Longtime Chronicle columnist Patty Hill dies in Mississippi

PATTY HILL
Beloved longtime Larchmont Chronicle society columnist Anne Patricia (Patty) Hill has died. She was 70.
Hill passed away on Aug. 16, 2024, at her home in Mississippi following a longtime illness, her husband, David Hill, told us.
Hill was named a Chronicle Woman of Larchmont in August 2012, shortly after she became president of the Ebell Club of Los Angeles.
She first visited the historic women’s club 13 years before, when a friend invited her to a weekly luncheon.
Hill returned with her husband for a dinner dance and was smitten.
She would go on to serve The Ebell in five different volunteer posts before becoming president. She oversaw a 455-person membership, a staff of 37, a commercial rental division and two philanthropies.
In her two-year term, she headed a multi-million dollar budget and the onset of a multiyear preservation and restoration project for the 75,000-square-foot Italian Renaissance-style building at Wilshire and Lucerne boulevards.
A Memphis native and former New Yorker, Hill sported cherry red-framed glasses, strings of pearls and a bubbling enthusiasm. She enlivened parties at area events “Around the Town,” the name of the column she penned for the Chronicle.
She was most proud, she told us in a 2012 interview, of her work as a minority arts coordinator of African American works at a repertory theater for the deaf and a dance company that performed Afro-Cuban dance.
She also served on the board of a professional musicians group and on the board of Crossroads School, which her son attended.
In an email last month to the Chronicle, David Hill wrote of their 49 years of marriage: “I wore out a half-dozen tuxedoes escorting her to a thousand balls, galas, opera openings and charity dinners, which she covered for her Around the Town column over two decades.
“She left me a heart filled with gratitude and several closets full of clothes.”
Patty Hill suffered multiple fractures from a fall on the stairs of her home in 2020 at the El Royale Apartments in Windsor Square. Her last column for the paper was in November 2020.
She is survived by her son, Lonnie Hill, of Las Vegas, her husband David, and three siblings.
Her fondest wish, David Hill told us, was that any memorials be in the form of a donation to the Ebell of Los Angeles where she served as president and on the board for 16 years. To donate, visit ebellofla.org/support-us#donate-today.
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