Harriet Pattison was born on Oct, 29, 1928, in Chicago, the youngest of seven children of William Lawrence Pattison, who ran a small real estate company, and Bonnie Abbott Pattison. Harriet attended the private Francis Parker School in Chicago, spent three semesters at Wellesley and then transferred to the University of Chicago, from which she graduated. Deciding to become a set designer, she enrolled at the Yale School of Drama.
In her memoir, Ms. Pattison wrote that she and her four sisters were not given middle names. Their parents, she said, expected them to “complete” their names by marrying.
Ms. Pattison’s first encounter with Mr. Kahn, in 1953, was fleeting: She was a Yale drama student, and he was overseeing construction of the Yale University Art Gallery. “I didn’t know who he was,” she recalled in the oral history, “But that night, I wrote down that I had met an amazing man. And that was it.”
She studied moral philosophy in Edinburgh for a semester and then moved to Philadelphia to take piano lessons from a friend, Edith Braun, who promised to help her get her life in order. Nearing 30, “I was still searching, at that late age, for some way of expressing myself in the arts,” Ms. Pattison told Mr. Birnbaum in the oral history interview.
In 1958, soon after moving to Philadelphia, she was formally introduced to Mr. Kahn at a holiday party. That led to what were “the most important 15 years, I think, in Lou’s life and in mine,” she told the journalist Martin Pedersen in the online magazine Common Edge in 2021.
When Nathaniel was born she was 34 and had not yet chosen a career. Landscape design seemed like a good fit. But in the mid-1960s, she wrote in her memoir, “a woman with a child and no wedding ring was cause for gossip, even suspicion.”
