Patricia LeFavour

Patricia (Pat) LeFavour (1938-2024), daughter of Margurite Saaf, passed away August 20 listening to jazz at the home of friends in Boise, Idaho. 

Patricia LeFavour and Edgar

Raised to be gentle and lady-like by her industrious mother, Peg, Pat none-the-less became a terror on the streets of New Canan, CT.  With her brother Mike and friend Terry Cody she sought mischief, borrowing cars and boats, running from her father, and using her BB gun in all the ways we teach children not to.

Pat grew tall, her black hair long. Photographed with her mother, she was a child model for Family Circle magazine. A member of New Canaan’s Police Auxiliary League gun club, she won trophies for her skill with a gun.

By the time she arrived in Aspen, Colorado in the early 1960s, Pat had completed two years of junior college and several semesters of art school in Boston, and had worked in New York City doing layout for magazines. In Aspen, Pat managed a ski hill lunch spot. Over her lifetime, she owned three restaurants. The first she opened with her husband, the chef Bruce LeFavour; The Paragon was renowned for its French cuisine, wild boar feasts, and curtained private dining rooms.

For fifteen years, Pat lived in Woody Creek, outside Aspen, where she trained horses, competed in trail rides, painted, made wood sculpture, and volunteered at the local public TV Station. She partied with silk screen artists, teachers, physicists, photographers, bar owners, writers, wood workers, and wanna be coroners, and claimed to have schooled her friend, Hunter S. Thompson in wearing a white bucket hat.

In the 1970s Pat and Bruce moved with their two children to Robinson Bar Ranch at the edge of the White Cloud mountains, outside Stanley, Idaho. There they operated a restaurant and inn. Pat earned an outfitters license while, in her unfiltered and sometimes outrageous way, she worked the front dining room beside her daughter Cree. For this more modern French restaurant, Bruce grew vegetables and made butter and Pat, the two kids, and ranch hands raised birds and livestock for meat.

Pat raised a raven from a chick, Edgar, who could speak in Pat’s voice and lived to terrorize ranch guests. One of the greatest losses of Pat’s life was the loss of her raven who, while Pat was traveling, flew away and never returned.

After her divorce from Bruce, Pat opened her final restaurant, the Tunnel Rock Cafe outside Challis, with her partner Polly Read. From 1982 to 1985, their cafe served fine eclectic food to ranchers, miners, Idaho Governors, artists, gay friends, and locals from the Challis, Stanley and Ketchum area. While Pat and Polly didn’t fly a rainbow flag (a rainbow wind sock shaped like a fish was as close as they came) Pat, got along well and was appreciated by locals in the area.

Driving her red truck down Custer County’s dirt roads Pat could be found chukar hunting with the stereo blasting and a beer in her hand. A card carrying member of Ducks Unlimited, Pat also belonged to the NRA when it focused on gun safety, hunting, and one-to-one self defense.

In the 1990s Pat settled in Eureka, California with Sharon Chamberlain her bookish and patient partner of thirty-five years. There she continued to work in wood, bet on ponies, walk the waterfront with her dog, and frequent Earnie’s, Dave’s or another bar where she had friends. 

Pat collected and walked the world wearing all manner of hats. She could sail and scuba dive, navigate horse tack and wild mushrooms, train hunting dogs, pack a mule, and manage a horse and buggy. She traveled on boats from the Queen Elizabeth II to a freighter in the South Pacific, the Toporo II.

Jazz music was Pat’s comfort and companion in her later years when she lived in downtown Boise, in an apartment with her art, her books, and daily New York Times. Cole LeFavour said, the wild compositions and solos of jazz fly just as Pat did in life, flipping the bird, making art, skinny dipping or jumping in clothes-on, letting rip an ear-splitting two-fingered whistle, or seeking good food and good whisky on eighth street. Pat wore proudly a disregard for convention, for predictability, for conformity—and that itself is jazz.

Pat is preceded in death by her mother Marguerite Saaf, her brother Mike, her longtime partner Sharon Chamberlain and former husband Bruce LeFavour. She is survived by her two children, former Idaho State Senator Cole Nicole LeFavour and spouse Carol Growhoski, and by her daughter the writer Cree LeFavour, spouse Dwight Garner and their two children Penn and Harriet Garner-LeFavour; her former partner Polly Read King and husband Don King; by stepsons including Andrew Chamberlain and his spouse Tony Sasso; also by nieces and nephews Shelly Saaf Talk, Jennie Hudson, and Jason Saaf.