TORRINGTON – Pat Novak recalled a very frank conversation she had with her children while they were still young.
“They were getting a little in to the ‘modern’ sense of things,” she said Friday, seated in the kitchen of her Torrington home. “I sat them down and told them, ‘We have regulations in this family. There are things you will not do.’”
Those comments spawned the expected protestations from her brood – “Why can’t you be more like …,” and “Why can’t you be nice?”
“I said, ‘I’m not that type,’” Mrs. Novak recalled. “’I’m not your best friend. Don’t worry, I’m not running for Mother of the Year.’”
Now, decades later, she can reflect on the unintended prophesy in that simple statement as, this week, she travelled to Washington, D.C., to receive the honor she promised her children she wouldn’t seek all those years ago – Wyoming’s Mother of the Year for 2018 – presented by the organization American Mothers during its national convention in the nation’s capital.
“I didn’t even know about that group, but that was an expression we all used,” Mrs. Novak said of her off-hand ‘Mother of the Year’ comment. “But, I am going to tell that story at the convention.”
Mrs. Novak was named to the prestigious parental listing after being nominated for the honor by her daughter, Catherine, of Jackson. A friend of Catherine’s had read something in the newspaper, calling for the nominations, and suggested she submit her mom for consideration.
“I don’t think at my age I should have even been nominated,” Mrs. Novak said. “I forgot about it entirely until I got a call from the Wyoming Health Department, of all things.
“I thought I might have some dread disease,” she said with a laugh. “I didn’t have a disease – they told me I’d received this.”
Prestigious beginnings
The group American Mothers began in 1931 as the American Mothers Committee of the Golden Rule Foundation, according to its own history on its website, americanmothers.org. Its list of founders and benefactors reads like a Who’s Who of American history – Eleanor Roosevelt, Sara Delano Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower, JC Penney and Norman Vincent Peale.
The group presented the first national American Mother of the Year award in 1935. Today, a plaque bearing the names of more than 80 honorees is on display in a place at the prestigious Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. This year, some 40 state Mothers of the Year from across the United States and Puerto Rico are vying for that national honor.
“This is more on service than anything,” Mrs. Novak said. “They try to pick people – when you read their biographies, most of them have done some kind of service. They range from home-school mothers to executives.”
Mrs. Novak was born on a remote ranch near Greybull and attended country school through third grade. She then was sent in to the “town school” in Greybull, where she met the woman who’d have a great influence on her life – her fourth-grade teacher.
“Miss Gwinn,” Mrs. Novak recalled. “She was just very gentle and, it seemed like, all of us just responded to her.
“It was a little bit different approach from country school,” she said. “Though I feel I had an excellent education in country school, too. It was very traditional, but it offered a very good start.”
And it was a lot more active in the country school, Mrs. Novak said, with horse races over the noon hour, digging ditches and falling off the swing sets a somewhat common, almost daily occurrence.
“I had that kind of growing up,” she said. “It was pretty free spirited.”
Passion for kids, teaching
It was those early years in town school and that one, special teacher, which would end up partially charting the course of Mrs. Novak’s life. After high school, she attended Dominican College in California, where she majored in English with a minor in Elementary Education.
“Then I started teaching in Cheyenne,” Mrs. Novak said. “That was when you could get a job immediately. I think I got that one over the phone.”
She only taught for about three years, before she married Paul Novak, and decided to work in the home. But that didn’t stop her volunteer activities, or her love of children and teaching.
“I stayed at home and did volunteer teaching for VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and other programs,” Mrs. Novak said. “For pay, I did home-bound teaching of sick children, a couple hours a week in their homes.”
Mrs. Novak is also active in her church – the St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Torrington – where she taught catechism for more than five decades, as well as adult education classes and served with the parish chapter of the Council of Catholic Women.
In addition to the schools and her church, Mrs. Novak also had a lasting impact on the community at large when she initiated what’s probably been her biggest project more than 35 years ago – the Care and Share Program serving families in need in Torrington and Goshen County with co-founder, former high school then Eastern Wyoming College biology instructor Butch Punke.
“The Care and Share Program is probably the biggest thing I’ve done,” Mrs. Novak said. “That’s probably what I’ll be talking about” at the MOY convention.
“Butch and I started that, with our family’s support, and it’s still going,” she said. “It’s ecumenical and it serves the poor and the hungry. Every dollar donated comes back as a dollar without any operating costs.”
‘Proud to represent Wyoming’
One of the things Mrs. Novak and the rest of the state Mothers of the Year will be asked to do during the convention is present a three-minute speech about themselves, their personal history and their state. One thing she’s proud of, she said, is Wyoming’s role in equality for women, another factor that greatly influenced her outlook on life growing up.
“Nobody ever said to me, ‘Well, Pat, you can’t saddle up your horse, go up the mountain and herd these cattle or sheep or whatever,’” she said. “There was just no, ‘No,’ because you’re a woman.
“Wyoming has the first right-to-vote for women, we had a woman governor, way back in the day,” Mrs. Novak said. “I am so proud to be representing Wyoming. That’s the one thing about this that inspires me to do it.”
