CONCORD TOWNSHIP-Patty McGinley was one teenager who found a way to listen to her parents and go for her own dream, too. She said she had always wanted to be a teacher but her father was concerned about the job market for teachers in the mid 70s. He told her to think health care.
“In those days girls were still mainly offered the choices of nurse or teacher,” she said. “But my friends were all doing nursing, so I decided to become a dental hygienist. The compromise was that I would continue for my bachelor’s and get a teacher’s degree.”
It was the combination that brought her from Pennsylvania, where she had grown up in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, to Lake County. She was offered a full time teaching position at Lakeland Community College.
“At the time, all you needed was a bachelor’s to teach at a community college,” she said. Having been trained as an educator, she beat out master’s level candidates by coming to her interview armed with a portfolio of sample lesson plans. She has been teaching at Lakeland ever since. In 2000, she finished her master’s degree in education at Lake Erie College.
McGinley’s high school sweetheart, Mark, was also in the area, completing his law degree at Cleveland State. The couple was married a few years later.
She cut back to a part time position five years later, when her first son, Kevin, was born.
“I wanted to do the things my mom had done for us when we were kids,” she said. “I was able to work around the kids’ schedules.”
Growing up in a small ethnic Italian community, the oldest child of Ermundo and Concetta Amicucci, McGinley said she never realized some people were not Italian until she was in high school.
“There were five different ethnic parishes in our little town,” she said. “We went to the Italian one. All my friends names ended with a vowel.”
Her mother was a homemaker and loved to cook. McGinley described her as “the kind of person who feeds the UPS guy when he delivers her diabetes supplies.” She grew up in a large extended family where “the focus at get-togethers was always good food and good conversation.”
“I couldn’t say I sat there in the kitchen and learned how to cook,” she said. “But I love to eat, so when I moved away from my mom, I started to experiment.” She said there were also a lot of phone calls for cooking advice.
Coming from a large clan, McGinley has never been intimidated by cooking for a crowd. She tends to gravitate toward committees with cooking duties, and had been involved for many years in making cabbage rolls for the annual festival at her church, St. Gabriel Parish, Concord. She has taken cooking courses from at the Loretta Paganini cooking school.
Four years ago, McGinley began teaching part-time in the dental hygiene program at Tri-C Community College. Between the two positions, she is now teaching full time again. She said she really enjoys the difference between the two schools, and is glad for the variety. She also likes the fact that her schedule allows her time to pursue volunteer activities and keep up with her kids. Son Kevin, age 24, is now out of college; Chris is 21, and will be a senior at Ohio State in the fall; and Greg, at 20, is a student at the University of Dayton.
McGovern is a freelance writer.
ANDREA MC GOVERN
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