Patricia (Pat) Lee Grossman

April 13, 1945 - March 14, 2015 Patricia (Pat) Lee Grossman of Golden, Colorado passed away peacefully at home on March 14th, just a month shy of her seventieth birthday. A vibrant, curious and completely unique woman, Pat will be deeply missed by her friends and family. She was born Patricia Lunday on April 13th, 1945 in San Antonio, Texas, where she lived with her father Donald, mother Charlotte and younger sister Linda.  Rarely without a book in her hand, Pat took to horses and dogs at an early age. As a girl, her favorite companions were a troublesome border collie named Smokey and lifelong friend Diane Shelton Russell. She graduated from Douglas MacArthur High School and attended Texas AM University.  When her father opened a branch of Continental Water Systems Corporation in Colorado, she followed her family north to Denver.  Pat enrolled at Colorado State University and joined the Chi Omega sorority. At CSU she met her first husband, John Gascoyne. After graduating with a degree in microbiology, Pat moved with John to Albuquerque, where he attended law school and their daughter Shawn Stephanie Gascoyne was born. During this time, Pat worked as a lab technician at Presbyterian Hospital and adopted a toy poodle named Alfie, the first of many dogs she would name after notable unsuccessful presidential candidates. Alfie (whose full name was Alfred M. Landon) was succeeded by Wendell Willkie, a mixed breed shepherd, and three Great Danes, Adlai Stephenson, Thomas Edmund Dewey, and George McGovern. In 1970, the Gascoyne family relocated to Shiprock, N.M., where John worked as a lawyer for the Navajo Nation.  After returning to Colorado few years later, the couple, had a very amicable divorce, remaining close friends throughout their lives. Putting her science degree to work, Pat joined the family water purification business, which had been taken over by her mother when her father passed away in 1972.  Pat started cleaning membranes and doing analytical work before moving into the sales department and eventually inherited and managed the business when Charlotte passed away in 1986. An active member of the business community, Pat was the President of the Wheat Ridge Chamber of Commerce for a number of years, and was part of a ladies investment club with other Chi Omega alumni members. Through the company she met her second husband, Robert “Bob” Grossman.  Bob and Pat complemented each other remarkably well, doing things as a couple that neither would have pursued as an individual. Members of the Evergreen Colorado Kennel Club, they showed a number of Great Danes and finished a grand champion Belgian Tervuren, Jamacia’s Dancer. In the early ‘80s, Pat suggested that they purchase an old Jaguar E-Type coupe that they drove past frequently in the mountains.  Restoring that particular Jag took almost two decades but, in the interim, the couple passionately collected, raced, and showed a number of other Jaguars, with Bob doing the restoration work.  Eventually the couple would build a large barn on their property to house the collection. When Pat sold Continental Water, Bob’s hobby of restoring classic Jaguars became a business. Bob and Pat were members of the Rocky Mountain Jaguar Club and Rocky Mountain Vintage Racing Association.  Keen to race her Jaguar MK II saloon with a group of peers, Pat was a founding member of the association’s Ladies’ Race Group. Pat was equally passionate about architecture and design.  She would extensively remodel every house she owned, adding solar and other energy efficient innovations as that technology became available.  Her largest project is her stunning passive solar straw-bale home, named Suncatcher, in Golden. Through her design projects, Pat became involved with a number of organizations, including the Colorado Renewable Energy Society and the Golden Tour of Solar Homes.  Never able to fully leave the work world behind, Pat spent a number of years at Joe Kelsey’s State Farm Insurance Agency in Arvada. In addition to her husband and daughter, she is survived by step children Benjamin Grossman and Caryl Grossman, and grandchildren Rachel Septon, Lucy Bowman, Peter “Xander” Bowman and Manna Smith. Memorial donations can be made to the Wildlife Sanctuary (Hudson, CO), Jefferson County Democratic Party, Planned Parenthood or the ACLU. A pot luck memorial celebration in Pat’s honor will be held at the Forney Transportation Museum, 4303 Brighton Blvd, Denver, CO 80216 on Sunday April 19th at 5pm.