Pat went to Captain Robert Gray Elementary School for 1st through 4th grades, John Jacob Astor Middle School for 5th through 9th grade and then graduated from Astoria High School.  Her brother Bob had scarlet fever when Pat was in third grade and the house was quarantined.  Pat and her father Daniel had to live with friends (that he and Kaarina knew from church) for 6 weeks while Bob recovered.  While in school Pat worked at a soda fountain on Main Street across from the Liberty Theater.  It was a popular hang out for the high school kids. 

Shortly after graduating from high school Pat was in an auto accident, smashing her face on the dashboard which turned all her teeth black.  Daniel and Kaarina had a dentist pull out all her teeth and fit her with dentures which she wore for the rest of her life.  No one ever saw her without them, unless you were a member of the family, you never knew she had them.

Pat went to Oregon State University in Corvallis for a year.  She began working at the Bumblebee Tuna processing plant when she was in 10th grade, throughout the rest of high school, her year in college and for many years after that.  Pat and her friends would sometimes sneak off to keg parties on the beach in Astoria during the summer where there would be bonfires, beer, food and lots of people having fun.  One night in the summer of 1947, she met a navy man, Bill Jenkins, at one of these beach parties to which they had both come to the party with dates.  They would later meet again and began dating and eventually were "going steady" after a few years.

In late 1950, Bill was assigned to ship out on the USS Sanborn.  He and Pat decided to get married shortly after learning about his reassignment.  One morning they took the ferry across the Columbia River from Oregon to Washington where there was less wait time to marry.  In Ilwaco, Washington while knocking on the Justice of the Peace’s door, a minister drove by, realized their predicament and asked if they wanted to get married in his church.  They of course agreed and were married in a quick ceremony.  Afterwards a reception was held at Pat’s cousin Leila’s house.  Supposedly they had three wedding receptions, the one at her cousin Leila's house, one at the American Legion and one at the Turpenien family home.  For their honeymoon Pat and Bill drove north to Vancouver, British Columbia and spent a few days there. 

Settling in back in Astoria, they found an attic apartment together which had a shower in the basement.  The place was wide open with no walls or drapes on the windows.  They had lots of friends that would come over and drink beer and they ended up getting kicked out because of all the parties and toilet flushing going on in the attic apartment.  Bill’s assignment on the USS Sanborn included a 6 month tour of duty to the Caribbean with ports of call in St. Thomas and Jamaica and the east coast of the United States.  Pat settled into the life of being married to a naval officer with the many assignments away and moving all over the country to be near Bill at his ports of call.

Fill in a lot of the rest of this with pieces of Bill's biography ... all the moves, Holly, Bill Jr and Nora's births, settling in Bremerton, life there, bowling in women's bowling leagues at Bay Bowl, the onset of her MS and a little on the children's paths/lives.  We have lots of pictures to scan and add yet.

Pat fought a battle with Multiple Sclerosis that began around age 40, progressing to the point after a few years where she was bound to a wheelchair.  For some people, life on this planet is not terribly fair … Pat accepted her situation with her inherent good nature and a sense of humor.  MS is a very unpredictable disease that has a way of progressing to a certain point and then arresting itself, sometimes for a very long period of time.  After 27 years in a wheelchair, Pat’s battle with the disease began again late in 1996 and ended when she passed away on October 24, 1997.  Add a little on Pat's stroke and how many of the family visited and waited to see if Pat would pull through.  Most of Bill's biography information came from all those anxious hours in the waiting room at the Naval Hospital.

Many thanks to Bob and his daughter Karin (Nora's cousin) for filling in all the blanks and making this biography possible.  In August 2009, Karin while visiting her father in Oregon, was showing him how to surf the net and came across this Steffens Family Pages website with Bill (Smoot's) biography.  This page (Pat's biography) was nothing but a short paragraph on her fight with MS followed by a long list of questions we were hoping someday that someone could help answer.  We had planned for Pat’s sister Kathleen to help us document her earlier life, but then Kathleen  passed away unexpectedly not long after Pat.  We thought Nora's father Bill could help us fill in some of Pat’s early life and most of her later life and then he passed away very unexpectedly in 2005.  Thanks again to Bob and Karin who answered all the questions and more!