Patricia Headland Radway
Hanover, NH – Patricia Headland Radway, prize-winning quilter and former Hanover Town Clerk, passed away January 18, 2025 at the age of 99 in Hartford, VT.
She was born in New York City, to Courtenay and Esther Headland. Her father was raised in Beijing, China by a missionary father and a Canadian mother who was physician to the Empress Dowager. Patty’s mother was a small-town girl from Alliance, Ohio.
Patty grew up in Yonkers and Irvington, New York with her younger brother Courtenay, known as “Bud.” She graduated from The Masters School and Wellesley College with a degree in psychology and a minor in music and was working for Liberty Mutual Insurance Company in Boston when she met and married Laurence Radway, a graduate student in government at Harvard.
In 1950 when Larry was hired by the government department at Dartmouth College, Patty, Larry, and young son Bob moved to Hanover where Patty and Larry lived for 53 years until Larry died in 2003.
Patty devoted herself to many community services – reading to children with polio at Mary Hitchcock hospital, volunteering at Howe Library, the PTA, the League of Women Voters, and as a ski instructor for the Ford Sayre ski program. She gate-checked ski races at Oak Hill and the Skiway and measured the distance of landings at the Dartmouth ski jump.
Patty was also very involved in Democratic Party politics at the local, state and national level – hosting receptions for numerous Democratic Presidential candidates in her living room including both Bill & Hillary Clinton and John Glenn.
From 1966 to 1973 Patty served as a Supervisor of the Checklist, and from 1973 to 1980 she served as Hanover’s Town Clerk. When the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1971, she began registering Dartmouth students who wanted to vote in the 1972 first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
A dinner party she was hosting was interrupted when she was served with papers filed by Town Republicans who didn’t want students to vote. Undeterred, she continued registering students and the case was eventually dismissed. As Town Clerk, she is believed to have processed the first name change on a birth certificate for a transgender Hanover native, who years earlier had attended birthday parties for one of her children.
Most of all, Patty was remarkably skilled at handicrafts and was an exceptional artist. She studied the trucks and trains at GrandDad’s Toy Shop in Thetford, came home and built replicas for her kids. She knitted sweaters, made skating dresses and school clothes for her daughters, drew original family Christmas cards, made unique Christmas ornaments every year, knitted Christmas stockings for her children, and later needlepointed pillows for them depicting important moments in their lives when they graduated from high school.
Later in life, she became a master quilter, winning ribbons at the Vermont Quilt Festival and Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair. Her quilts still hang in the Chappaquiddick Community Center. Her mantra was – “She who dies with the most fabric wins!”
In 1965-1966 the Radway family travelled around the world, stopping in Malaysia for 6 months along the way. Patty packed and unpacked 15 pieces of luggage and figured out how to get her 3 youngest kids clothed, cleaned, fed, educated, and transported for 12 months in 15 different countries.
She visited dozens of countries on six continents. Her favorite place was Budapest, Hungary, birthplace of her father-in-law, which she visited nearly a dozen times when Larry ran Dartmouth’s term abroad program at Karl Marx University (now Corvinus University). Other favorite destinations included Israel, China, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Namibia, and the Spice Islands in Indonesia.
In 1979, Pat and Larry built a house on Chappaquiddick Island in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard. For more than four decades, Patty spent most of her summers and several cold winters there, hosting her children and grandchildren.
Patty taught everyone how to dig for clams and scallops, pick wild blueberries, garden, cook seafood and bake pies, identify poison ivy, pick off ticks, and how to enjoy the sand and surf. She also joined the quilters league and taught quilting classes, donating several prize quilts to the Chappy Community Center.
Until her death, Patty continued listening to and singing along with The Weavers, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul & Mary, and adored anything and everything bright orange.
Patty is survived by her children Robert of Auburn, ME, Carol Tobias (Michael Tobias) of Cabot, VT and Dorchester, MA, Mike (Stephanie Vardavas) of Portland, OR, and Deborah of Montague, MA; five grandchildren Lisa and Corinne Tobias (Kevin Gilnack), Laura Edouard, Jessica and John Radway (Megan Marsh); nine great-grandchildren and her sister-in-law Rhoda Headland. She is also survived by her long-time best friends Lu Martin and Borbola Szendro; and many nieces and nephews.
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