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Donor Profile
Patricia Valas, of Lovettsville, Va., has been a Cape May MAC (Museums+Arts+Culture) member, supporter and donor for years.
A Friends of the Lighthouse plaque with her name on it, alongside other major donors in support of the lighthouse, is in the entryway to the Cape May Lighthouse.
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“I’m a normal person who’s been very fortunate in life,” she said. “Because of my family history, I have a place in my heart for Cape May and Cape May Point. That’s where I choose to bestow my good fortune.”
Patricia lives with her husband a mile and a half south of the Potomac River in northern Virginia near the Maryland border and is a retired middle school teacher and librarian. She currently works at her local library as a page, which means she shelves books, which, as an accomplished librarian and booklover, she enjoys.
“And I do it perfectly!” she said, laughing.
“I was a middle school teacher for 30 years in Carroll County, Maryland. I started out in life sciences and halfway through my career I got another master’s degree and became the librarian.
“I was only ever at middle schools and at two of them in Carroll County, Maryland. I went to McDaniel College, which at the time was called Western Maryland College, and that’s where I stayed when I graduated.”
She was born in southern New Jersey, in Pitman. Her connection to Cape May and especially Cape May Point, her home away from home, goes back to her childhood.
“My first memory is that we stayed in a house on the ocean side of the road in Whale Beach – houses on that side of the road in Whale Beach don’t exist anymore because they were all wiped out in the storm in 1962. I remember staying there and then we drove up to Cape May Point to see the lighthouse. At that time there was a wooden boardwalk that went out from the dunes to the top of the (World War II) bunker which was mostly buried in the sand. I remember walking out to the top and my father telling us a story about enemy submarines in the ocean and showing us where the guns would have been to protect us. I saw my first pelican fly by and I was hooked by the history and mystique of the place.”
As an adult, Patricia returned to Cape May and Cape May Point regularly on vacation. She’s been vacationing in the Cape May area for more than 35 years.
“The place I settled on was Somewhere in Time at the Point. I rented the same condo for years,” she said. “It is my home away from home. The owner has changed in the last couple of years, but the owner knew me well enough that I could come off-season -- I like to come in the spring and the fall when the birds and the Monarchs are migrating.”
Patricia’s interests and passions are diverse and drive both her travels and the causes she helps support. One of those passions is Monarch butterflies. She’s traveled to Mexico to the sanctuary for Monarch butterflies at the end of their migratory path.
Another is habitat preservation. She supports the Loudoun County, Virginia Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy, where her passion for Monarchs developed as she learned how to tag them and studied them, while learning about habitat preservation. Locally, she has supported the Monarch butterfly tagging program in association with New Jersey Audubon. “I would go and visit the Monarch tagging program at the Point. I met (Monarch Monitoring Project Director) Mark Garland, and I donate to his tagging program. I did tag butterflies on my own, not there, but here in Virginia for two years, and now I’m just trying to get people to plant native plants,” she said. Another passion is beach glass. Patricia always walks the coastline from the Point to Higbee’s Beach when she vacations at her home away from home in the Point. She loves to scour the beach for the colorful glass and found a unique piece from the 1920s, which impressed more than one of the judges at the 2014 North American Sea Glass Association conference held in Cape May that year. Another passion is wine. Patricia has been a wine judge since 1997 and counts 40 years of learning and experience. She is a member of the American Wine Society, a national organization, and is a graduate of their wine judge training program. She is good friends with the owners of both Turdo Vineyards & Winery in North Cape May and Natali Vineyards in Cape May Court House.
Patricia is adept at seeking out and meeting experts in Cape May who share her passions, including Joe Jordan, who wrote an authoritative history of Cape May Point, Pete Dunne, internationally recognized birding expert and author, and Richard LaMotte, renowned expert and author on beach glass. She owns a signed copy of each of these authors’ books.
She met Pete Dunne by spotting him birding one morning with New Jersey Audubon at the Hawkwatch Platform in Cape May Point State Park. She noticed he was sorely missing his usual cup of coffee, so she biked back to her condo to make a fresh pot and brought it to him.
Running through it all, is a passion for
