Classified Shining highlights a Classified Professional in and outside of work. Do you know a Classified Professional that you would like to nominate to be profiled in our next Classified Insider newsletter? Email CFT Communications Specialist Nason McCarthy: nmccarthy@cft.org with a bit about the member in mind and we will reach out.

Before she helped students in the financial aid office at Palomar College, Patti Serafin traveled around the country, scoring and keep stats for golf tournaments on live TV. She shared the booth with the legendary Vin Scully, the voice of the Dodgers (in this case, he was the voice of golf), and in 1998, she was on the NBC Golf Tour production team that won an Emmy for outstanding live sports series.  

Serafin, who retired from her job at the college in 2022 after 15 years, and who served in the Palomar College Council of Classified Employees, AFT Local 4522 as a steward, a secretary, and vice president, grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, the second youngest of seven children. She went to a small college in West Virginia, planning to become a teacher, but that didn’t work out. She moved back home, and her father, who had his own business and was a leader in the community, got her a job at the concessions stand at a golf course. 

Working there, Serafin met a caddy who became her boyfriend, and he asked her to travel the country with him to golf tournaments. She agreed. 

This was in the mid to late 70s and Serafin enjoyed seeing different places and finding a concessions job at the courses they went to. After she’d been doing that a few years, TV networks started televising golf tournaments. Since they didn’t know much about the sport, they’d hire the caddies to sit with them and tell them who the players were and what shots they’d made. Serafin was qualified to do that, and her boyfriend introduced her to one of the associate directors at CBS, who had her work in the TV trucks, replaying on reel-to-reel tapes.  Eventually, Serafin became Vin Scully’s scorer and stats person.

Serafin loved it. Before, when she and her boyfriend (who became her husband)  traveled around to tournaments, they would have to pay for their own lodging and transportation. But working in TV, their employers paid for much nicer hotels then they’d been able to afford as well as rental cars and flights. In 1980, they got hired at NBC as contract employees and worked there for the next 20 years. 

In 2000, their marriage dissolved, and Serafin didn’t want to work alongside her ex-husband. They had been living in Vista, a small town in San Diego County and Serafin had been volunteering at her kids’ schools, serving as president of the PTA six times and coaching baseball and basketball. She knew a lot of people there and decided to apply for classified jobs. She got one as a College and Career Center technician at the high school her children attended. After seven years there, she got hired in the financial aid office at Palomar.  

Anel Gonzalez, the President of Palomar Council of Classified Employees, who has worked alongside Serafin (known to her colleagues as “Party Patti”) for years says her contributions to the local were invaluable and that Serafin is a natural leader and organizer. 

“She can talk to anyone about anything. A lot of what we do is communication and expressing ourselves in a manner that can move the needle,” Gonzalez said. “She was often in meetings with me and the president of the college, and her lens and perspective and her ease in communicating, I think really helped us in a lot of ways because she was able to explain things in a way where people were like, ‘Oh, I see that point.’”

Gonzalez remembers how Serafin, who is now organizing a retiree chapter at her former local, went to a CFT workshop with Matthew Hardy on how to talk to the board. Hardy suggested saying that you love your job. Serafin took that to heart, Gonzalez says. 

“Patti would come to the meetings and have a report every time, whether it was about what was happening in her area, which was financial aid, or what was happening with students or with the union. Then she would say, ‘My name is Patti Serafin, and I’m a financial aid advisor, and I love my job.’” Gonzalez said. “Now people channel their inner Patti, and they come to board meetings, and they say their name, they say what they do, and they always say, ‘And I love my job.’ Patti left that legacy and that impression on people. Like the young kids say, she has the rizz [charisma, for those who aren’t young kids].”

Along with her work starting the chapter, Serafin is traveling with friends, as well as going up to Seattle to see her son and to San Leandro where her daughter lives and spending time with her four grandchildren. 

“She’s had an extraordinary life,” Gonzalez said. “ And she’s always kind of doing her own thing. I think she’s always living her best life.”