Learn more about Patricia Smith Wood’s new autobiography, 'Ruby Raising Pat'

A light, welcoming tone suffuses Patricia Smith Wood’s new autobiography, “Ruby Raising Pat: Growing Up As a 20th Century Woman.”

The book takes readers through Wood’s life from her birth in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1939 to the present in Albuquerque, where she’s resided since 1951.

She introduces her extended family — parents, a brother, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents, her daughter, three ex-husbands and Don, the man she’s been married to since 1986. Pat and Don had been high school sweethearts at Highland High School. And don’t forget the author’s girlfriends and neighbors.

Wood even decorates her personal experiences with broader historical contexts by bringing in World War II and the American presidents that held office at different stages of her life.

A lot of people. A lot of brief stories. Woven together into 102 compact chapters.

Wood even serves up history lessons before she was born. She references the stock market crash of 1929, and the impactful Great Depression of the 1930s.

Wood writes that she had a rough entry into the world: “I acquired a bad case of impetigo while in the hospital nursery.” Impetigo is a bacteria infection with blisters.

Then she jumps to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and America’s declaration of war on Japan.

Some of the most interesting elements of the book are Wood’s remembrances of moments with family members and friends.

The second chapter finds Wood and her parents living in Gatesville, Texas, in 1942. She writes that the first memory she had was when her family was living in a garage apartment.

In one episode, Wood writes, her mom began shrieking and beating the floor with a broom.

“I saw a small mouse, lying on its side, with a little trickle of blood oozing from its tiny nose. I was horrified at the sight of that little creature. I can still see the image in my head. My mother had beaten the mouse to death,” Wood writes.

Wood remembers bursting into tears, grieving for the mouse, upset that it was bleeding. That was her first lesson in how quickly someone or something could die, she writes.

Another episode from the same year, 1942, Wood writes about joining her mother for a tea party at the home of the wife of Gatesville’s mayor.

Normally, she said, she was a quiet and well-behaved child. She remembers daintily holding a tea cup at the party, turning to her mother and saying in a clear, penetrating, little-kid voice, “Mommy, let’s pretend this is beer!”

Her mother’s face reddened. Gatesville was in a “dry” county, meaning liquor sales were forbidden. Not that little Pat misbehaved. After all, how is a 3-year-old supposed to know that she committed a faux pas and embarrassed her mother?

Years later, Wood writes, her mother told her they never did receive any more tea party invites from the mayor’s wife.

Wood has a knack for describing the homes and neighborhoods where she and her family lived. For example, her parents bought their first home in a new development, near San Mateo Boulevard and Indian School Road.

“The Realtor we were working with explained the roads would be paved ‘soon.’ We drove up the dirt road which was San Mateo. It was a bumpy ride,” she writes.

In a snapshot about their hoped-for telephone service that today’s young Duke City residents wouldn’t understand, Wood recalled that her dad requested a telephone be installed in their home; he needed it for his work as an FBI agent. Because they moved into a brand-new neighborhood, phone lines were not yet strung up there.

Her family was informed that it would be one year before a phone would be installed.

However, when that first phone the family received was installed, it was a 12-party line. That means 12 households had to share a single line. It would take some months, Woods noted, before the family would finally receive the private line that her dad required.

Wood was an only child until the fall of 1953 when her parents had a baby boy. Wood writes that she wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of a new sibling.

When she was little, she writes, she had wanted a baby sister, someone closer to her age to play with. A sister, not a brother.

“Now that I was a teenager,” Wood writes, “I had no interest in having a sibling. To me, being in junior high school was the very beginning of becoming the grown-up I wanted to be.”

Eventually, she realized she had to change her attitude and learn to accept her new brother, “because my mother certainly isn’t going to give the kid away to the elves.”

“Ruby Raising Pat” is Wood’s second nonfiction book. The first was “Raising Ruby,” a biography of her mother published in 2022.

She also has published four mysteries in her “Harrie McKinsey” series — “The Easter Egg Murder,” “Murder on Sagebrush Lane,” “Murder on Frequency” and “Murder at the Petroglyphs.” She is working on a fifth volume in the series.