In memory of Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson

Frontier Nursing Service Quarterly Bulletin, Winter 2003

On Thursday, January 9, 2003, at 3:00 pm, I attended the memorial service for Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson held in the sanctuary of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC with Ruth Lubic, founder of the DC Birth and Family Center. Mrs. Patterson contributed funds,,in memory of Mary Breckinridge to furnish the DC Birth Center in Washington. We sat behind Kate Ireland and Dr. Patience White of the FNS Board of Governors. Flags hung on both sides of the entrance to the sanctuary bearing the motto and logo of the FNS. These were commissioned by Mrs. Patterson to honor Mary Breckinridge and usually hang in St. John's Chapel at the entrance to the Children's Chapel.

The eulogy for this remarkable woman was given by the Honorable Clarence J. Brown, Jr., former congressman from Ohio. It is published here in its entirety. - Kitty Ernst

"Born to the silk of the wealth and historic reputations of two of America's great families and married into another, Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson might well have lived a life of private ease without any social significance or notable personal accomplishment.

"But the blended heritage of her great grandfather, Kentucky's John Cabell Breckinridge and her maternal grandfather, Ohio's B.F. Goodrich, could not be denied.

"The former, a Vice-President of the United States, Democrat presidential candidate against Abraham Lincoln, general in the Confederate States Army and Secretary of War of the Confederacy, was an heroic battler to preserve a way of life he held dear.

"But her maternal grandfather was an innovative inventor and the founder of a business which forever changed fundamental aspects of American Life. From her strong Goodrich mother, Isabella; her handsome attorney father named for his grandfather and her three bold and dashing brothers, Cabell, Chad and Robert, she learned to be an actively independent woman.

"As a student at Vassar, she gave her family and friends a forma ste of her future life of ecletic action by swimming the Hudson in her undies while she carried her proper dress, dry above her head, for a night on the town in Poughkeepsie.

"Within months of that adventure, she had helped found the National Student Association of America, of which she would become national president, had her formal debut in New York Society, and had been presented at the Court of St. James in London. In the months following her 1927 graduation she also learned to play polo and herd cattle at the family ranch near Santa Barbara, California; to fly an airplane near the family vacation home in York, Maine where she became that state's first licensed female pilot; and began her lifelong interest in multiple flash photography by enrolling at the New School for Social Research in New York near the family home there.

"Are you beginning to get the picture of a woman of her times --- or perhaps a woman of ALL time: Eve contemplating the Apple of Life and thinking to herself, "Why not?"

"In 1939, three years after graduation, she established herself in a professional career as a cinematographer by making a black and white silent film about her cousin Mary Breckinridge's Frontier Nursing Service where Marvin had been a volunteer horseback courier for a summer after her college graduation in the poorest, most benighted hills and hollows of Kentucky. The Forgotten Frontier, made by 25 year old Marvin, within two decades of the first public showing of a motion picture in the U.S., has been cited by the American Film Institute as an historic and all time classic.

"After studying still photography with Clarence White in New York, her photographs began appearing in Life, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Town and Country, Junior League and many other magazines and metropolitan newspapers of the day.

"Included there were her shots of Africa taken on a 1932 trip from Capetown to Cairo with her friend Olivia Stokes and Canon and Mrs. Anson Phelps Stokes. Their trip was made within the lifetime of those who could recall Stanley's sensational finding of Dr. Livingston in the Dark Continent. After Cairo she and Olivia had then gone on, ALONE to Palestine, Turkey and France, where Marvin resolved that she would make it her life work to see, photograph and write about the world. Eight years later, assignments from Town & Country to cover the Lucerne Music Festival and Life magazine to cover a Nazi rally in Nuremburg, brought her face to face with world politics.

"She had been introduced previously to domestic politics as an Intern in the Washington Congressional office of her cousin and godmother, Isabella Selmes Greenway, Arizona Democrat. There, and as a secretarial assistant to Jouett Shouse, the chair of the Executive Committee of the Democrat National Committee, Marvin had been introduced also to a bachelor Foreign Service Officer from Dayton, Ohio. Her 1940 European jobs would change both his life and hers.

"On arriving in London, Marvin ran into another old friend, Edward R. Murrow, whom she had first met through their mutual participation in the Nation Student Association. The CBS news broadcaster asked her to report on the impact on average British families of the war just begun in Europe. After that first broadcast, for the next seven months, she originated and wrote, past the censors, her own on-air portions of those historic broadcasts from London and elsewhere inWestern Europe, where she worked with Tom Grandin in Amsterdam, Eric Severeid in Paris and William L. Shirer in Berlin. Three times she was on the last train out of a nation as the Nazis marched across Europe: Lucerne to Calais when Poland was invaded; Amsterdam to Paris as the Netherlands fell, and Paris to Genoa as France collapsed. Like the Biblical Ester working to save people from the oppressive wrath of Xerxes, Marvin was in the thick of things.