Dr. Robert Patterson

My grandfather had very few close friends in his life time. Robert Patterson was not one of them.

As I mentioned in my earlier blog, these four men spent months and years trapped in the mountains together with infrequent and rarely friendly contact with the rest of the world. They did have supervisors and company higher-ups who would visit daily to check progress, but they would never stay to see the actual work being done.

This naturally made the four of them as close to brothers as they could get. However, being someones brother doesn't mean you have to like them. Dr. Patterson would constantly butt heads with grandad on minor issues simply to prove a point. My grandfather was a few years younger than Patterson, but very obviously his intellectual superior and that is what drove a wedge between them. Grandad would always say watching him work was like watching an angry child with a broken toy.

I think before I tell this story about Patterson, it is important that I mention there were not always four men. The team hired was originally only three. That lasted all of six weeks because of Patterson's stubborn ego.

When the previously mentioned meteor struck near the test site, he went by himself to investigate. After hearing there was nothing interesting to see, Patterson was determined to find something worth presenting and making my grandfather look like a hack. All he could come up with is the theory that this sort of thing may happen again and they would need a astrophysicist and/or space rock specialist in case it did. It was then Dr. Richard Smiley was added to the team, rounding off the four.

A few years back, Dr. Patterson passed away. Our family went to the funeral and paid our respects, but Grandad had to get in one last jab and reminded the open casket that he was also better at not dying.