(Photos courtesy Christopher Boffoli unless otherwise credited. At right, WSB’s Patrick Sand in 2016)
By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
My heart is broken to have to share with you the news that WSB co-founder Patrick Sand has died.
Patrick died suddenly at our home/HQ in Upper Fauntleroy on Thursday morning (October 17). He called for help and I found him on the floor. SFD medics tried 10 rounds of CPR but were unable to revive him.
So many in West Seattle know Patrick as the salt-and-pepper-haired photographer who’s always there when something’s going on – breaking news, festivals, art walks, school sports, so much more. Photography and breaking-news rapid response were his major responsibilities for WSB, as well as our advertising business.
Patrick was my husband as well as my co-publisher and business partner. We had 40 years together, starting with our first date in Grand Junction, Colorado, in fall 1984. He had grown up there and was running a radio station; I went there for my first news-producing job, working at a TV station in the same building. My TV career later brought us from San Diego to Seattle in 1991; we looked around the city for places to live and chose – mostly because of its water proximity – West Seattle, where we welcomed our son five years later. Another milestone of sorts for us in the mid-’90s, Patrick took an early interest in the internet in 1994, and we bought a PowerMac and got connected via an early ISP called Delphi.
A decade-plus later, Patrick and I founded WSB as a news site in 2007. I had started it in late 2005 as a “blog about West Seattle” with random ramblings; in December 2006, after the big windstorm left tens of thousands of West Seattleites without power (us included), readers who had found us by then started asking us for more information about the status of restoration, and other problems. So we started trying to find out. During the next year, we started covering more and more local news, and in fall 2007, after some readers suggested we should try selling advertising, we decided to try to make a go of it as a business, so I quit my TV news job.
At the time, he was stay-home dad for our son Torin, which he always said was his favorite job ever, along with WSB. Stay-home fatherhood was relatively uncommon in the late ’90s-early ’00s, so it was his first round as a trailblazer, which we then were considered for launching WSB in the hyperlocal-news wave of the late ’00s.
WSB won a national Online Journalism Award and regional awards from organizations like SPJ and CityClub, but the most meaningful awards were local, like the Orville Rummel Trophy for Community Service that we carried in the 2010 West Seattle Grand Parade.
We rode in a little electric-powered cart that Patrick had to drive nerve-wrackingly from the downtown dealership where we found it (we declined the traditional ride in a convertible). Also so meaningful – the honor we received from the Fauntleroy Watershed Council last year.
(WSB photo by Patrick Sand, October 2023)
WSB will go on. Patrick was too proud of, and dedicated to, our work to want to see it end just because his time on this plane of existence was up. His joviality and fortitude are irreplaceable, among so many other attributes I can’t even give voice to right now, so bear with us as we figure out how to move forward. Please honor his work and role in the community by continuing your partnership with us in community-collaborative news coverage.
Patrick Sand, 67, son of the late Henry B. Sand and Mildred E. Sand, is survived by me (wife Tracy Record), son Torin Record-Sand, rescue cat Sullivan.
To quote Jackson Browne‘s beautiful memorial song “For a Dancer” – “Somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go, may lie a reason you were alive, but you’ll never know.” I’m pretty sure he did know … and that all those of us whose lives he enhanced knew too.
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