Patricia Ridpath is a registered nurse, pianist, piano teacher, and poet, who lives in West Virginia. As a teenager she worked for Senator Matthew M. Neely in Washington, D.C., and later worked for the Columbia Union Conference, Georgia-Cumberland Conference and Southern Union Conference. She also spent some time as an honorary "dorm mom" after marrying John V. Ridpath, who was then a boys’ dean at Georgia- Cumberland Academy.

Ridpath became a registered nurse in 1983, after she was a grandmother.   She has been Director of Nursing at nursing homes in West Virginia and now works full-time as Nurse Clinical Coordinator in Sharpe Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Weston.

Ridpath gives members in area churches free piano lessons because she wants churches to have music in their services. Besides being adult Sabbath School teacher and pianist at the Braxton Seventh-day Adventist Church, she also teaches young adults and plays for the services at the Burnsville United Methodist Church.

Ridpath has three children, Charles Vernon Bucklew, Cheryl Robin Bucklew, and David Scott Bucklew, and five grandchildren.