Patricia Booth was as comfortable at an opera performance as she was at building furniture.
Her son, Ted Booth of Lumberville, Pa., doesn’t have that building inclination.
“She gave me a table saw a couple of years ago. I guess she thought every home should have one,” he said. “I haven’t taken it out of the box yet.”
Patricia Booth, a financial specialist and urban planner, died Wednesday at a Denver-area hospice. She was 75.
A service is planned for today at 10 a.m. at Fairmount Mortuary, with a reception following in Mitchell Hall at the Denver Botanic Gardens.
Patricia Booth had a natural knack for building and repairing: She built the deck at the family home in Denver and was general manager for the construction of a family mountain home. She would point out when her children’s homes needed certain repairs and sometimes did them herself.
“She was the kind of person you’d want to have around” to supervise workers at your home, Ted Booth said.
Patricia Booth got a degree in landscape architecture when that wasn’t a common profession for women, her son said. She was also a financial planner and worked with her husband, the late Charles Booth, who was a lawyer.
Former Mayor Tom Currigan named her to a committee that examined the city’s tax structure and then to the city’s Planning Board.
She worked with the League of Women Voters’ committee promoting rapid transit and believed in looking at the long-term as well as the short-range needs for transportation, her son said.
“She realized that just building more highway lanes was a short-term solution, adding more traffic and congestion,” Ted Booth said.
Patricia Booth was one of a group that founded the city’s first Montessori school, in southeast Denver, and was on the nominating committee in 1979 that named the first woman to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals: Stephanie Seymour.
A gregarious person, Booth “was a great thrower of parties,” Ted Booth said.
She was devoted to Opera Colorado and the Colorado Symphony.
Through her myriad activities, she made many friends and kept them all her life, Ted Booth said, but she never stopped making new ones.
Patricia Berkner was born May 30, 1931, in Washington, D.C., graduated from high school in Bethesda, Md., and earned her bachelor’s degree at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
She married Charles Booth on Dec. 22, 1954. He died several years ago.
In addition to her son, she is survived by another son, C. Arthur Booth of Denver; her daughter, Susan Booth Brehe of Matlock, Iowa; her sister, Phyllis Berkner Wiederander of Asheville, N.C., and six grandchildren.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at vculver@denverpost.com or 303-820-1223.
