Pat Spence was born in 1932 in the small town of Burns, Kentucky. Although she grew up poor, her father was a sheriff. Pat also grew up with many stories of family members who were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Her family moved often because of jobs and finances; they lived in Tennessee, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Virginia before finally settling in Kentucky
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The Spence family lived mostly on welfare because of their lack of employment opportunities. Pat's father drank heavily, and Pat's mother became paralyzed with arthritis after she had a stroke when Pat was only four years old. Eventually, her parents separated; her mother moved to Florida, where she died in 1963 at age 50.
The family bounced around again when her father married again and went to live in Cincinnati , Ohio . Pat's father fell into depression after his wife's death and said that he did not want to live anymore. He committed suicide in 1963 at age 58.
Pat was very close to her mother but never knew her well after she married again at age 16 or 17. She has described herself as an angry child who would not talk to people unless it was necessary. She spent much time alone reading stories about the Civil War and how people survived hardships.
Her favorite books were The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, and Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. She graduated from high school during the Great Depression when the economy was bad and there was much unemployment among young men. In 1952 she left high school early to get a job as a waitress at a diner in Kentucky .
In 1953 she married Walter Ewing Jr., son of Walter Ewing Sr., a wealthy oilman from Texas . Walter worked hard at making money so that Pat could have too. They had two children: Wendy Lynne Spence Vincent (born 1953) and Scott Lee Spence (born 1955).
They divorced in 1962 after Walter became abusive again and had two more children with his second wife: Drew Lee Ewing (born 1964) and Kristina Marie Ewing (born 1966). After they divorced Pat moved back home with her mother, who had remarried a man named Jimmie Garner. In 1965 Pat married Martin Spence who worked as a bricklayer for six years before he went into prison for robbery dealing drugs out of their home for some time.
He died from an infected splinter that he received while building a new house for a client on December 12
