In Memoriam: Patricia Livingston

BY JOHN POPE | Provided by The Advocate

(Note: This piece originally published in The Advocate on May 19, 2019. The Press Club of New Orleans appreciates The Advocate’s permission to republish.)

Patricia Kennedy Livingston, a longtime New Orleans newspaper columnist who also was an active civic volunteer and stage performer, died May 9 at Passages Hospice in New Orleans. She was 84.

Livingston wrote the “Uptown Line” column for The Times-Picayune for 25 years. From 2013 on, she wrote features for The Advocate.

She also wrote advertising and public relations copy, and she worked with the editor of the patients’ newspaper at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Carville, at the time the only U.S. home for patients with leprosy, now known as Hansen’s disease.

Livingston went there monthly to help the editor with his correspondence. He needed assistance because the disease had robbed him of his sight and fingertips, said her daughter Charlotte Patricia Maurine Livingston Piotrowski.

Because Hansen’s disease now can be treated on an outpatient basis, the center lost its funding in 1999 and closed, although patients who had been living there were allowed to remain.

Livingston also tested recipes for cookbooks, wrote for trade journals, and wrote and published newsletters for business groups.

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, she and her family lived in San Antonio before moving to New Orleans, where she graduated from Isidore Newman School. She earned a bachelor’s degree in art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where she was a member of Delta Gamma sorority and French and journalism honor societies.

Livingston earned a master’s degree in theater and communications at the University of New Orleans. She had started work on a master’s degree in creative writing when Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005, and she did not finish that program.

She performed in plays at Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre, Gallery Circle Theater and Tulane Summer Lyric Theater, and she sang in the concert choirs of New Orleans and Loyola University.

Among the organizations for which Livingston was a volunteer were the Spring Fiesta, the Hermann-Grima Historic House, the Women’s Guild of the New Orleans Opera Association, Habitat for Humanity, Save Our Cemeteries, the Preservation Research Center, the Sierra Club and the Sports Car Club of America.

Besides her daughter, survivors include a son, Robert Jefferson Currie Livingston, of Pittsburgh, and a sister, Katheryn Elizabeth Kennedy Sublette, of Charlottesville, Virginia.

A private memorial service will be held.

John Pope is a Press Club of New Orleans Lifetime Achievement Award Winner