Patricia Evelyn Franklin, age 74, passed away May 30, 2012 at the Plano Specialty Hospital in Plano, Texas. Patricia will be buried at a graveside ceremony which will be held at the Riverside Cemetery in Mangum, Oklahoma, Friday, June 1 at 2:00 p.m. A memorial service will be held for Pat at the Cotton Mill in McKinney, Texas at 2:00 p.m., on Wednesday June 6, 2012.
Patricia will be greatly missed by her family and numerous friends. She was born in Hugo, Oklahoma November 22, 1937 and graduated from Mangum High School in 1954. She attended Southwestern State College in Weatherford, Oklahoma, but soon went to work for H. L. Hunt Oil Company in Dallas, Texas and later with Thomas Y. Pickett & Company, an ad valorem tax company. She retired in 1991 and went with her husband to Kauai for ten years where he worked as a landscape architect. When he retired, they both moved back to McKinney, Texas to be close to their three children, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
In 1988 she was diagnosed with Primary Pulmonary Hypertension and given three to five years to live. She told Dr. Louis Rubin that wouldn’t work because she wanted to see her grandchildren graduate from high school. At the end of three years, she was going downhill fast and was put on an experimental drug, Flolan. At her death, twenty one years later, she was the longest living PPH patient in the nation and possibly the world. She did live to see six of her grandchildren graduate from high school, and one grandchild graduate from college, and saw two of her granddaughters get married.
She married Cas J. Franklin (C.J.) in Mangum, Oklahoma in 1960 and they had three children. She was preceded in death by her father, John Denver Winn, and her mother, Edith Opal Winn. Patricia is survived by her husband, Cas J. Franklin; her children, Cas Jay Franklin and his wife, Lori, Drue Franklin and his wife Linda, Jennifer Leigh and her husband, and Scott Chilton; sister, Betty Ruth Bennet; brother, Michael Winn; grandchildren, Stephanie Brewer, Kevin Franklin, Kristen Clark and her husband Stephen, Chad Chilton, Carson Chilton, Cooper Chilton, Kat Chilton, Quanah and Jesse Franklin; and great-grandchild Kayleigh Marie Brewer.