Dressing up for history

The New York Times has an obituary by Daniel Slotnick for a visionary:

Phyllis Patterson (photo), who brought sixteenth-century Europe to Southern California in the 1960s, when she helped found the first contemporary Renaissance fair, died on 18 May 2014 in a hospital in San Rafael, California. She was 82 and lived in a log cabin nearby, in Novato.
The cause was complications of dementia, her son Kevin said.
A high school history and English teacher by trade, Patterson started the Renaissance Pleasure Faire with her husband, Ron, in 1963. The Pattersons are widely credited as the first to conceive of such a fair in modern times, recreating a typical Elizabethan spring celebration, complete with outsize turkey legs, flagons of ale, handcrafted wares for sale, and jousting and swordplay.
The inaugural event, in North Hollywood, attracted three thousand people, and fairs like it have since been held from Alaska to Texas.
Patterson was adamant about presenting history as accurately as possible. “Everything is either authentic to the period, or created from technology of the time,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1992.
Would-be fair actors were held to exacting standards, and every merchant, knight, and noble was trained in Elizabethan English and mannerisms. Anachronism was verboten.
“What we try to do is not just give people another diversion and another place to spend their money, but to give them a chance to broaden their perspective about other times and places,” Patterson said in 1992. “We try to bring history to life so that people can actually participate in it and learn something at the same time.”
The Renaissance Pleasure Faire is held annually in Irwindale, California, although the Patterson family has not been involved since the late 1990s. The fair has attracted more than five million people, averaging twenty thousand a weekend, according to its website.
Phyllis Ann Stimbert was born in Omaha, Nebraska on 25 January 1932, and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. She graduated from Messick High School there, and then received a bachelor’s degree in English from Memphis State College (now the University of Memphis) in 1954. She married Patterson two years later. They divorced in 1980, and he died in 2011.
The fair was born from an arts education program that Patterson conducted out of their Los Angeles backyard, beginning in the early 1960s, after she had stopped teaching high school.
In addition to her son Kevin, she is survived by another son, Brian; a brother, Vaughn; and two grandchildren.
Though Patterson strove for historical accuracy, comparatively modern times still intruded on the fair, sometimes glaringly. “I remember a young girl running up to me a few years ago, almost crying,” Patterson told The Los Angeles Times in 1987, “saying: ‘You’ve got to do something. Someone’s back there playing Bach.’”

Rico says that the RenFaire came, a little later, to Northern California, and started him on his obsession with historical reenactment, now into a later genre, cowboys...