A lifelong educator who in retirement still occasionally substitute taught, Pat was considered a streetwise teacher who brooked no foolishness from her students. One time while giving a misbehaving young lad the heave-ho from her class, she called the kid a name that left no doubt about her opinion of him.
“I’ll tell my mom,’’ the kid said.
“Let’s call her right now,’’ Pat said.
So it was in ways discernible and indiscernible that Pat and Bud’s world views melded, she as a former teacher with a penchant for order and humor, and he as a polio-stricken kid from Superior, Wis., who found athletic fame at the U and in the NBA and NFL before turning to coaching, winning four Gray Cups in the Canadian Football League and leading the Vikings to four Super Bowls.
“Still,’’ Bud would tell friends, “I’ve always felt like an outsider.’’
Except, that is, when he was in nature — an awareness that first overcame him as a kid, he told me over the 40 years I knew him. It was then, in autumn, after football practice and on weekends, that he’d catch a city bus to the edge of town, where with his shotgun he’d walk for miles targeting rabbits and grouse.
