Honoring Patsy Cline

Patsy Cline’s home in Winchester, where she lived as a child and as a budding star, soon may be turned into a museum for fans of the legendary country singer.

“We want to make the house exactly like it was when she was there,” said Judy Sue Kempf, the president of Celebrating Patsy Cline Inc., a nonprofit group that owns the modest house at 608 S. Kent St. “That’s where her career was formed.”

Cline, whose distinctive country sound still has untold number of fans, has become something of an icon in Winchester — next only to its apple festival. She has become one of the small city’s biggest tourist attractions.

Kempf said her organization is asking the city to rezone the property so it can be used as a museum. Hundreds of sightseers stop by the house annually, though it is not open to the public.

Liner notes:
As a teenager, Patsy Cline was a waitress behind the soda fountain at Gaunt’s Drug Store in Winchester.

Cline married her second husband, Charlie Dick, on Sept. 15, 1957, at the house next door to her family home, 720 S. Kent St., Winchester.

www.patsycline.com

The house, which is on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places, is tiny. When Cline, her mother, sister and brother moved into the four-room home in 1948, it only had two bedrooms. The white, clapboard house has been renovated and enlarged since then.

Cline lived at the home from 1948 until 1953 and returned intermittently to live with her mother, including after her marriage to Gerald E. Cline failed.

Cline hit the big time on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts in 1957 after singing “Walkin’ After Midnight.” She recorded more than 100 songs before dying in a plane crash in 1963 while flying home to Nashville. She was 30.

Thousands attended her funeral in Winchester.

She had moved to Nashville with her second husband, Charlie Dick. Dick, a Winchester-area native, said he met Patsy for the first time at the Kent Street home. She was just a local singer and he was a linotype operator at the Winchester Star.

“I hope it works,” said Dick in a telephone interview from Nashville, where he still lives. “I know people want to see that house.”

Dick said the Nashville home where he and Cline lived for just over a year is still besieged by fans. “The people who live there now said people are always knocking on the door begging to come in.”

Dick said he has Cline’s jewelry, clothes and all of her music awards that he would lend to the museum.

And Celebrating Patsy Cline — which also plans to open a Patsy Cline museum on the city’s downtown pedestrian mall — already owns about 125 items that belonged to Cline including some furniture, clothes, a sewing machine and other items.

“I know Patsy Cline fans will want to walk in the same house she lived in,” said Scott Andres, who is a member of the board for Celebrating Patsy Cline. “I’ve heard folks say she’s more popular now than when she was alive. It’s an interesting phenomenon.”