Patricia O'Connor

Beloved wife, mother, and grandmother, Patricia Ann O’Connor (née Rooney) of West Hills, California died on Friday April 15, 2022 at West Hills Hospital in the presence of her family. Pat was born in Chicago, Illinois to Richard and Marie Rooney (née Flynn) and grew up on the south side of Chicago in the Washington Heights neighborhood. She attended St. Margaret of Scotland for elementary school and Longwood Academy for high school. She is a graduate of Chicago Teachers College and taught 3rd grade for several years at the Burnside elementary school in the Chicago Public Schools. She met her husband Bob at the Holiday Club Ballroom in the Cosmo Theater near West 79th and South Halsted and they were married on the 5th of November 1960. In 1965 she moved with her family to Southern California, where she and Bob raised their three sons, Robert, Richard, and Daniel. Pat enjoyed listening to opera, oil painting, taking arts and craft classes, and learned to love baseball by watching her sons play. After her children were raised, she volunteered as a teacher at Temple Solael preschool. Later in life Pat became afflicted with Retinitis Pigmentosa and progressively lost her sight. Thereafter she was never far from her radio, listening to books on tape supplied by the Braille Institute, and finding support and companionship at the Foothill Service Club for the Blind in Glendale as well as her local widows and widowers (WOW) group. She is preceded in death by her husband Robert H. O’Connor and is survived by her sons Richard and Daniel, and by her son Robert, his wife Megan, and her two granddaughters Ailish and Caoilinn. A burial will be held at 10 a.m. on Saturday May 7th at Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery, 22601 Lassen St. Chatsworth, CA.
The family requests that those wishing to honor Pat’s life send a donation in her name to the Foundation Fighting Blindness (www.fightingblindness.org/).