Home, sweet home: Former Cat and present first lady wants to open the doors to campus

It’s summer. Time is probably spent at the pool, working a summer job, traveling around the world, or maybe going back to your hometown.

But, according to UK’s first lady, home is where the heart is.  And her heart rests at the university.

Patsy Todd has been UK’s first lady since her husband, UK President Lee Todd, was elected as the university’s 11th president on July 1, 2001. The two were 1968 UK graduates, and even though coming back to UK was completely unexpected, she said moving in was just like coming back home.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­“It had a very different feel to it, but it was home — it was like coming back home,” Todd said.  “You have to make every place your own, and we did.”

Todd and her husband have lived in various places throughout their time together, but have resided in Lexington since the 1970s.  It was then they started their family, two children: Troy, now 33, and Kathryn, now 27.

“People think we’re newcomers to Lexington, but we’re not at all,” Todd said.

In fact, Todd and her husband were born and raised, and even met and married each other, in Kentucky.

She was born a few hours southwest of Lexington in Greenville, Ky., in the mid-1940s.  Two years later, her family moved to Earlington, Ky., where she began school with a class of just over 30, including Lee Todd.

Throughout her early years, Todd, then Patsy Brantley, was a pianist, attended church with her parents and two brothers, and watched her favorite television lawyer series, “Perry Mason.”

Since the first grade, the Todds were always “good friends.”  Moving into high school, she became a cheerleader who worked at the local Dairy Queen while he, who went by “Trove,” was the class artist and worked at the newspaper.

As friends, the two were very competitive.  Lee Todd had been class president since the seventh grade, while Patsy Todd always ran for secretary or treasurer.  It wasn’t until their sophomore year when she decided to run against him for class president — and she won.

A year later, the two started dating.

The ideal high school sweethearts, the two were prom king and queen and later attended Murray State University for their first two years together.  After transferring and graduating from UK, the two got married.

“I graduated on a Monday and we got married that Saturday night,” Todd recalled. “Since everyone was coming in town for my wedding, no one was at my graduation except my fiancé.

“I will never forget what he looked like, when I looked up at him, sitting up there on the bleachers (in Memorial Coliseum) all by himself,” she said, smiling.

After another summer of classes for Lee Todd so he could complete his engineering degree, the two traveled to Boston, Mass. He was offered a fellowship at Massachusetts Institute for Technology, while she, with her education degree, decided to pursue her masters at Simmons College and work as a substitute teacher.

While up north, the Todds were forced to grow up and start their lives together.

“We went from a four-way stop (in Earlington) to a parkway,” she said. “We grew up, we matured. When we came home when we were 27, we were very different people.”

While studying in Massachusetts, the two traveled up to Ogunquit, Maine, on weekends and the city quickly became a favorite destination for their family vacations.

“Back then, it was all about effective living, not so much on world travel,” she said. “So we’ve encouraged our children to travel and to study foreign language.”

Their son Troy, who speaks German, and their daughter Kathryn, who speaks Arabic and French, both live in Lexington and work in international relations.

But no matter how much traveling the Todds do, Lexington will always be their home. When they became president and first lady, keeping that home as open as possible was the first thing they wanted to accomplish.

Landscaping is perhaps the most notable comfort on campus — one student’s mother called to tell Todd that her son phoned home saying, “Mom, you should look at these tulips” — but before the Todds moved into Maxwell Place, a fence and tall bushes hid the house completely from view.

When the grounds workers showed Todd a landscaping plan consisting of $25,000 worth of plants, she said she just wanted the fence and hedge gone.

“They said, ‘But Mrs. Todd, you don’t understand. If you take it out, people will be able to see in (the house).’  And I said ‘Well, I’ve never lived behind a bush, and I’m not going to start now,’ ” she said.

A question on most students’ minds may be if the Todds actually live at Maxwell Place, which has been home to nine UK presidents. And while they do own a second home, Todd said they live there almost half the time.

“Sometimes we can be here for two weeks at a time,” she said. “We have out-of-town company every football weekend, but we’re here from two to three days a lot of weeks.”

But Todd said Maxwell Place isn’t just for her and her husband — it’s for the students.

“This is part of your inheritance,” she said. “That’s why we take students upstairs into the family area and, at first, they were uncomfortable with that, but I want people to see what the university has. We’ve enjoyed being here as first family, and we made it our own.”

Making campus feel like home to students is one of Todd’s most important goals. So before summer ends, take a walk around campus when you don’t have a backpack full of textbooks. When you get there, stop by Maxwell Place. Todd guarantees visitors lemonade and cookies.