For the Observer-Reporter

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WAYNESBURG - Going-away parties can be fun and they can be bittersweet, but rarely do they offer an outdoor mass, joyous live music in four-part harmony and a thunderstorm finale.

For 81-year old Gloria Gugliotta, it was a fitting tribute to 50 years of Greene County living.

"I knew it was coming, but I didn't know what was going to happen," Gugliotta said. In a few weeks, she would be moving west to be near her daughter in Chicago, Ill. But for the moment, she was caught up in the tenderness of saying goodbye.

"I've been truly blessed with wonderful friends that are like family to me. We share bonds that families share and we know each other as family. We are a community of singers," she said.

After 20 years as choral director of the musical ministry Mosaic of St. Ann Church, Waynesburg, Gugliotta finally got the chance to sit on a lawn chair by the pool and listen to the music.

It was a muggy afternoon on June 16 when dozens of past and present Mosaic members gathered at the home of original member Reinett Jackovic for the going-away party.

"This is typical of our Mosaic get-togethers - we relax and there's a bonding of the members that builds relationships," Jackovic said. "We're a group, not a number of solo voices. Gloria encouraged that kind of closeness. There was no other way to say goodbye to her but in the company of one another."

As thunder rumbled on the horizon, the singers stood under the eaves and gave their mentor a glorious send off in song. Candles flickered in the wind as Gugliotta's favorite priest returned to Waynesburg for the occasion, prepared to say mass.

"Father Al McGinnis was my priest for 13 years, and nobody knows me the way he knows me," Gugliotta laughed. "He was so supportive of Mosaic. I see him as very spiritual and responsive to the music, and he let us do what we wanted to do. He gave us a great deal of freedom."

More than a choir, Mosaic remains true to its 1960s Vatican II folk-mass roots with guitars, drums, keyboard and an eclectic range of songs - everything from the Broadway musical Rent to Handel's "Messiah," member Karen Bogucki of Carmichaels said. "Gloria was a godsend to our group. I remember first hearing her sing at a Lions Club concert in the mid-1960s when I was still in high school. She sang 'The White Cliffs of Dover' and I'll never forget it. She has a wonderful voice, and she shares herself with so many. She is a blessing."

Gugliotta joined St. Ann about the same time of Father Valentine and soon was adding her love of music to Mosaic, Bogucki remembered. "Once she got her hands on us, she made us the best we could be. We're missing her already. I told her to get the couch ready in Chicago because I'm coming to visit."

Gugliotta, a Pittsburgh native, sang professionally with her sisters as a girl. Later, her talent for teaching music would enrich the county through private voice lessons in her Dry Tavern home. A generation of Coal Queens and Rain Day contestants found their way to her door to learn the art of musical articulation.

Aspiring beauty queens weren't the only young women to benefit from the Gugliotta touch.

"I came to Greene County in 1961 and was the assistant director of Youth Development Center until 1963, and director until it closed in 1984.

"Working with youngsters gave my staff and me an opportunity to show them that they were appreciated, valued and considered people of worth. We mustered our professional talent to show them there was a better way if they would reach out to it. I've always considered it a privilege to enter into the lives of these girls, and I think we were fairly successful in helping change their lives. They were kids who had talents they didn't know they had. To see children respond to caring is a beautiful thing to see."

Retirement only meant more time to volunteer, and Gugliotta made the most of it. She kept ties to her hometown alive by manning the phones during WQED radio and television pledge drives.

As a Retired and Senior Volunteer Program volunteer, she was a traveling storyteller for Flenniken Library. Gugliotta also became a poster child for healthy aging at the Wellness Center at Greene County Memorial Hospital. After winning the center's Member of the Year award in 2004, she shared her secrets to good health by speaking at area health conferences and was a regular at Jefferson Senior Center's weekly exercise classes.

Now Gugliotta is beginning a new life when most people her age would be thinking of settling down to a familiar routine.

"My granddaughters and their friends were just here chatting and polishing - and using - all of my silverware and looking forward to the snacks I'll be making them," Gugliotta reported by phone from her new digs in Hyde Park, a stone's throw from Lake Michigan.

Light streams through the stained glass window with the Mosaic logo designed by Regina McDowell of Graysville and the many boxes nearly are unpacked. "I'm just blocks away from (the University of Chicago) campus, where they have concerts and classes and many other interesting things. But I'm most thrilled to be with my daughter and her family," she said.

"We have the opportunity to share this part of my life and more than ever before we'll be able to share in more tangible ways. But I have a great big futon that opens into a double bed, and I'm looking forward to Greene County coming to Cook County. Give me a call."

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