Margaret Fitzpatrick and Augusta Platte were Delta Zeta sorority sisters at Howard College (now Samford University). That connection seems to have been very fortuitous.
Margaret Fitzpatrick grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. She graduated from Howard College (now Samford University) where she and Platt were members of the Alpha Pi Chapter of Delta Zeta.
She ended up in Hollywood on what must have seemed like a lark. Paramount Studios was looking for “Miss Panther Woman,” and she entered the acting contest at the Alabama Theater. She did not win that part, but Paramount offered her an acting contract. She took it and headed west in 1932. Her stage name became Gail Patrick.
Her first role was a small part as a secretary in If I Had a Million. Perhaps at the time she said to herself that if she had a million she would give it to Delta Zeta. I like to believe she did.
When Patrick had a short stop at the airport in Jackson, Mississippi, she spent most of it trying to track down her friend Augusta Platt, who was serving as an inspector for Delta Zeta. Today’s crop of Delta Zetas could probably not understand how difficult it was to connect with someone in 1936 when cell phones and find a friend apps were but science fiction folly.
Augusta Platt’s engagement to Fred Kelleway was announced in a November 1938 Oakland, California newspaper. After the 1938 Delta Zeta convention in Pasadena, she spent some time in the Bay area and it was then that she met Kelleway. Did her long-time friend have anything to do with the match-up? I do not know, but the couple’s wedding took place in Patrick’s Hollywood home on December 31, 1938.
Patrick retired from acting in the late 1940s. She said it was because she had stillborn twins. She began designing children’s clothes and for eight years had a small shop, the Enhanted Cottage, on Rodeo Drive.
In 1947, Patrick married for the third time. Her husband, Cornwall Jackson, was Earle Stanley Gardner’s literary agent. Gardner was the author of the Perry Mason series of books. Although Gardner’s character had been brought to the big screen in the 1930s, Gardner did not like the way Mason was portrayed and wanted no further attempts at it. Jackson, however, secured the film rights to the books. Patrick apparently talked Gardner into letting her produce the Perry Mason books as television productions. From 1957 until 1966, Raymond Burr portrayed Mason in the successful courtroom drama.
In 1962, Delta Zeta named Patrick their Woman of the Year. She was also elected to the first Board of Directors of the newly created Delta Zeta Foundation. I suspect Kelleway was in the audience as she was a national officer and may have had a hand in this appointment. That is speculation on my part, but I think it might be a good bet.
In October of 1963, Gail Patrick and her sorority sister came together again at the Delta Zeta Founders’ Day brunch held at the Kaiser Center in Oakland, California. At the Brunch, Patrick spoke of the “Warmth of the Flame.”
Patrick and her husband divorced in 1969. Five years later she married John E. Velde, Jr. She died of leukemia on July 6, 1980, and Valdez died in 2002.
After her husband’s death, a $1 million bequest from the Gail Patrick Velde Trust was given to the Delta Zeta Foundation, on whose board she served decades before. It established Delta Zeta’s Gail Patrick Women of Distinction Program. Patrick’s legacy provides scholarships, both undergraduate and graduate, as well as the honorarium awarded to Delta Zeta alumnae designated as Woman of the Year.
To learn more about Patrick in her own words, read a transcript of this 1979 interview with her.
