Rufus L. Patterson Jr.

[2] Patterson gave up formal schooling at the age of fifteen, worked a short while for a railroad, then spent a year studying at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

After studying mechanical engineering in England for two years, he returned to Durham, where he became associated with James Buchanan Duke and the American Tobacco Company in 1898, of which Patterson later became a vice-president in 1901.

When he retired as president of AMF, he was succeeded by his son Morehead, who also became chairman of the board following his death in April 1943.

[4][7] In the 1920s, Patterson and his college classmate and fraternity brother, John Motley Morehead III (who was also a first cousin of his wife),[8] funded the $100,000 construction cost of the Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower, a bell tower designed by McKim, Mead & White and located on the campus of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

From 1919 until 1943,[a] they divided their time between their limestone neo-Renaissance three-story Manhattan townhouse at 15 East 65th Street (which they bought from James J.

Van Alen who had built the mansion in 1917),[13] and Lenoir (now called Linden) their estate at Southampton on Long Island.

[22] Through his son Morehead, he was a grandfather of two grandsons, Rufus Lenoir Patterson III (1922–1944),[23] a Lieutenant with the USAAF who was killed in action during World War II (he married Mae Gouverneur Cadwalader, daughter of Gouverneur Cadwalader),[24] and Herbert Parsons Patterson (1925–1985),[25] who became president of the Chase Manhattan Bank in 1968.