Harry Hurley raised six children, the eldest four alongside Fannie Miller Hurley. After Fannie’s death in 1934, Harry married Marguerite Canada, and the pair raised two more children. The youngest of Harry’s six children was a son named Howard Pat Hurley, born on May 4, 1942.
When Pat was born, the family lived in what was then known as Myerstown, near the edge of Benton. However, the family soon moved further into town, purchasing a house near what was then Benton High School.
As he got older, Pat spent considerable time hunting with his dad. Those hunting days led to a life-long hobby for Pat.
“I grew up hunting, bird hunting, duck hunting, there wasn’t any deer around here then, but we did a lot of bird hunting and duck hunting,” said Pat. “He always had bird dogs, and I enjoyed that, and it carried on into hunting big game.”
Pat went on to graduate from Benton High School in 1960, and from there he enrolled at Murray State University with the intention of becoming a chemical engineer. Ultimately, fate would have him complete a teaching certification instead.
His sophomore year at Murray, Pat met a freshman named Dinah Cope.
“She went to South Marshall, I went to Benton,” said Pat. “Went to Murray, and met Dinah Lou Cope from Brewers her freshman year, my sophomore year. That’s where we got together.”
The couple married on July 27, 1963. Shortly after they married, the couple welcomed two daughters in short succession. When the girls were around 7 years old, the couple welcomed a son and considered their family complete.
Pat began working construction to provide for the family and work on his education, often working for a semester before taking another semester of classes. He graduated in the spring of 1967 and began teaching at North Marshall that fall. All the while he was working at one of the plants in Calvert City through the summers and on the Saturday midnight shift.
Pat taught chemistry, biology, and earth science for three years before leaving education. While there, he was tasked with being the first tennis coach in the county.
“When I was at North Marshall, they wanted to start a tennis team, and I was a tennis player,” said Pat. “Oh, I forgot a very important point, I was the Marshall County champion for three years in a row in tennis. We used to have a tournament. Then, when I was teaching school, they wanted to start a tennis team, so we built some tennis courts there on a parking lot beside North Marshall, and we had a tennis team.”
Pat likened the popularity of tennis at the time to the current popularity of pickleball.
After he left education, he then moved into selling real estate. He spent many years working for Peel and Holland but recently sold his shares and moved to working with ReMax. And in his 80s, Pat has no intentions of slowing down.
Bird hunting with his father led Pat to a lifelong love for the outdoors. As an adult, he traveled to Colorado, Alaska, Canada, and various parts of Africa on hunting trips. Among his big game hunts are a moose, a caribou, a brown bear, a zebra, several elk, and many other animals.
Such a hobby led Pat to another hobby — reloading ammunition.
“My hobby today is reloading,” said Pat. “I’ve got a lot of rifles, a lot of grandsons that hunt. I furnish all their rifles and shotguns, and reload all their ammo so they don’t have to buy anything. And, I’ve got enough stuff in my basement to reload for the rest of their life, they won’t have to buy a thing. That’s just what I like to do.”
However, not all of his travels were for hunting. Pat and one of his daughters took up mountain climbing for several years.
“My daughter and I climbed mountains for years, in Colorado and Wyoming, Montana,” said Pat. “We climbed several of those fourteeners in Colorado. She was a flight attendant, and she could fly wherever we wanted to go [for] free, and we’d just catch a plane and climb a mountain. Did that for a long time.”
Whether climbing or hunting, Colorado was also his favorite. Though in recent years, the hobby has shifted again, this time to riding four wheelers and side-by-sides.
Today, Pat and Dinah have seven grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, and two more great-grandchildren expected in August.
