Friends of Eaton fire victim mourn a Renaissance woman with a generous streak

You should have seen the bookcases in Patricia McKenna’s Altadena home.

It was an astonishing personal library, her friends recalled: a collection on art, fashion, history and design tomes that bowed even the sturdiest shelving.

When a friend developed an interest in Scythian culture, McKenna handed over her library’s entire section of ancient Central Asian design books — not a book, mind you, but close to a dozen academic works on Bactrian and Thracian art, dress and culture.

She’d acquire books and give them away, then buy more books to fill the space. The shelves would sag, her husband would cheerfully hammer up more reinforcements, and the cycle continued from there.

“That’s the way she operated. She loved introducing people to other sources of information and giving things that she knew would be meaningful to them,” said Cat Winesburg, a longtime friend of McKenna’s and the beneficiary of her Scythian bequest.

Her voice grew quiet. “The library is now ash,” she said.

On Monday, the county medical examiner confirmed that McKenna, a longtime Altadena resident, perished in her Punahou Street home during the Eaton fire that consumed more than 9,400 structures in an area of nearly 22 square miles. She was 77. McKenna is one of 17 people known to have died in the Eaton fire, all of them west of Lake Avenue.

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The news was a blow to communities who recalled McKenna at her creative best: former students and faculty at Los Angeles City College, where she worked for years in the theater department, and fellow members of the Queen Medb Encampment, a Celtic historical reenactment group.

“The world, and our Encampment, lost a grand lady in the Eaton fire,” said Robert Seutter, a member of the group. “She was a classy lady [with] a wry, dry wit, and was a keen observer.”

McKenna grew up in Whittier with her brother and two sisters, Winesburg said.

She became interested early on in historical costumes, a passion she put to use in her personal and professional life.

As costume shop forewoman at LACC, McKenna pulled together technically impeccable and historically accurate costumes for everything from Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers” to the midcentury French drama “Cher Antoine.”

She helped Winesburg construct her wedding dress, a historically faithful reproduction of Elizabethan garb.

McKenna drew from an encyclopedic knowledge of fashion from the medieval age onward, said her friend Jenny, who asked to withhold her last name for privacy concerns.

“If somebody needed to know something about costuming, Pat was the one they could go to,” she said. “She had a generous nature and a generous spirit like no one I’ve ever known.”

Around 1985 McKenna married Tom Wellbaum. Decades later, few friends can recall the precise nature of Wellbaum’s work — something in engineering? — but all remember vividly his impish sense of humor, and his devotion to McKenna.

She moved with him into the 1923 Sears, Roebuck and Co. kit house on Punahou Street that Wellbaum had purchased as a teenager and fixed up with his father.

For nearly two decades the couple traveled, went to Renaissance fairs and historic festivals, and hosted friends and family, even after Wellbaum was disabled in a workplace accident.

McKenna stood a regal 6 feet tall, and could be snippy and imperious when annoyed, friends said. Yet she was also consistently generous — giving nearly-new clothes and jewelry to friends she thought better suited for them; keeping a petty cash fund just for veterinary bills for loved ones’ ailing pets.

In the early 2000s, Wellbaum was struck by a car while crossing the road in his mobility scooter. He died soon afterward. By her friends’ reckoning, a piece of McKenna went with him.

Her health began to falter. She went out far less often than she used to.

A few years after Wellbaum’s death, a heart attack sent her to the hospital. She left with a defibrillator and a diagnosis of broken heart syndrome, a colloquial term for rapid weakening of the heart muscle.

“But we could have told him that,” Jenny said of the doctor. “When Tom passed ... it took her whole heart.”

A series of falls left McKenna with injuries that made it difficult to get around. When Winesburg visited in July, McKenna was starting to talk about cleaning her place out, and the eventual possibility of moving to an assisted living facility.

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The two women wept together over the realization that it was almost certainly the last time they would see one another, given their mounting health issues, Winesburg said.

A friend spoke to McKenna on the evening of Jan. 7, about an hour after the Eaton fire began, Winesburg said. McKenna said she had a go bag packed and would sit tight until the evacuation order came.

It came too late. Her home was in an area west of Lake Avenue that did not receive evacuation warnings until the early hours of Jan. 8, when the fire was already threatening the neighborhood.

For days, friends called emergency shelters, hospitals and the Red Cross looking for her. A week later, family learned that human remains were found at the site where her house once stood.

It took nearly a month for forensic testing to confirm that they were McKenna’s.

Her loved ones hope she slept through it all, Winesburg said. They find some comfort knowing that McKenna did not have to see her beloved home in ashes.

“She would not have been happy at all, or interested in rebuilding a house she loved,” Winesburg said. “The house she lived with Tom in was gone.”