1996 she, for several years, led innovative workshops around the state on using computers in music education.  

Always a giving person she shared her musical talents in the community. She began playing the organ and directing the church choir at Scipioville Presbyterian Church in the early 1960s, and continued until retiring last year.  During that time she also played several years at Fleming Federated and Aurora Presbyterian.  Even during the last months of her life, which she spent at The Commons on St. Anthony in Auburn, she played the piano as residents sang holiday songs.

Pat was proud to be descended from abolitionists, suffragists, and educators.  After her retirement she worked to make sites of local activism accessible to the public.  From 2003 to 2019, she was a dedicated board member of Sherwood’s Howland Stone Store Museum, a gathering point for late nineteenth-century suffragists and reformers; and she served as board president for nine years.  She was instrumental in the acquisition and restoration of Opendore, the historic home of Isabel Howland, a local leader in the women’s suffrage movement and the Sherwood Equal Rights Association, organized in 1891.

Pat is survived by her husband, David; her sisters Faith Rick (Jay) and Susan Crumrine (Scott); her children, Diana Williams (Jeff), Pam Masten (Don), and Ed (Amisha); and six grandchildren, Sean Williams, David and Sarah Masten, Hannah Kanner (Cameron), and Toussaint and Shalini Sharma-White. 

Visitation will be from 4PM to 7PM on Friday, February 14, 2025 at Brew Funeral Home, 48 South Street, Auburn. The memorial service will be at 1PM on Saturday, February 15, 2025 at Scipioville Presbyterian Church, 3428 State Route 34B, Scipio Center, NY 13147.

Contributions may be made to Howland Stone Store Museum (PO Box 124, Aurora 13026), https://www.howlandstonestore.org/donations) or to the First Presbyterian Church of Scipioville, NY at www.scipiovillepresyterianchurch.org in memory of Patricia White.

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