Pat Loud, RIP

 A moment of silence, please, for Pat Loud.

What's that you say? "Who the heck is Pat Loud?"

Come on, people! Pat Loud! Mother of the Loud family! Remember them? Southern California, five kids, too much money and a pair of adulterous parents? It was all on TV in the 70s. In fact I think it was even on PBS. Educational tv at its finest!

Ok, ok. For those of you who need a recap:

"An American Family" was a docu-series about the Loud family. Once a week America could gather around the tube, tune in, and watch the Loud family go down the drain. Ah, those Sunday evenings with the family, us kids in our pjs, watching educational tv together... actually it probably wasn't such a good idea.

The dad cheated. The mom cheated. The eldest son was gay and years later would contract HIV. (It always makes me shudder to learn about people "coming out" in the 70s, knowing about the terrible virus that was going to hit them with hurricane force a few years later. It's like watching film of people boarding the Titanic.)

The eldest daughter longed to be a professional dancer. The series treated us to one of the girl's performances. Another disaster in the making. No sense of rhythm and chubby thighs... no, the dance thing was a sad pipe dream. Even I could see that, and I was still young enough then to have ridiculous dreams of my own.

The night one of the sons wrecked the car on camera and then lied to his mom about how it happened, again on camera, but this time with the son shooting a warning glare at the cameraman.

And then. of course, the on-camera divorce. What a landmark for television. And by "landmark" I don't mean the Grand Canyon. More like the La Brea Tar Pits. Ugly and, honestly, kind of boring.

The eldest son died in 1990 from hepatitis. The parents eventually got back together.  The dad died in 2018. The mom wrote a book about her life, "Pat Loud, A Woman's Story." You can pick up a paperback on Amazon for $700. and change. 

When their mother died the surviving kids published a loving obituary about how strong and wonderful their mom was. Curiously though- at least in the version I read- there's no mention of the documentary that made her and her family famous. I wonder why?