Former isle resident On the morning of Sept. 11, former Hawaii resident Patricia Malia Colodner and her husband, Warren, walked their 9-year-old daughter Colby to a New York City bus stop.
lived life to fullest
Patricia Colodner died in the
collapse of the World Trade CenterBy Treena Shapiro
tshapiro@starbulletin.comFrom there they went to vote in New York's mayoral primary election. Patricia took her 2-year-old son, Jordan, into the voting booth with her and let him pull the lever.
About 8:15 a.m., the family parted ways. Patricia entered the subway station and headed to work at Marsh Inc., a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan.
About a half-hour later, the executive secretary was at her desk on the 96th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower making plans with a friend on the phone when the line went dead.
Patricia Colodner is one of more than 300 Marsh & McLennan employees who died after two jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center towers. She was 39.
Warren Colodner said his wife "liked to get to work early so she could get home early to be with the children."
That Tuesday, "she made amazing time," he said. "It was terrible fate and luck."
"Her two children made her feel blessed, and she was a wonderful, devoted mother, and she made me very happy, happier than I ever was in my life," Colodner said.
Colodner, a senior partner at the Kirkpatrick & Lockhart law firm, said he met Patricia when he worked temporarily in an office next to Patricia's on a special case. He said he asked Patricia on a date in October 1987 when he learned she was coming back to Hawaii to help her mother move.
"I got up the nerve to ask her if she could bring me back an aloha shirt," he said. He asked her out to dinner, too.
Patricia Colodner, formerly Pitchford, was born in Hawaii, attended Star of the Sea School and graduated from Our Redeemer Lutheran High School in 1979. She moved to New York soon after, according to her brother Dean Pitchford.
Although she went straight to work, she thought it was important to earn a college degree. She took night, weekend and summer classes at Fordham University, eventually earning a degree in computer science. "She was very proud of that," her brother said.
Pitchford said he and his sister were "extremely close," talking on the phone three times a week and getting together frequently even though she lived in New York and he resided in Los Angeles.
He was in New York with her about 10 weeks ago. "I went up to see her office, and she took me to lunch on the ground floor," he said.
Pitchford, who wrote the title songs for the movies "Footloose" and "Fame," said his sister loved the theater and helped him with a few productions in New York.
"There was nothing that she didn't love to do," he said, including yoga, meditation and cooking. "She was a phenomenal cook."
Their mother, Marie Pitchford, a member of the Star of the Sea parish until she moved to California, said her daughter also loved parties. "She loved to party, anything for a party," her mother remembered, adding that Patricia dressed as a pregnant witch one Halloween. "She loved to dress up."
She also loved her job, her mother said. "She loved being in the business world."
Patricia joined the rest of the family in Los Angeles for a surprise party for Dean's 50th birthday at the end of July, she said. She had two other brothers, Stanford and James.
Describing her daughter as vivacious, Marie Pitchford said: "It's very difficult for me to accept that she's not here. This is just incomprehensible. I keep thinking any minute she's going to come through the door."
The family had a memorial service for Patricia Colodner last week at the Riverside Chapel in New York and will attend another for her company Friday at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Another service will be held in West Virginia, where Marie Pitchford was born.
