Elizabeth Chapin was born on 26 July 1896 in Chicago, the daughter of Simeon Brooks Chapin, a wealthy stockbroker, and Elizabeth Mattocks; the family moved to New York when she was five. During the First World War she drove a Red Cross ambulance in France, and she went on to an unusual career for a woman of her day as an insurance broker with a prominent Wall Street firm. She married the New York stockbroker Kenneth Askew Patterson. Religiously minded since childhood and a keen traveller, she had been to India and on an Arctic voyage toward the North Pole before she met Baba.
A customer of Malcolm and Jean Schloss's bookstore, Elizabeth was invited by Jean to meet Meher Baba at Harmon, New York, on 17 November 1931. She later described the meeting as absolute recognition, as if meeting someone she had always known. Baba named her Dilruba, "one who steals the heart," and she became, with her close companion Norina Matchabelli, one of his most devoted American disciples. On 24 May 1932 at Harmon Baba picked a small pink wildflower, gave it to her and told her to keep it and write down the date.
In December 1936 she came to India to live in Baba's ashram for Westerners at Nasik, where she kept the ashram accounts with Norina, drove members of the group, and looked after the dogs. Her car carried Baba and the women mandali over thousands of miles of Indian roads, including the Blue Bus tours of 1938 and 1939. On 6 May 1938 Baba allowed her to spend twelve hours alone in his cave at Tiger Valley, Panchgani. With Norina she also helped supervise the editing, printing and distribution of the Meher Baba Journal.
In May 1941 Baba sent her, Norina and Nadine Tolstoy to America with the task of finding a property for a spiritual center. She remembered the land at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that her father had given her, and in October 1944 the site was finalized. With Norina she turned the wild lakeside woodland into the Meher Spiritual Center, pouring her own fortune and practical care into it and consulting Baba at every decision. In 1947 she and Norina returned to India to stay with Baba again.
When Baba came to the Center in 1952, Elizabeth drove him, Mehera, Mani and Meheru west. On 24 May 1952 near Prague, Oklahoma, a car came at them on the wrong side of the road. Baba, Mehera and Meheru were thrown from the car and injured; Mani, dozing in the back seat, was the only one unhurt; and Elizabeth was pinned behind the wheel with both arms fractured and several ribs broken. Years later she found in her New Testament the wildflower Baba had given her, dated 24 May 1932: exactly twenty years before the accident. She hosted Baba again at the Center in 1956 and 1958, and devoted the rest of her life to it. Elizabeth died in Myrtle Beach on 6 December 1980, and her ashes were interred at Meherabad near Baba's Samadhi under the inscription she had chosen and Baba had approved: "Elizabeth is with Baba."
