Profiles of a pandemic: Western New Yorkers lost to Covid-19

Louvenia “Lou Lou” Henderson, a woman of faith and a proud single mother of three from the Town of Tonawanda, became the sixth person in Erie County to die from Covid-19.

And yet, she was being so careful not to catch the virus.

“I don’t understand how this happened,” said Shamiah Wilkes, Henderson’s daughter.

“My mom, she took all the preventative measures," Wilkes said. "She had gloves in her car. She had sanitizer everywhere. She was always washing her hands. So, I feel like the people around her were very careless – and she suffered because of it.”

Henderson, 44, started feeling sick around March 18, a Wednesday. By the following Saturday, she asked her daughter to take her to the hospital.

Henderson looked ill, her daughter said, but it seemed more like a cold – something she could get over. Wilkes brought her mother something to eat at home from Panera Bread, went out for a bit and upon her return found Henderson sleeping.

But by Sunday morning, her condition took a turn for the worse.

“My brother woke me up and said, ‘You got to take mom to the hospital,’ ” Wilkes said. “I go and see, and she’s crying, saying her body hurts. She just said she wanted to get out of here.”

Wilkes dropped her mother off at Kenmore Mercy Hospital. By the time she parked her car and went in, Henderson was being admitted. Wilkes was told visitors were not allowed to stay because of concerns about the new coronavirus, so she left expecting to pick up her mother later that day.

Henderson would be diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia and later test positive for Covid-19. In the following days, her family prayed for her day and night and continually called the hospital to check on her status.

By Wednesday, her conditioned worsened. Henderson was in an induced coma and on a ventilator. Doctors informed the family she had 24 hours to live.

Shamiah Wilkes, 25, and her two brothers, Jeremiah “L.J.” Wilkes II, 22, and Jeremiah “J.B.” Wilkes III, 21, were allowed to see their mother and say their goodbyes.

“I prayed that she heard us,” Shamiah Wilkes said. “But she wasn’t conscious at all.”

A round of dialysis for Henderson on Thursday renewed the family’s hopes, until they got the call from the hospital at 9:15 a.m. on Friday.

Henderson had died at 9:10 a.m.

“I just don’t want my mother to be another number of someone who died from Covid-19,” Wilkes said. “I want her legacy to continue.”

Born Dec. 22, 1975, Henderson – known to friends and family as Lou Lou – grew up in Buffalo, where she attended Burgard High School. Henderson went on to study social work at SUNY Buffalo State. She didn’t graduate but always talked about going back to finish her degree.

Henderson was a child and family coordinator at Goodwill Industries and attended Midtown Bible Church in Buffalo.

“My mother was a God-fearing woman. She prayed for everybody,” Wilkes said.

Henderson also took particular pride in the three children she had raised.

“She was so proud of me and my accomplishments,” Wilkes said. “I just finished getting my MBA, and I was always the topic of discussion when she was around her friends. She would always brag about how proud she was of me – basically all her children. We’re in college. We didn’t get into trouble. She was just proud of us.”

Wilkes said her mother’s health had been “pretty good” and she didn’t know of any underlying conditions.

"I found out Tuesday that she had, in fact, contracted Covid-19, and it took myself and all of my friends aback," said Melodie Baker of Clarence, one of Henderson's longtime friends. "She was so young and healthy. I can't believe that she died. It's unimaginable."

Baker and Henderson, friends for 20 years, attended church together at Midtown Bible, where Baker’s father is pastor.

Both of Henderson’s parents died at an early age – her mother, Mary Alice Henderson, at 55; her father, David Ross Sr., 54.

“So we were her family,” Baker said. “I called her my sister. I mean, that's kind of how you grew up in the church. Everyone was family.”

Baker described Henderson as a quiet person, but fun-loving. Baker recalled how once during a church sermon, Henderson made a quip that was so funny it not only had the choir in stitches, the pastor let it slide because it was so clever.

“I mean, she was that friend that was just hysterical,” Baker said. “Everyone who commented on my (Facebook) page talked about how absolutely funny she was.”

After Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz posted on Friday that a woman in her 40s was the sixth coronavirus victim in the county, Baker took to Twitter to let the world know it was her friend, Lou Lou.

"It's sad,” Baker said of Henderson’s death. “It's heartbreaking."

Besides here three children, Henderson is survived by a brother, David Ross; and two cousins, Tiahesha and Nakisha McLaurin, who were like sisters to her.

The family is still making funeral arrangements, but have started a GoFundMe page to help with expenses.

One night last week, Valerie Monahan looked at her husband of 50 years – the Vietnam veteran, the grandfather of three, the Eucharistic minister, the docent at Buffalo’s naval museum – and noticed his fingertips were purple.

"I am not a medical person, but I said, 'You are not getting oxygen,' " she recalled in an interview Thursday. After the ambulance crew hurried her husband to Kenmore Mercy Hospital, she thought he would recover from pneumonia, or bronchitis, or whatever was sapping him of air, and return home.

Walter H. Monahan of Kenmore did not recover. He died in the hospital around 10 a.m. Wednesday, 11 days after his 50th wedding anniversary, five days after he turned 74 and 14 days after he first noticed what he thought was a bad cold.

He is the second Erie County resident to die from Covid-19. The first was a woman in her 80s, whose death was announced by the county health department the previous day.

"People might think, 'Oh that person has lived this long life,' and they might think that it's OK that these people passed away. But it's not," said Kelly Frothingham, Monahan's daughter. "They were taken far too soon."

The outpouring on social media, and memorials left at the Monahans' home in Kenmore show that he was a big presence. On Facebook, a woman called him "my wonderful neighbor." In recent days, a message went out to members of St. Joseph University Parish, where Monahan served as a Eucharistic minister, requesting prayers for him, said a parishioner, Susan Stievater. Neighbors taped images of butterflies to the family's fence and chalked messages of support on the sidewalk.

Monahan had served on a destroyer during the Vietnam War, and from then on, the Navy was in his blood. When his tours ended, he was asked where he would like to be stationed. The West Coast, he said. They put him in the Pentagon, in a large office of about 50 people working for the chief of naval operations.

That’s where he met his future wife. Valerie was a civilian employee in the same office. Their first date was to a drive-in theater. They brought a six-pack and watched "Hellfighters," an action picture starring John Wayne.

They eventually set up a home in Rochester, where Monahan had been raised. He worked as a facilities manager for a hotel operator, and when their daughter established her career in Buffalo – Frothingham is an associate dean at SUNY Buffalo State – the couple moved to the Buffalo area to be closer to the two grandchildren they had at the time. The couple’s son, Michael Monahan, and his wife have since had a son, in Rochester.

In Buffalo, Walter Monahan took a job as the facilities director for People Inc.'s senior centers, Valerie Monahan said. Then he drove a school bus for five or six years. In retirement, he volunteered for Meals on Wheels and became a fixture at just about any event involving his grandchildren.

On March 10, Monahan had a regular checkup at the Veterans Administration Medical Center. A doctor found him in good health, and his COPD – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – continued to be well managed, his wife and daughter said. The next day he started complaining of a cold.

This was days before cases of the novel coronavirus began ramping up in Erie County. His doctors suspected pneumonia. On March 14, he still felt good enough to celebrate the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary. But the celebration, planned for Oliver’s Restaurant, was put on hold.

“When my dad first got sick, they couldn’t test him for Covid-19 because there were no tests available,” Frothingham said. The Covid-19 diagnosis wasn’t known for certain until Saturday, when a test administered at Kenmore Mercy came back positive. By then, Monahan was under a ventilator and unaware of the finding.

Covid-19 attacks the sacs of the lungs, the alveoli, that help the body exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With Monahan, the ventilator was delivering oxygen but his body's failure to release carbon dioxide was stressing his organs, which began shutting down, Frothingham said.

With vehement apologies, the hospital’s staff restricted the family’s access to him because of concerns about the spread of Covid-19. But his wife and children were allowed to see him for a few hours before he died.

The family has been trying to think of where he caught the coronavirus but doesn’t have a good guess. Valerie Monahan has been tested for Covid-19, and the results were negative. Kelly Frothingham, who is quarantined with her, has not been tested.

Thursday was a whirlwind of calls with condolences and conversations with family friends.

The emotions are being sorted out.

“Right now, we just can’t afford to have anger,” Valerie Monahan said. “But I am angry when I see pictures of the kids on the beach in Florida, when I’ve lost my husband.”

Then, there’s the support that has come at them from all directions.

Valerie Monahan is especially touched that friends are flying their flags at half-staff.

And by a sign a neighbor put up for them to see: "Monahans, sending you strength and love."

Even when they attached her husband to a ventilator at Buffalo General Medical Center, Karen Catalano remained hopeful.

Her mind fast-forwarded 28 days – to a successful end to the ventilator regimen. She pictured the two of them spending more time together, perhaps taking dance lessons or visiting the beach near their home in Angola.

But Theodore Xavier Catalano, the 10th of 12 siblings and the patriarch of their blended family, did not remain on the ventilator for long. After four days, Karen Catalano received a call telling her she should come to the hospital right away.

Her husband's grave prognosis was certain, she learned, and nothing more could be done to save him from Covid-19.

She knew his wishes because they long ago discussed their concerns about quality of life in the event of a catastrophic illness. So Karen Catalano agreed to disconnect her husband of more than 20 years.

He died March 29 at age 62.

"He wasn't getting any better," she said. "He was just progressively getting worse every day."

They married in 1999. She brought four children into the marriage, he brought two. He treated her children like they were his children, she said, not his step-children. She said he had a special way with kids.

They were both insurance professionals and property appraisers.

"He could remember a house he was in 20 years ago, exactly how it was laid out," Karen Catalano said.

He studied the history of the insurance business and went to local high schools to give lessons in the topic. He also was a real estate professional and was with the Custom Property Realty Agency in Angola when he died.

Their daughter Rosalie Francisco Catalano was born in 2000.

"She was the light of his eyes," Karen Catalano said.

He spent every moment he possibly could with Rosalie, even coaxing her to skip school so they could spend the day together.

In January 2019, when Rosalie was 18, she flew back out to California – where she was studying filmmaking – after coming home for the wedding of a sister. In Burbank, she grew sick from what was thought to be a flu, perhaps caught on the airplane.

"I said stay hydrated and ride it out for 24 hours," Karen Catalano recalled.

Whatever the illness, Rosalie never recovered. By the time family members hurried out to California, she was on life support. She died on Jan. 24, 2019.

Karen Catalano has been quarantined, unable to open her doors to family and friends as she mourns. She had plenty of time to think about the parallels between Rosalie's case and her husband's as he slipped deeper into his illness.

Theodore Catalano's bout with Covid-19 began simply enough, with a cough, in the middle of March. The medical professionals at a wellness center thought it was bronchitis, but Karen Catalano doubted that. To her, the cough sounded distinctly awful, worse than bronchitis.

"The corona cough is a horrible cough," she said.

She said she pressed her husband's doctor to have him tested for Covid-19, and he was eventually placed in isolation at Brooks Memorial Hospital in Dunkirk as the family awaited the results of his test. Almost a week later, the results still had not come back from a lab in Albany. Eventually, they learned the reason for the delay: his swab contained too small a sample to analyze. Another sample was needed.

Meanwhile, Theodore Catalano was miserable.

"He was very depressed," said Karen Catalano, who could talk to him by phone. "He was in a lot of discomfort. The breathing was very hard for him."

She described him as a large man with other health issues. He had diabetes, narcolepsy and Graves' disease, a disorder of the immune system. He slept connected to a CPAP machine that provided continuous positive airway pressure.

He had gone into Brooks Memorial on March 16, she said. By March 20, her husband's condition had worsened to the point where he was being moved from isolation to the intensive care unit. He had agreed to be intubated and was going onto a ventilator.

Though Covid-19 still was not confirmed in his case, everyone was proceeding as though he had it. Karen Catalano said he received treatments of a malaria drug combined with an antibiotic – the so-called Z-Pack – that has helped some patients.

On March 24, word arrived that a second test came back positive. The next day, with Catalano in a medically induced coma, an ambulance capable of transporting a patient on a ventilator rolled him from Brooks to Buffalo General.

There, the doctors told his wife that they could keep him on the ventilator for 28 days, she said. So she thought that with weeks on the machine, he might survive. She thought of dance lessons, the beach, other outings together.

"My whole element was the morale," she said, indicating that her thoughts of a bright future might help her spirits and eventually benefit her husband, when they could finally talk again. "If you can keep the morale positive and full of hope you can help other parts of your body heal," she said.

But large percentages of people placed on ventilators for Covid-19 have died.  After looking at X-rays of her husband's chest, Karen Catalano sees that he steadily worsened.

"You could see how his lungs had been declining every day," she said.

In his final moments, she had 10 minutes with him. She won't forget that. Nor will she forget the scene in Buffalo General's ICU.

She sensed mostly stress and distress coming from the medical staff, and the stress in the faces of other relatives deciding whether their relatives should come off the ventilator and be allowed to die.

"I describe it as a living morgue," she said. "All you hear are machines. And all you see is the stress in the eyes of everyone there."

When Rosalie was disconnected from the machinery keeping her alive, she lasted just four minutes, Karen Catalano said. The blood-infection sepsis had reached her brain.

"With Ted, it was 20 minutes," she said. "Knowing that Ted struggled for anther 20 minutes, he still had the fight of life left in him. But yet, he wasn't getting any better. He was just progressively getting worse every day."

Rita Faber was in otherwise good health for a 90-year-old. But she fell Friday in her apartment at a complex for seniors.

Doctors at Mercy Hospital in South Buffalo checked her out. She had no broken bones or lasting damage, the doctors reported to her son, Stephen Faber.

The plan was to place Faber in a rehab facility, to help figure out why she fell and hopefully prevent more falls, before returning her to her South Buffalo apartment.

But she developed a fever in the hospital that night and was placed in isolation. Late Saturday, test results came back for Covid-19. She had tested positive, said her great niece, Kelly McCoy of South Buffalo.

Rita Faber, who had a do-not-resuscitate order in place, died on Tuesday, McCoy said.

The news hit the family just four days after she began to show symptoms and three days after Covid-19 was confirmed.

"This hits super close to home now," McCoy said on Twitter.

"I think what took us all by surprise is she went in there relatively healthy," she told The Buffalo News. "And she died within days. Nobody was able to see her. Nobody was able to say goodbye to her.

"There are a lot of people who will look at her and say, 'well she was 90,'" McCoy said. "Was her body weaker because she was 90 years old? Yeah. It was. But it doesn't make the rest of us immune."

Roughly half of the people who have tested positive for Covid-19 in Erie County are under age 50. While the elderly and people with weakened immune systems or respiratory issues are considered more at risk, younger people can die from it.

An Erie County resident in her 40s, Louvenia “Lou Lou” Henderson, died of Covid-19 complications last week. Family members said they knew of no underlying conditions that exacerbated her condition.

Faber had been in the hospital for less than a day before she developed a fever, so doctors believe she contracted the novel coronavirus before she arrived, McCoy said.

She had been a resident of the Seneca Cazenovia Senior Apartments complex at Seneca and Cazenovia streets. It's run by People Inc., which has been educating residents at its senior housing sites about the risks of Covid-19 and urging them to take precautions, said Thomas Ess, the emergency preparedness coordinator and Covid-19 incident commander for People Inc. He offered no specific measures taken at Seneca Cazenovia, home to about 40 people, in response to Faber's case. Alerting people she may have been in contact with is up to the county Health Department, he said.

Faber had been a resident of Buffalo her whole life. She was born Rita Helen Pruzinksi and married Stephen Joseph Faber, who has since died. She worked at a bookbinding company that later became known as the Acme Nebrich Bookbindery. She had a son, Stephen, and a daughter, Susan Faber Weber, who died in 2012 at the age of 56. For fun, Faber and her sisters liked to visit the casinos, McCoy said.

When McCoy talks of Covid-19 hitting "super close to home," it's not simply because of her great aunt's death. Stephen Faber, who had been with Rita Faber and took her to the hospital, spent time with McCoy and her parents without knowing of his mother's illness.

McCoy, who said she was already immuno-compromised, has quarantined herself. And her parents, in their late 60s, are taking the matter much more seriously, McCoy said.

"This has put my parents directly in the line of fire, and by proxy, myself," she said.

Raised during the Great Depression, Luigi D'Orazio learned how to do things for himself.

After growing up on a farm, he became so adept at plumbing, electrical work and carpentry that he built the home on Grand Island in which he raised his family.

At 91, D'Orazio was living in that home on Warner Drive, with a home health aide, when he developed a fever. The fever subsided, then returned, and he collapsed two days later, on March 30.

He was rushed to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital and died there on the morning of April 1 from kidney failure stemming from Covid-19, said his son, Brian D'Orazio of Fredericksburg, Va.

D'Orazio, who was born in Rochester, graduated from high school in Niagara Falls and served in the Air Force during the Korean War, was a "service above self guy," his son said.

"His greatest efforts were in the community," Brian D'Orazio said.

His father had served as an elder for the Grand Island Presbyterian Church and became involved with an ecumenical task force for the Niagara Frontier. He became an emergency medical technician and over 56 years responded to numerous calls for the Grand Island Fire Company. In 1991, the Grand Island Chamber of Commerce honored him with a special award for his lifetime of work as a community volunteer. He had retired from New York Telephone three years earlier.

"If there was a walkathon that could be done, he and my mom were doing it," Brian D'Orazio said.

The former Reta Wixon, who was married to D'Orazio for 58 years, died in 2010.

In his senior years, D'Orazio had been in mostly good health, until 2019, his son said. In November, he was hospitalized for pneumonia at Erie County Medical Center and did his rehabilitation at its Terrace View nursing home.

Brian D'Orazio and his sister, Rebecca D'Orazio Orton, suspect that their father, who rarely left the home, caught the coronavirus from one of the health aides who would stay with him or during visits to a doctor's office in the weeks before he died.

"There's going to be no way to identify where it came from, nor would it really make a lot of difference," Brian D'Orazio said.

Orton said people are asking when a memorial service will be held. Right now, she can't say.

"All I can say is that it will be at the fire hall when it does happen," Orton said.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

With no other way to mourn, John Pijanowski wrote the tribute at his kitchen counter. He is a professor of education at the University of Arkansas, a Brown University graduate "whose research focuses on how people translate moral thinking into moral action, self care, and leadership development," as his official university bio puts it.

He is also the son of Don Pijanowski, a Buffalo guy who spent his life working with machines. "His hands always had rough fingers, kind of thick but strong, with the fingernails worn down into pads," said John, 50, who vividly recalls the sense of warmth and safety whenever his dad put those hands on his youngest son's shoulders.

Don died Wednesday at Sisters Hospital, from complications caused by Covid-19. He was a robust and busy 87-year-old who developed a cough last week that he thought was no big deal. By Sunday, he had stopped answering the phone at his Kenmore home, where his worried son Mike hurried over and "found him in distress," John said.

Three days later, Don died on a ventilator, in intensive care at Sisters.

His four sons – Jeff, Mike, Greg and John – could not gather around him as they did in 2007 when they lost their mother, Kate Pijanowski. Instead, scattered by the physical boundaries of a pandemic, they came together to grieve digitally by text or messenger, before John Pijanowski, a writer, did what he knows best.

He wrote from his gut and posted the words to Twitter, where more than 60,000 people as of Thursday afternoon, including former heavyweight champion George Foreman,  "liked" or responded to the tweet that began this thread of posts:

I want to tell you about my dad, Donald John Pijanowski. He was born on October 30, 1932, and he passed away today at 12:07 p.m., April 1, 2020. The doctors tell us it was Covid-19 which means we were not allowed in the hospital to be with him for his last days.

Instead of gathering around him and each other we are mourning via texts and video and putting our faith in the brave nurses and doctors caring for him that he was not alone.

My dad was a great man. There are no buildings named after him, he left behind no fortune, and there are no books that tell his story. He was not great in the way we often try to define the term - he was great in that he was such a *good* man - good to his core, unfailingly good.

As the youngest of ten children born during the Great Depression, the stories of his childhood always seemed harsh, but he never told them that way. Stories of his youth were always told with a warm sense of nostalgia and a twinkle in his eye.

I want to tell you about my dad, Donald John Pijanowski. He was born on October 30, 1932 and he passed away today at 12:07pm, April 1, 2020. The doctors tell us it was covid19 which means we were not allowed in the hospital to be with him for his last days. pic.twitter.com/UC52BKvhmj

— John Pijanowski (@John_Pijanowski) April 1, 2020

They slept 3 kids to a bed, 1st to wake up got to choose their shoes, there were 2 Christmas presents for all the kids combined - one gift for the boys to share, and one for the girls, and ... the girls were the best ballplayers in their sometimes rough Buffalo neighborhood.

He joked of how his mom often had to stretch food seemingly beyond its natural limits and as recently as last week was wishing for a taste of his mom’s spinach soup.

The stories of his work ethic were legendary. He wasn’t a suit & tie guy; he was a green bar of lava soap guy. He had many jobs through the years (like wiring houses & steel manufacturing) & his career was ultimately building and later servicing huge industrial turbo compressors.

Every time we drove down Union street he told me the same story of the job he had, & ultimately walked away from, painting those houses because the supervisor told him to only paint the parts that people could see from the street. “I could never do that,” he would say every time. 

If my dad was doing a job for you then you knew he didn’t just do the parts he thought you could see, he did the entire job and he would not leave until it was done right. 

Wherever I went with my dad he seemed like the coolest guy in the room. His sports exploits were also the stuff of legend. When he was younger he would get manufacturing jobs and favorable shifts so he could play on their company baseball teams.

I heard tales growing up of a home run he hit at Schiller Park that not only left the park but ended up hitting a house across the street. The last time we played with a football he was 55-years-old and he threw his age – a 55-yard strike on the fly to me running a post pattern.

Wonderful of you to share. Our great memories, plus Hope of a better life must suffice for now. Wish I’d met Donald John. https://t.co/Oaw6Zuo6Wp

— George Foreman (@GeorgeForeman) April 2, 2020

My dad’s defining feature, though, was how much he cared about people. Over the years and over the past few hours I have heard from many friends who grew up with me and spent time in my home when we were kids.

My dad was a great man because he left the world a better place for having been in it. He was an infinitely kind man with a sharp sense of humor who worked hard, played hard, and loved deeply. I will miss him every day of my life and be grateful I had the privilege to be his son.

Thursday, by telephone from Arkansas - with his 10-year-old son Jack chiming in from the background - John Pijanowski explained why he wrote so quickly, with such passion, of his father. He said he does not remember his dad raising his voice in anger to his children, or a single time when his mother and father had a quarrel.

His parents did not attend college, yet in their own way prepared him for an Ivy League school. The house was always full of books. His dad brought home a giant dictionary when they were children, and Kate Pijanowski, for years, would take a mechanical pencil and add any new word she heard that was not already in the book.

As for love of Buffalo, Don Pijanowski was transferred to Houston, years ago. He remained committed to his job until he retired, but in the 1990s - with thousands of Western New Yorkers headed toward Texas - he and Kate went the other way, back to their hometown. Once settled again, they had no wish to leave.

"He was just a Buffalo guy," John said, "and really comfortable there."

Kate and Don met as teens and were together for almost 60 years, leaving their sons to worry about how their dad would do as a widower. His solace, as always, came from looking outward. He became a regular at a seniors center in Kenmore, where his volunteer work included finding crossword puzzles for a World War II vet who had served as a code breaker during the war.

Don had witnessed the misery of the Great Depression. His father died when he was young, leaving his mother to raise 10 children in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood. When her older sons left to fight in World War II, Don was there to sense her fear as she waited for her boys. He later served in the Army Reserve before embracing the quiet rhythms - including a passion for the Bills and Yankees - that for decades shaped his world.

Wednesday, Don lost his life to Covid-19. Those closest to him were not allowed at the hospital, and family members are not sure yet when they can plan for a memorial. His sons are left to contemplate, at some point, how to best honor their father.

"None of the rituals or traditions we use for comfort make sense anymore," John said, speaking for a growing number of people who mourn someone they love amid this time of isolation.

So he sat down and wrote, for one central reason. His dad provided the moral center of his life, and he will not pretend to "breathe some deeper meaning" into the harsh way his father died. "He deserved a better ending," John said of Don Pijanowski, a guy who had "empathy pouring out of him," grace that kept him vibrant until this time of virus.

"If there's a deeper message," the son said, "it's in everything that came before."

Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Buffalo News. Email him at skirst@buffnews.com or read more of his work in this archive.

Ronald Peoples never knew he had the Covid-19 virus.

By the time his test results came back, the 86-year-old retired Buffalo Public Schools educator was hooked up to a ventilator at Millard Fillmore Hospital and was falling in and out of consciousness, according to his children.

Peoples, the first African American teacher at School 82, became ill March 29 and a day later was taken by ambulance to the hospital. He was admitted and tested for the novel coronavirus.

Before being placed on the ventilator March 31, his final words in separate phone calls to his daughter Monica Peoples and and his son Ronald Jeffrey Peoples were, “I love you.”

The next day the test results confirmed he had contracted the virus.

Peoples died a day later, on Thursday.

“He never knew he had the virus because he was in and out of consciousness,” said Monica Peoples.

While they are heartbroken at how the virus took down their father, who had remained active in senior citizen track and field events, his children have chosen to celebrate their father's life by recalling his countless good deeds.

“Dad was a people person. If he wasn’t doing something for somebody else, his life would not have meant anything,” Monica Peoples said. “He was still working at the age of 86 in a program where he would meet with younger incarcerated people to try and change their lives while they were in jail and when they were released.”

Peoples, who resided in Snyder, had worked for the Community Action Organization of WNY’s Second Chance Program.

Ronald Jeffrey Peoples remembered his father’s generosity.

“As a kid growing up, if I’d get a shirt and I didn’t really like it, he’d ask me, ‘Why don’t you wear that shirt?’ I’d say, ‘It doesn’t look good on me,’ or, ‘It is too small.’ He’d say, ‘OK,’ and it was gone. He’d find a kid who needed a shirt. He was always doing for others,” Ronald Jeffrey Peoples said.

Peoples, according to his children, set a stellar example for them.

After the Buffalo native was discharged from the Navy in 1957, he earned a bachelor’s degree at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. He then returned to Buffalo and was hired as the first African American teacher at School 82 on Easton Avenue.

Peoples earned two master’s degrees in special education and educational administration. Advancing from the classroom, he went on to serve as the district’s home school coordinator/counselor at Woodlawn Junior High School and then as the district's elementary school supervisor.

When he retired in 1995 after 35 years of service, Peoples was the district director of adult education.

In a 2017  “Salute to Local War Heroes” story in The Buffalo News, Peoples was more eager to talk about his children’s accomplishments than his experiences as a Cold War veteran assigned to a Navy ship that searched for enemy submarines in the Atlantic Ocean.

"My daughter Monica has a doctorate degree. My son Ronald has a master's in business administration and my other daughter Rachel, who passed away, had a bachelor's degree in recreational therapy," Peoples had said.

Monica Peoples of Clarence followed in her father’s footsteps and worked for the Buffalo Public Schools, retiring as an assistant superintendent for pupil personnel.

Ronald Jeffrey Peoples, a New Jersey resident, works in information technology sales.

Among Peoples’ most important affiliations was his membership in the Buffalo chapter of the African American fraternity Omega Psi Phi, according to his daughter.

“It is a fraternity brotherhood that performs service to the community, which is taken very seriously and that was an extension of my father,” she said.

Peoples was also a member of Bethel AME Church at Michigan Avenue and East Ferry Street. And he remained an avid sports fan his whole life, with a special devotion to the University at Buffalo’s men's and women's basketball teams.

“He had season tickets,” Monica Peoples said.

Peoples was married to the former Arlene Miles, who died Nov. 5, 2005. Besides his son and daughter, he is also survived by a second son, Brian Peoples; four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

In reflecting on the toll Covid-19 is taking because of social distancing, Monica Peoples said it is hard to believe that there will not be “a packed church” to mourn the passing of her father.

“That is why we will have a memorial in the future honoring his life,” she said.

Cyril J. Alessi was all things Buffalo. He grew up on the West Side, and when he worked at his father's business, Tommy's Tire Shop, on Niagara Street, he fixed truck tires that were sometimes taller than he was.

After serving in the Army, he sold cars and then went into the restaurant business. He opened a Ruby's restaurant in downtown Buffalo when downtown had department stores, followed by a Ruby's at Boulevard Mall.

He went to the first Buffalo Bills game in 1960, and when the modern drought ended in 2018, he wished that Tyrod Taylor had played better during that wild card game in Jacksonville, said one of his brothers, Donald Alessi.

In April, Alessi was living in the Vinecroft Retirement Community in Clarence – alone because his wife of 60 years, Esther, had died in 2017 – when his health took a turn, his brother said.

The folks at Vinecroft told Alessi's oldest daughter, Karen Mauger of Clarence Center, on April 2 that he didn't look well. She spent the night with him in his unit.

The next day, Donald Alessi said, Alessi's doctor looked at him on Skype and wanted to get him to a hospital immediately. Doctors at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital diagnosed him with double pneumonia. Hospital personnel called the family to say Alessi was faring badly, and they should come.

Mauger, her sister Laura Roth of Williamsville, and Donald Alessi arrived to find him on oxygen with labored breathing. At their request, a priest from St. Gregory the Great, which is just steps away, came over immediately to administer the last rites.

The moment the priest was done, Alessi died, his brother said. He was 86.

"We were all in shock, because this had all transpired in the same day," Donald Alessi said of the April 3 death.

A nurse told the family that Cyril Alessi had displayed the hallmarks of Covid-19. When test results were known the next day, the hospital confirmed he had contracted the virus.

The Alessis had four children, Karen, Laurie and sons Thomas of Minneapolis and James of  Mountain Grove, Mo. Cyril also is survived by grandchildren; great grandchildren; and brothers Donald, of Clarence, and Dr. Thomas Alessi of Columbia, S.C. Another brother, Russell, who was in the restaurant business with him, died before him.

The family has been struggling with the fact it cannot yet hold a memorial gathering for Alessi, said Donald Alessi.

A Memorial Mass is scheduled at Nativity Parish in Clarence on Aug. 4.

Robin Steck can't say enough about the doctors and nurses at Sisters of Charity Hospital, St. Josephs Campus, but her gratitude can't mask the ugly, unfair realities of her husband's death.

"All that keeps going through my head is that he died alone," she said Saturday. 'There wasn't anything he wouldn't do for anyone. He was a good man. He didn't deserve this."

Only 56, retired Erie County Corrections Officer William L. Steck Jr. died Friday night from Covid-19, isolated from his wife and family during his final days.

Like her husband, Robin is also alone, quarantined in her East Aurora home because she showed symptoms of having the virus, including a fever.

She mourns her husband's death by talking across her backyard fence to his two sons. No hugs. No kisses. No physical contact with anyone.

Quarantined since March 22, she is feeling better now, and her fever is down. During a brief interview Saturday, she seemed more eager to talk about Bill than herself.

And when she did, her voice cracked with emotion.

"I wasn't prepared for this," she said between tears. "I always had hope. I always thought he would get better. I always thought he would snap out if it."

More and more, one of Covid-19's lasting legacies is proving to be the painful isolation it forces on patients and families while a loved one faces death.

In a New York Times opinion piece, a critical care doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston wrote that, "It's a tough decision that leaves our patients to suffer through their illnesses in a medical version of solitary confinement."

Despite that, Robin seemed anxious to talk about her husband, eager for the world to know the man she loved.

He started getting sick on March 18 and his condition got progressively worse until one day his temperature spiked at 103.3 degrees.

At St. Joseph's, a facility now dedicated to Covid-19 patients, he was put in isolation and for a short time received one of the two malarial drugs being used on people with the virus.

"They were wonderful," Steck said of the doctors and nurses.

Bill Steck was remembered by former co-workers Saturday as fun-loving and full of life.

Robin says he loved his two sons and her two sons and a daughter, and she talked at length about his passion for travel and their trips to Alaska, Jamaica and Hawaii.

When asked about the virus and how it came into their lives, she acknowledged she doesn't know where it came from.

"We do not have a clue," she said. "I wish we did."

In a statement Saturday, a spokesman for Sheriff Timothy Howard said, "Losing anyone to this disease is painful and the sheriff expresses his deepest condolences to the family on behalf of the entire Erie County Sheriff’s Office."

Catherine Phillips-Russ of Kenmore knew how to revive a weary spirit, according to her daughter, Elizabeth Curtis.

Phillips-Russ, a longtime administrator with Erie 1 Board of Cooperative Educational Services, might accomplish the feat with a bouquet of flowers, a home-cooked meal or a few kind words for the frazzled or downtrodden.

Phillips-Russ, 64, died April 4 from the effects of Covid-19 at Kenmore Mercy Hospital, her daughter said.

"Up until the point of getting sick, she was completely healthy and living a completely happy and productive life," her daughter said.

In late March, Phillips-Russ sought treatment for what she thought was a sinus infection. After four or five days on antibiotics, Phillips-Russ seemed to be recovering. But she took a nap on a Sunday, and woke up having trouble breathing, Curtis recalled.

Phillips-Russ was admitted to Kenmore Mercy. It was the last time her family would see her. On her second or third day there, Phillips-Russ was placed in a medically induced coma.

"They called on a Saturday evening and told the family that they had lost my mother's pulse, but they would try to resuscitate her. Five minutes later, they called back and said she was dead," said Curtis.

"It was very sudden, and it was unfair, I guess, is the word I would use. My mother was a person who gave to everyone else first. So, I think for the family it's hard for us to understand why something like this would happen to a person who lived their life, really, to serve others the majority of the time," Curtis added.

Curtis said she has heard from some of her mom's colleagues and former students, and their parents, who expressed how much Phillips-Russ meant to them.

She recalled her mother, a Cardinal O'Hara Catholic High School graduate, working hard to get degrees in education from Daemen College.

"She definitely was the motivation for me to become a special education teacher," said Curtis.

However, it was her mother's kindness that Curtis will treasure.

"When people were having a bad day, Cathy was the one who made sure everybody was OK. She'd bring them flowers or make a meal, if that's what it took," Curtis said.

Phillips-Russ also leaves behind her husband of 32 years, Stephen; another daughter, Margaret Russ; a sister, Elizabeth Marshall; four brothers, Joseph Phillips, John Phillips, Thomas Phillips and Paul Phillips; and a 12-year-old grandson, Cameron Curtis.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

The story of Covid-19's effects on Western New York has largely been one of mind-numbing data, provided day after day on a national, state, county and even municipal level.

But Sunday's death notices in The Buffalo News told a very different one: that of at least seven individuals who died of the disease, and Covid-19 was listed as the cause.

They were among dozens of other deaths, spread over nearly seven pages.

The victims of the virus, according to the death notices, included:

• Charles J. Fletch, a Wheatfield husband to Nancy, and father of five – Ashley, Angela, Lindsey, Kendra and Jodi.
• Denise Grenier, a 66-year-old Lovejoy woman, who was "not surrounded by family and friends" when she died on April 8, because of the social-distancing restrictions. She is survived by a son, Robin; sisters Deborah and Claudia; and brothers Lee and Kevin.
• George F. Manthey, a 92-year-old Navy veteran and former steelworker.
• A 72-year-old Buffalo native, John P. Verel, who had relocated to the New York City area in 1972 for a career in finance and then technology. He died in Connecticut.
• Lois A. Walck, an 82-year-old farmer from Niagara Falls who was married to her husband for 63 years.
• William L. Steck Jr., a retired Erie County corrections officer from East Aurora, whose family shared his story with The News last week.
• 93-year-old Renee C. Williams, who "valiantly fought Covid-19" at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, and "will be missed beyond any expression of words" by daughters Renee and Joan and by her son, Craig, according to her death notice.

That represents a fraction of the 9,400 people who have died statewide and more than 50 in Erie County since the outbreak began. Information was not available for all seven victims.

...

George Manthey died April 5, at age 92.

He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and earned a degree in engineering from Tufts University before embarking on a long career. He started at Worthington Pump, before moving on to Ryerson Steel and then U.S. Steel, from which he retired in 1991.

He was an active member of St. John Lutheran Church on Main Street in Williamsville, and also volunteered for organizations throughout Erie County, including Junior Achievement of Western New York, Red Cross, Meals on Wheels and the Food Shuttle of WNY. He helped start Little League Football in Clarence, and helped out with tax returns at the Clarence Senior Center.

He received the Erie County Senior Citizen Volunteer of the Year award in 2001.

Manthey was married to his wife, Ellen Jane, for 67 years, and had two children – Linda and John – plus four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

A celebration of life will be held at a later date, but donations may be made in his memory to St. John Lutheran Church.

His family could not be reached for additional comment.

...

Lois Walck died April 8, at age 82.

Born in Niagara Falls in 1937, she married her husband, Donald D. Walck, 63 years ago, and they ran their Lockport farm together. Lois operated farm equipment and did all the bookkeeping, among other roles, according to the death notice.

She was an "avid bowler" and competed both locally and nationally, winning "numerous trophies," the notice continued. She enjoyed taking photos and sharing them with others. She and her husband also enjoyed snowmobiling, boating and traveling to Florida and Australia.

The lifelong Lutheran was "an exceptionally generous, kind person who loved spending time with her family," the notice continued.

"Lois made friends wherever she went, and will be remembered as gracious, always having a smile on her face and bringing happiness to all who knew her," the notice said.

She is survived by her husband; her sister, Judith; her three daughters, Deborah, Donna and Doreen, as well as six grandchildren and one great-grandson.

Funeral services will be held later. Contributions may be made to the St. Peter's Lutheran Church or school in Sanborn.

Lives lost to Covid-19

Renee Williams led a simple life with her husband and three children, living in their ranch-style home in Clarence Center for more than 50 years.

“We were not well-to-do whatsoever growing up,” said Renee Sliwinski, Williams’ oldest child. “But one of the things she’s always enjoyed was Letchworth. She loved going down there as a child, and that would become our pilgrimage. Walking down to the lower falls and the flume was the cat’s meow for her.”

Williams was 93 when she died of Covid-19 on April 7 after a brief stay at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital in Amherst. She was transported there by ambulance from the Vinecroft Retirement Community in Clarence Center, where she had lived for only two years with her cat, Muppy.

“She was opinionated, driving right up to the end,” said her daughter. “We were seriously considering trying to take the keys away from her without starting a war. She liked that little bit of independence.”

During the short time Williams lived at the retirement center, she adapted nicely to its community lifestyle, exercising daily with her new friends, sharing meals, chatting.

Covid-19 put an end to community activities at the retirement center. Residents were advised to eat alone. They were asked not to congregate. Visitors were not allowed. Two weeks passed as phone conversations with her family grew shorter and less frequent, her daughter recalled.

“I think she started to get depressed, but come to find out, she wasn’t answering her cellphone because she did not know who was calling. She was in the throes of the virus by that time,” Sliwinski said.

“She was having a hard time breathing, but I really could only catch part of that on the phone. She didn’t have an appetite, and her mouth was dry," she added.

Williams was administered oxygen for three days, her daughter said.

“They tried antibiotics, anti-malarials, high doses of Vitamin C and Zinc, but she kept getting worse," Sliwinski said. "She did not want any extraordinary measures. She wanted to go in her sleep. Putting her on a ventilator wasn’t part of that process.”

In addition to her oldest daughter, Williams is survived by her son, Craig, and another daughter, Joan Genet; and numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren.

The family plans a celebration of her life in the future.

Even at 66, Denise Grenier of Buffalo liked to work.

Her son Robin said she was recruited years ago to be the officer manager for Amstar of Western New York, a painting company in Cheektowaga.

"She was really happy that at the age of 60 she was still a desirable employee," Robin said.

Denise Grenier loved Motown music, Marvin Gaye in particular, her son said. She loved her son, of course, and she loved her teacup poodle, Mr. T.

Her niece Dana Grenier Mancini said on Facebook that her aunt had a wonderful sense of humor.

"She could tell great stories about our family, her laugh always cracked me up," Mancini wrote. "She was the worst at family volleyball, but so was I and so was her son. So it was our thing."

During a family outing, someone recalled comedian Eddy Murphy's routine about his quirky relatives at a cookout and dubbed her "Aunt Bunny."

Robin Grenier lived in the South for many years but months ago he lost his job, moved back to Buffalo and settled in at his mother's house in Lovejoy.

"I'm happy that I got to spend these last months with her," he said.

During the week of March 16, Denise Grenier displayed the symptoms of a cold, but she was mostly lethargic. There was no fever or cough. By March 24 she was bed-ridden, and two days later her doctor prescribed an antibiotic, her son said.

On March 27, an ambulance took her to Mercy Hospital in South Buffalo. Soon after, she was placed on a ventilator at the facility set up by Catholic Health to focus on Covid-19 patients, the St. Joseph Campus of Sisters of Charity Hospital.

When a doctor called Robin Grenier to say nothing more could be done for her, he remembered what his mother told him years earlier when she imagined a situation like this: "Don't make me suffer."

She died Wednesday at the age of 66.

Her relatives have been processing their loss, each in their own way.

Then there's Mr. T, who was given a tough name because he weighed just 2 pounds when rescued years ago.

Mr. T, Grenier said, has been "very sad and depressed and is barely eating."

The story of Covid-19 is often told in numbers. On Sunday, it was told with names.

A former superintendent of Eden schools died of complications from coronavirus Wednesday, less than a week after he was among 41 residents of Father Baker Manor to test positive for Covid-19.

Donald D. Fregelette, 88, was believed to be the first Covid-19 death connected to the Orchard Park nursing home, where 25 employees also tested positive for the virus.

David Fregelette said his father developed severe respiratory problems within days of the test result and was transferred to Mercy Hospital on Monday.

He died with a nurse holding his hand, according to David Fregelette, who lauded hospital staff for the care they provided.

“The nurses and staff there went above and beyond anything we could have hoped or imagined,” he said. “It was incredible to me.”

With no visitors allowed into the room, nurses used their own phones so Donald Fregelette could FaceTime with his children and grandchildren. Several of them joined with the family in reciting the Our Father and Hail Mary during the calls, said David Fregelette.

In the hours before Donald Fregelette died, a nurse held his hand and spoke with his son on the phone.

“She wanted to know all about his life. She wanted to be as much a family, while we couldn’t be there, as she could be for him,” said David Fregelette.

He said his father then told the nurse he was ready “to go give my wife a hug now.” AnnaMarie Fregelette died in 2015.

David Fregelette said he does not blame Father Baker Manor, which had the highest number of known cases related to a single Western New York facility since the pandemic began.

Nursing home staff did everything they could to ward against the virus entering the facility, including washing and disinfecting any personal items brought there by family members, he said.

“I never got the feeling they were lax or weren’t taking things seriously,” he said.

David Fregelette said his father was healthy and independent and only ended up in the rehabilitation unit at Father Baker Manor after breaking his hip in a fall on March 16. He received a partial hip replacement at Mercy Hospital and was transferred to the nursing home on March 21, David Fregelette said.

Donald Fregelette, pronounced Fridge-aletti, served as superintendent of Eden Central School District from 1984 to 1990. He was principal of the high school for 14 years before that.

He was remembered this week by community members and former students as a caring and fair leader.

"He treated everybody fairly," said Mark Clark, who graduated from Eden High School in 1974. "He wasn't a dictator. He was never like that.”

Mark Schwippert responded to Clark’s post on Facebook about the death, saying Fregelette was a “great person and made a positive impact for all Eden students."

"My favorite principal," wrote Bob Reed.

"He was a good man," added Barbara Perez.

David Fregelette said everyone in Eden knew him and his four siblings growing up, “whether we knew them or not, because of who our father was.”

Donald Fregelette was born and raised in North Collins, the son of the town dentist. He served in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany during the Korean War. He was a graduate of Canisius College and began in education in 1955 as a social studies teacher. In retirement, Fregelette remained active in the Eden community, particularly at Immaculate Conception Church, where he was a longtime member.

In addition to his son, David, he is survived by a daughter, Cathy Schneider; three more sons, James, Donald and John; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Woman discharged from Father Baker Manor now in Covid-19 hospital

Aug. 15, 1924 – April 8, 2020

Shirley Dell’Amico, who in mid-life earned college degrees and had a lengthy career as a counselor for marginalized people, died April 8 at Garden Gate Nursing Home in Cheektowaga. She was 95.

Her family said the cause of death was the Covid-19 virus and cardiac arrest.

While raising her four children, Mrs. Dell’Amico worked part-time at the University at Buffalo for anthropology professor Marvin Opler and decided to attend night classes.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UB in 1971 and a master’s degree in 1976, then began working as a counselor in the Erie County Holding Center.

During a session with two inmates in the late 1970s, they took her hostage in an attempt to escape. The ordeal lasted only a few hours.

Her son Len recalls asking her, “Of course, you’re not going to go back to work there, right?” Her answer, he said, was “Of course, I am.”

She went on to work for Horizon Human Services as a forensic mental health counselor for outpatients.

Barry Berghaus, a colleague from Horizon, recalled, “First, she knew about criminals, everything about criminals. How they thought, how they talked, how they posed and how they lied. Second, she had a sense of humor about it all, which ... was the only way to do the job.”

After Horizon, she worked at Depth Inc., a non-profit agency that assisted the homeless, volunteered at a hospice for AIDS patients and worked as an activities aide at several assisted living facilities.

She continued working part-time with seniors, some of whom were younger than her, until she was 89. She played piano and led sing-a-longs, conducted exercise classes and organized discussions about current affairs.

Born Shirley Louise Ellis in Buffalo, she developed a love of music as a child.

“Grandma took her to bars on the East Side or Fruit Belt where she remembered loving the foot-stomping music she was exposed to while her mom played cards,” her son Fred said.

She saved money from her baby-sitting jobs, bought a new upright piano when she was 18 and learned to read music. She later learned guitar and recorder and particularly enjoyed traditional blues and folk music.

A typist at Curtiss-Wright during World War II, she met an engineer there, Fred Dell’Amico. They were married in 1946.

He went on to work for Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories, later Calspan, then oversaw track work and purchases of rail cars for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority during construction of the Metro Rail system. He died in 1990.

A longtime Snyder resident, she was an avid reader and was known for her cooking.

Survivors include a daughter, Louisa; another son and a granddaughter.

A celebration of her life will be arranged at a later date.

As confirmed Covid-19 cases multiplied at the Father Baker Manor nursing home in Orchard Park, Grace D'Angelo Tutton's first test for the deadly virus came back negative.

That was on April 4. Two days later, Tutton had a fever and the following day her doctor reported she tested positive for Covid-19, said daughter Judy Manchester-Vassie.

The 93-year-old's condition deteriorated quickly. When her family asked for a chance to say goodbye, the home arranged for them to meet from a safe distance.

Tutton's relatives on April 8 gathered on the sidewalk garbed in masks, gloves and gowns. Staff wheeled her just outside, hooked up to oxygen and covered in blankets for warmth.

They sang "Hey Good Lookin' " to her, a family tradition at birthdays. "We were hoping she would hear this," Manchester-Vassie said. "We don't know."

By the next morning, Tutton had died at the nursing home, where 25 staff and more than 40 residents tested positive for the virus.

She had moved into Father Baker Manor in December, after living for about eight years in the Embark at Orchard Glen senior apartments with her second husband, Duncan Tutton, who died last August.

The Kenmore High School sweethearts reconnected at a reunion about 30 years ago, Manchester-Vassie said.

Born Grace Woodall Smith, Tutton studied nursing at Buffalo General Hospital, where she later worked. She and her first husband, the late Dr. Joseph D'Angelo, raised five children in Orchard Park, where she was popular with neighborhood kids.

"They called her 'Mrs. D,' or 'the kissing grandma,' " Manchester-Vassie said.

After her children had grown, Tutton earned a nursing degree at Trocaire College and worked at Our Lady of Victory Hospital.

Divorced from her first husband, she moved to North Carolina around 1990 after marrying Tutton. She helped out at horse farms there and taught English to the children of migrant workers.

In this area, where the Tuttons returned around 2011, she was active with the Orchard Park Symphony, Hamburg Garden Club and the Orchard Park Community Church.

A great-great-grandmother, she enjoyed international travel, writing letters and playing Scrabble.

"She was the most generous person," Manchester-Vassie said.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

41 Father Baker Manor residents, 25 staff test positive for Covid-19

Kenneth Whigham Sr. loved sports. It didn't matter whether they were professional, amateur or youth league level.

"He was a huge Bills fan, and he also was a youth football coach for the Buffalo Vets for 10 years,” said his cousin, Vince Staples. “And then, after coaching, he became one of our administrators with the Buffalo Vets."

Whigham, 54, a retired transportation supervisor with a school bus transportation company, died April 10 in Buffalo General Medical Center from Covid-19, his cousin said.

Whigham, a Buffalo resident, was recovering from a stroke he suffered in 2018 when he was diagnosed with Covid-19, said Staples.

"He was home; he didn't go out. He had a few visitors, but he was following the guidelines. It just came out of nowhere," Staples said of the virus.

Whigham had a dry cough that lingered for four days before family members convinced him to go to the hospital April 5. Whigham was taken by the eldest of his four adult children, Kenneth Jr.

"My hat's off to the fine people at Buffalo General Hospital. They did all they could to help my cousin," Staples said.

Staples described Whigham as a respectful, caring guy.

"He believed in helping those who needed a helping hand. So it was nothing for him to go out of his way to pick up a coworker and help them get back and forth to work when they didn't have ample transportation," Staples said.

When Whigham, a 1987 graduate of Kensington High School, coached youth football, he also served as a mentor to the youth, some of whom he also helped get employment years later at the school bus company, Staples added.

Whigham was a member of True Bethel Baptist Church, whose pastor, the Rev. Darius Pridgen, also battled Covid-19 but is recovering.

Staples said he does not know if his cousin spent time on a ventilator when he was hospitalized, because family members were prohibited from visiting him in the intensive care unit.

"The more people that hear how quickly this can come about and take over someone, you know, maybe we can slow the spread going forward," he said.

As a boy growing up in South Buffalo some 70 years ago, Salvatore Sedita looked up to his sister, who was nine years older.

Mary took him places, helped care for him, and had his back.

"She was like a second mother to me," he said, when asked to recall the woman who died days ago with Covid-19.

They had remained close as the decades flew by, and he would usually visit her on Sundays, after church.

This year, Mary Sedita's health, at 90, was especially frail. She was convalescing in the Father Baker Manor nursing facility in Orchard Park – where 41 residents and 25 employees have tested positive for Covid-19 – when she developed pneumonia, Salvatore Sedita said.

She was placed in Mercy Hospital where she, too, was confirmed to have the virus, he said. But Mary Sedita already had signed a document indicating she wanted no heroic efforts taken to save her life, and she did not want to be intubated.

She was returned to Father Baker Manor, where she received medication and oxygen but nothing else to deal with the virus, Sedita said. She died Friday.

Mary Helen Sedita was a distant cousin to the branch of the family that gave Buffalo a mayor, Frank A. Sedita, and two judges, Frank A. Sedita III and the late Frank A. Sedita Jr.

She graduated from South Park High School and Rochester Institute of Technology, her brother said. She worked as a loan officer for HSBC Bank and was active in the Democratic Women's Club of Western New York.

She married and divorced. There were no children. For much of her life she lived alone.

The siblings saw each other at least once a week, Salvatore Sedita said, and Sunday mornings were a typical time to gather. Asked how he will remember his big sister, Sedita said he would remember the role she played in his upbringing.

"When I was really little, it was she who would take me to the circus and to shows and to things like that," he said.

He also remembered her as a private person.

"She probably would get mad at me for talking to you," he said.

The grieving family of 77-year-old Ellen E. Booker, who died of Covid-19 on Friday in a Cheektowaga nursing home, called on the state Health Department to publicly identify nursing homes where the virus has spread and disclose the number of cases at each facility.

Under pressure from the family and media, the McGuire Group on Tuesday released the number of novel coronavirus cases at Garden Gate Health Care Facility, where Booker lived, and at two of its other local nursing homes that have reported cases.

Forty-two residents are infected with the virus at Garden Gate, 46 at Harris Hill and 23 at Seneca Health Care Center. The McGuire Group reported no cases at its Autumn View Health Care Facility and Northgate Health Care Facility.

State officials also appear poised to reverse their policy of not identifying nursing homes where Covid-19 cases have occurred.

The officials indicated Tuesday that they are developing a plan to publicly release the names of those nursing homes. But details of when and how that will happen were not released.

As of Tuesday, 2,200 nursing home residents across the state died from the virus, an increase of more than 750 since Booker died.

The state Health Department also reported 346 nursing homes have a total of 5,894 coronavirus cases. As of last Friday, 319 facilities had a total of 4,630 cases.

If New York State identifies nursing homes with Covid-19 cases, it will follow the lead of other states, including Connecticut, Ohio, and Rhode Island. Los Angeles County is also releasing such information.

The first indication that the state may change course came during Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s briefing earlier Tuesday. His long-time adviser Dr. James Malatras said a review of nursing home virus statistics was underway to address privacy concerns.

“We just want to go through the data and make sure we’re not releasing any potential personal information, and as soon as that’s done, that will be made available for people,” said Malatras, president of SUNY Empire State College.

Advocates for nursing home residents have also called on the state to identify facilities with cases of the virus so that the public can be aware of potential dangers.

“The failure to ensure that residents, families and the public are informed about Covid-19 cases in our nursing homes and adult homes has only served to raise alarm and panic in communities across the state,” said Richard J. Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition in New York City.

The Booker family dealt with conflicting information from Garden Gate on whether Ellen Booker, a former Hamburg resident, was infected and also a lack of information on her condition and what was being done to protect her and other residents, according to a family spokeswoman. That's what prompted the family to call on the state to change its policy.

“When I finally got through to my grandmother last week, they brought her to the phone at the nursing station and she couldn’t even speak," said Keely Booker, a granddaughter. "I asked her how she was doing. Her words were muffled, they weren’t even words.”

McGuire Group spokeswoman Dawn M. Harsch said staff members at all of its facilities "maintain continuous communication with our residents and their family members."

But the Bookers and other families with residents in area nursing homes and assisted living facilities have complained to The News about a lack of information pertaining to Covid-19 cases.

“I waited Saturday for an update on my mom at Garden Gate and they left me on hold for 15 minutes," said Donna Lee of her mother Barbara Celotto, who had previously tested positive for the coronavirus. "The next time I heard from them was later that night to tell me they were sending her to Buffalo General.”

Lee said her mother, who has a heart condition and a form of blood cancer, was supposed to be transferred to Buffalo General Medical Center if she consumed five units of oxygen.

“The emergency room doctor told me she came in at six units. How neglectful," Lee said. "Thank God she is responding well to treatment and is currently out of the intensive care unit. When will this end? What are they hiding?”

Keely Booker said that her father was notified on Tuesday of last week by Garden Gate that his mother had tested positive for Covid-19.

“About 10 minutes later, he received a call from a social worker at Garden Gate who told him that they were doing everything to prevent her from getting the virus, even though he had just received a call telling him that she had it," she said. "I believe they were trying to cover it up.”

Asked to respond to the Keely Booker's statement, Harsch issued this statement:

"We can confirm that she was Covid positive and passed away at Garden Gate. As with all of our residents, Ellen was like family to our staff and we mourn her loss.”

The News has requested the number of deaths from Covid-19 at Garden Gate but has not received a response.

Buffalo News Albany bureau chief Tom Precious contributed to this story

This was always Ronald Wagner’s busy time of year.

After retiring from the railroad, he opened a tax preparation business. So he was in the office a lot in the run-up to April 15.

This year, as March wore on, he came down with what he thought was a cold. But it was the novel coronavirus.

He died around 5 a.m. on Easter Sunday at age 70.

“The last time we ever got to see him was when we put him in the ambulance,” said David Wagner, one of his sons.

Ronald Wagner and his wife, Amy Ann, had been married for 46 years. They had two sons, David and Joseph. There are three grandchildren and a fourth on the way.

True to his roots, he loved the Sabres, the Bills, the Buffalo Bandits, and he loved to bowl. It didn’t hurt that he lived a stone's throw from the Spare Time Bowling Center in Cheektowaga. He took pride in the fact Joseph has bowled 28 perfect games, David Wagner said.

He loved golf, too, and during the first week of June each year he and David would travel to the Cross Creek Resort in Titusville, Pa.

"It was our chance to have some father-son time," David Wagner said. They'd play their rounds and later relax over a Crown Royal, the father's whiskey of choice.

After retiring as a yard master for CSX, Ronald Wagner opened “Taxes by Ron,” which operated out of a house converted into commercial space in Cheektowaga.

The cold he caught in March steadily worsened. On April 2, David Wagner got a call from his mother. His father was having a hard time breathing.

The ambulance took him to Mercy Hospital. He was in its intensive care unit on April 4 when a test showed he had Covid-19. He was soon after placed on a ventilator at the St. Joseph Campus set up for Covid-19 patients.

The family could only wait for rare calls from a nurse or doctor.

On Sunday, David Wagner posted this on Twitter: "Today my dad lost his battle with Covid-19. It is a terrible way to go being alone and the family is not allowed to see their loved ones. I love you dad."

He said he'd raise a glass of Crown Royal that night in his father's memory.

Anthony Olivieri liked physical work almost as much as he liked people.

And Olivieri, a lifelong Buffalonian who died Monday at age 92 from Covid-19 at Garden Gate Health Care Facility in Cheektowaga, was liked by many.

"Uncle Tony was probably one of the gentlest persons you would ever come across – kind, considerate, hardworking," said Kathy Enstrom, a niece. "He just was a super, super man, a wonderful man."

Olivieri had a difficult childhood. Following his mother's death when he was 7, he and two older brothers lived with his father while other siblings moved in with relatives. Olivieri studied small motors and welding at the former Technical High School (now Hutch-Tech) before leaving school at 16 to drive a coal truck for an uncle's business.

Olivieri later worked at Bethlehem Steel as a crane operator. He also ran a part-time landscaping and lawn care business with relatives, Oliver's Landscaping, that continued after he left the steel plant in 1983.

Olivieri was a member of the Masonic Fraternity for 53 years, mostly at the Eggertsville-Grand Island Masonic Lodge where he served as master twice and district deputy grand master. With the Western Star Lodge in Lackawanna, he was awarded the Wendell Walker Medal for lifetime contributions. In October he was named Masonic grand chaplain for the State of New York.

Olivieri was at Garden Gate nursing home rehabbing from a broken hip when he tested positive for Covid-19 on April 6, his wife said.

That nursing home has had more Covid-19 deaths than any other in Erie County, as of Wednesday, and it said Tuesday that 42 residents had tested positive.

Jean Olivieri, his wife of 28 years who shared a home with him in West Seneca, said Garden Gate allowed her to spend time with her husband on his last day.

"I have had the privilege of being his wife for close to 30 years," Jean Olivieri said. "He loved everybody and never met a person he didn't like. He always saw the good in everybody."

Olivieri was preceded in death by his first wife, the former Doris Swiderski.

His survivors also include a son, Richard; a daughter, Shirley, two sisters, Marie Catapano and Roseanne Felger; two grandchildren; and three grant-grandchildren.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about Buffalo area people who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

Feb. 17, 1939 – April 15, 2020

"John Pfahl could make even a heap of garbage look beautiful."

That's how Buffalo News Art Critic Richard Huntington in 2000 summed up the humorous, inspired work of John Pfahl, whom Huntington described as "one of the most widely esteemed of Buffalo's nationally recognized photographers."

Making garbage look beautiful, Huntington wrote, was what Mr. Pfahl did in his 1992 series, "From the Very Rich Hours of a Compost Pile." Huntington wrote, "Watermelon rinds, orange peels, bean pods, cabbage leaves and other assorted table scraps in various stages of decomposition are discovered by Pfahl's flawless eye to be the unlikely source of ravishing displays of color and quite rational compositions."

Mr. Pfahl died April 15 in Sisters Hospital. He had survived lymphoma in 1990 and "had multiple life-threatening conditions which were exacerbated to the point of death by Covid-19," his family said. He was 81.

"I want to make photographs whose very ambiguity provokes thought, rather than cuts it off prematurely," Mr. Pfahl once said. "I want to make pictures that work on a more mysterious level, that approach the truth by a more circuitous route."

For his 1994-1998 "Piles" series, Mr. Pfahl photographed a topsoil pile at a nursery, sand piles on the Buffalo Ship Canal and heaps of leaves and car tires.

"Ansel Adams had his beloved Sierras," Mr. Pfahl said at the time. "I seek out the more elusive mountains on the lake plain near my home in Buffalo, New York. I try to imbue these piles of raw and recycled materials, through judicious use of light, atmosphere and scale, with the majesty of mountains I recall from summers in the Rockies and the Alps."

"John Pfahl was undeniably Buffalo's most revered and accomplished photographer, who was widely admired and respected for his creative talent and generosity of spirit," said Gerald Mead, an artist, curator and lecturer in the Art and Design Department at SUNY Buffalo State who has collected Mr. Pfahl's work for 25 years. "His artistic legacy is justifiably preserved in numerous museum and private collections in Western New York, across the U.S. and abroad."

Born in New York City, the first of two sons of German immigrants Hans and Anna Gerhardt Pfahl, he grew up in Wanaque, N.J.

He was given his first camera, a baby Brownie, when he was 8, but according to his biography posted by the Janet Borden Gallery in Brooklyn, "soon appropriated his mother's 35 mm Voigtlander."

After winning a scholarship to Syracuse University, Mr. Pfahl studied advertising design, but some elective courses in photography altered his career path. He earned a bachelor's degree in art in 1961, then hitchhiked around Europe for a summer. He served two years in the Army with an engineering battalion in Fort Belvoir, Va., before being discharged in 1963.

He worked as assistant to photographers in New York City and Los Angeles, then married Bonnie Gordon, a Buffalo native, in the late 1960s in Albuquerque, N.M. In the early 1970s, they moved to Buffalo for Mrs. Pfahl's job as professor of design at Buffalo State.

Mr. Pfahl earned a master's degree from the Syracuse University School of Communications in 1968, the same year he began teaching at the School of Photography at Rochester Institute of Technology, where he became a full professor.

From 1983 to 1984, he was a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and in 1985 he retired from RIT to concentrate on his photography. He continued to contribute a scholarship each year to an RIT student.

In 1992, referring to Mr. Pfahl's "Waterfalls," Huntington wrote, "John Pfahl is so subtle it hurts. In almost painfully beautiful images, he first tells us that nature – the 'sublime' nature of the past century – is no more."

For "Permutations on the Picturesque," he photographed pastoral scenes in Wales, Great Britain and Italy, then scanned his images and manipulated them, sometimes making the sky more dramatic "or placing sheep in the meadow to make the scene more pastoral," wrote News reviewer Mark Lavatelli in 1999. "To remind viewers that these are digital prints, he included narrow bands of enlarged pixels."

For his series "Extreme Horticulture," wrote Huntington, Mr. Pfahl "subtly, and with great ingenuity, imposes his own subversive view by pointing up small but surprising visual occurrences."

In 1990, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery organized a major retrospective of his work, "A Distanced Land: The Photographs of John Pfahl," which was shown in Chicago, Los Angeles and Atlanta. His most recent exhibition, "Lake to Lake" with Amos W. Sangster, ran from April to January in the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University.

His work is held in many collections, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

His work was exhibited across the country and he had solo exhibitions all over the world, including Paris, Milan, Belgium, Ottawa, Tokyo, Germany and Spain. Locally, he exhibited at the Albright-Knox, the Nina Freudenheim Gallery and the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

He also was involved with Artpark in Lewiston from 1974 to 1984.

In 2009, he was named educator of the year at the Dallas conference of the Society for Photographic Education. In 1975 and 1990, he received National Endowment for the Arts photographer's fellowships. He was given an honorary doctorate of fine arts in 1979 by Niagara University.

Mr. Pfahl enjoyed gardening, travel, was a "passionate fan" of opera and classical music and had "a deep interest in people," his family said. He also had "a very silly side to his humor," said his wife, Bonnie Gordon.

Survivors also include a brother, Walter, two nieces and two nephews.

His family said plans for services are on hold.

Thomas E. Cullen, known worldwide as a rare book collector and dealer, worried he was vulnerable to Covid-19.

Cullen, 86, was in a nursing home, couldn’t walk and had diabetes – all of which increased his risk of catching the virus and dying from it.

He expressed his concern weeks ago in a phone call with his younger brother, Patrick.

“His immediate comment to me on the phone was, ‘I’m in trouble,’ ” Patrick Cullen recalled. “He knew he fit the description.”

Thomas Cullen ended up being among the 41 residents of Father Baker Manor in Orchard Park who tested positive for Covid-19 in early April. He died April 15 in the nursing home, where he had been living since June.

Cullen was an expert on rare manuscripts and books, especially incunabula, or pre-printing press books, and early hand water-colored illustrated books, and he even sold some of his books to the Library of Congress, according to Patrick Cullen, who described his brother as “brilliant.”

“He could tell you about just about any book that’s ever been printed,” he said.

Born in Buffalo, Cullen was raised in Cattaraugus. His lifelong book collecting hobby started early on when he offered to clean out the barns and garages of customers on his newspaper route, in exchange for what he found inside.

“And, so, he had one of the greatest comic book collections in the county,” said his brother.

After graduating in 1955 from St. Bonaventure University, Cullen worked as a rocket fuel scientist for Olin Matheson Corp., conducting research on solid propellants for satellites and defense systems. He later worked in pesticide research and was vice president of Crompton & Knowles, a dye company in Reading, Pa. He returned to Cattaraugus in 1982 to work as vice president of the Bank of Cattaraugus with his brother, Patrick, who was bank president for 37 years.

Cullen retired in 1996 and relocated in 2003 to Orchard Park with his wife, Carol, to be closer to their daughter. They were married for 56 years when Carol died in 2015.

A serious infection in his foot landed Cullen in the hospital in 2019 and led to his becoming a resident at Father Baker Manor, according to Patrick Cullen, who said the nursing home took very good care of his brother.

Patrick Cullen said he and his family pray every evening before dinner for the nursing home staff and residents.

Patrick talked with his brother by phone a few days before he died.

“He said, ‘I’m fine.’ But it was a weak, ‘I’m fine,' ” he said. “So, he knew what was up.”

In addition to his brother, Cullen is survived by two daughters, Christina Wooten and Jennifer Bush; a sister, Barbara Rauh; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Edward C. "Ed" Ortiz – part of the original Slo-Pokes group that started the races in a Niagara County field in the 1950s that led to Ransomville Speedway – lost count of the number of victory laps he'd taken during his three decades of competition. Then he and his children tallied his wins and learned that he had exactly 199.

Mr. Ortiz was 66 and had been retired from racing for 17 years at the time, but his children, including his sons Jipper and Ed, both racers, convinced him to try for a final win. So in 1998, Mr. Ortiz got behind the wheel of Jipper's DIRT Pro Stock car for one more shot at Ransomville Speedway. He placed second in the 20-lap race and was happy enough.

Then, said motorsport writer John Bisci, "the track officials sought him out. The winner’s car was illegal and the driver was disqualified. Ed had his 200th win after all."

Mr. Ortiz, a lifelong resident of Ransomville, died April 16 in Buffalo General Medical Center of Covid-19. The longtime operator of Ed’s Garage on Youngstown Lockport Road was 88.

Mr. Ortiz was one of 15 friends in the Slo-Pokes Car Club who started racing in Niagara County in 1955, first in an oval cut into a field behind his father's car dealership. Soon, "these impromptu jalopy races were turning into a big deal for the locals," said Bisci, a Buffalo native and director of public relations for World Wide Technology Raceway in Illinois.

After four years of raising dust and growing crowds protected only by a snow fence, Mr. Ortiz's father told the young racers they had to go elsewhere. The club raised the money to purchase the land where Ransomville Speedway opened in 1958.

He was the first American to win a track championship at Merrittville (Ont.) Speedway in 1961. He also won track championships at Ransomville Speedway in 1962, Canandaigua in 1962 and 1963, Lancaster Speedway on asphalt in 1966 and Rolling Wheels Speedway in Elbridge in 1971.

He was named 1962 NASCAR New York State Sportsman champion and was inducted into the DIRT Mortorsports Hall of Fame in 1999.

In 2007, he told The Buffalo News, "I guess we really didn't think that when we started the Slo-Pokes that one day we would become a little part of local history, but I guess we have."

A U.S. Army veteran of the Korean Conflict, he married Betty Lasher in 1957. He is survived by her; two sons, Jipper and John; a daughter, Ronnie Lippincott; a brother, Rick; seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. A memorial service will be held at a later date.

Charles “Big Wheelie” Vicario Jr. had rock ‘n’ roll in his soul.

The leather-clad frontman became a fixture on local stages for nearly 50 years, leading his band “the Hubcaps” through oldies medleys that brought audiences to their feet.

Music kept him young, said Vicario, who was 72 when he announced his retirement in 2019.

Vicario died April 18 in Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital after battling Covid-19, according to his wife, Candice M. Vicario.

Candice Vicario, who also contracted Covid-19, chronicled her husband’s struggle with the virus in a series of Facebook posts.

“My husband Chuck and I both have Covid-19. I am recovering at home. Chuck is in the hospital and struggling he may be headed for ICU soon,” Vicario’s wife said in post on April 5 that was shared 1,300 times.

In her final post on the day her husband died, Candice Vicario expressed gratitude to healthcare professionals “who took care of him and helped our daughters and I say goodbye via video chat.”

Vicario rallied more than once during his hospital stay, his wife said. He rallied in life also.

In 2012, he was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident after the Harley-Davidson he was riding collided with a van. Unable to perform, Vicario spent two years in rehabilitation that he capped with a song he wrote about his comeback.

Prior to the Hubcaps, Vicario sang in local bands Caesar and the Romans and Friendship Train. He  shared the stage with recording stars including Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison and Little Richard.

In 1985, he was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame. His '50s show, along the order of Sha Na Na, spurred a number of albums that led to a national tour.

Vicario and his band were a staple at M&T Bank's Plaza Event summer series and performed at many benefit concerts and entertainment venues throughout Western New York.

In his later years, he worked as a wellness advocate for a local health insurance provider.

Vicario spent his childhood in Riverside and Kenmore, and married the former Candice Martino. They lived in the Town of Tonawanda, have two children and many grandchildren.

Their son Charles Vicario III died at age 34 in August 2007.

Pamela McCrory was the kind of person who made everyone better just by knowing her.

She had a strong work ethic, a giddy laugh and a generous and caring heart.

McCrory, 56, died April 18 from Covid-19 after seemingly being on the upswing from the novel coronavirus she came down with two weeks earlier. Things took a turn for the worse that afternoon, and she died early that evening shortly after being taken by ambulance from her South Buffalo home to Mercy Hospital.

"The ambulance asked if she wanted to go to the hospital and she said yes," her husband, William, said. "And that was the last time I saw her."

The former Pamela Janusz was born in Jamestown and grew up in Cheektowaga. Shortly after graduating from West Seneca East, where she played intramural basketball, she got a job at Sisters Hospital washing pots and pans. She later became dietary supervisor, a job she held for 30 of her 38 years at the hospital.

"Pam was a very strong and stable person, someone you could really rely on," said Karen Ostrum, director of food and nutrition services at Mercy Hospital. "She was well respected by the people she worked with, and never asked someone to do something she wouldn't do herself. She really looked out for other people, and they recognized that in her.

"She wanted nothing more than to be happy, and she really took pleasure in very small things. She also tried to find humor in almost anything," Ostrum said.

William McCrory, her husband of 38 years, said his wife took care of "everything," including tending to their daughter Gabrielle, who turned 18 the day her mother died.

"I would hand her my check after keeping my cut for my own spending, and she did the rest," McCrory said. "She cooked, she cleaned, shopped, worked her own full-time job, ran my daughter around to her sports stuff, doctors appointments, you name it. She did everything."

The couple, who spent most of their years together in South Buffalo, worked together on several occasions to raise money for disabled American veterans.

"I can't stress enough that she would give the shirt off her back for whatever she got involved in," McCrory said. "She would do anything for anybody, and she loved that kid beyond belief," he said of their daughter.

Pamela McCrory loved animals and owned multiple cats and dogs over the years, as well as a horse. She also enjoyed cooking.

"We didn't have basic meals," William McCrory said. "It was all kinds of stuff. She wanted to try everything."

L. Carol Miceli turned her love of sewing into a business that helped pay the bills as she and her husband, a letter carrier, raised their three children in the Town of Tonawanda.

The former L. Carol Yunke, a native of Buffalo’s Fruit Belt neighborhood, could walk into a drapery store, study the design of the window treatments and go home and create the same drapes and valances.

Her remarkable talents provided her only daughter with many memories of Miceli, whose long and happy life ended abruptly after she contracted Covid-19 at a Lancaster nursing home.

On April 18, Miceli, 86, died at Kenmore Mercy Hospital in the Town of Tonawanda three days after she was transferred there from Harris Hill Nursing Facility, Jody A. Toth said of her mother.

“I was glad she was sent to Kenmore Mercy. They let me visit twice. I’d talk to her even though she was unconscious and on morphine. But her heart rate would increase when I was there and the nurses would say, ‘Jody, she knows you are here.’ I took comfort in that,” Toth said.

Even the approximately 14 months Miceli lived at the Harris Hill nursing home before falling victim to the virus were filled with joy because of her love for people, Toth said.

“She would get the quiet ones out of their rooms to participate in the activities,” Toth said. “She was very social.”

Helping weave the social fabric among senior citizens who are sometimes forgotten was only one of Miceli's talents.

While raising her family and working from her Carpenter Avenue home on window treatments, Miceli’s reputation spread throughout the Tonawandas and beyond, according to her daughter.

“People who lived in the expensive homes on Nottingham Terrace in Buffalo were contacting her to decorate their windows,” Toth said.

Miceli’s family members were more than impressed when their old leather couch, in need of renovation, was made new by her.

“She took it apart and used the pieces as a pattern and reupholstered it,” Toth said, “and she had never upholstered anything before that.”

The self-taught seamstress, a 1951 graduate of Girls Vocational High School in Buffalo, also shared her sewing skills with clubs at Kenmore East High School, when her daughter was a student there.

“She made uniforms for the majorettes, the dancers and the color guard,” said Toth, who served as a flag carrier with the Kenmore East color guard.

But after decades of raising a family and working, Miceli decided step back from her window treatment business and enjoy life with her husband, Joseph R. Miceli, to whom she was married for 50 years, the daughter said. He died in 2004.

In addition to her daughter, Miceli is survived by sons Jay J. and Joel R.; nine grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren.

A Mass of Christian Burial was celebrated Saturday at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in the Town of Tonawanda.

Aug. 23, 1932 – April 19, 2020

Bruce D. Burr spent 36 years working at Smallwood Drive School in Snyder – most of it as principal – before retiring in 1994.

"He adored that school," said one of his daughters, Elizabeth B. Elliott.

And the feeling was mutual.

"No matter where my parents traveled, people would recognize them – 'Dr. Burr, Dr. Burr!'" said his daughter.

Luckily, the longtime principal had a gift for remembering names and faces, so even if the student had graduated 20 years earlier, he could greet them by name, his family said.

A resident of Asbury Pointe, Getzville, he died April 19 in Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, Amherst, after being hospitalized 10 days earlier with Covid-19. He was 87.

"As a principal, his administrative style was to find excellent teachers, create an environment where they could thrive, and then let them teach," said his son, Peter A. Burr. "He took great pride in the high quality of education provided by Smallwood Elementary School. He was grateful for the support of Smallwood School District residents, which he deemed a very important factor in the success of the students."

An Army veteran who led the school in the Pledge of Allegiance at every assembly, Dr. Burr loved camping, hiking and nature study, and was a supporter of Smallwood Drive School's Outdoor Education curriculum. An Eagle Scout, he volunteered as assistant scoutmaster for Troop 278 for a short time.

He was born in Buffalo, the first of two sons of Harold Llewellyn Burr and Alice Strebe Burr.

He graduated in 1950 from Kensington High School, where he played intramural basketball, football and baseball and was the 1950 Buffalo All-High Chess Champion, as well as a Buffalo All-High Tennis Doubles Champion.

Dr. Burr earned his bachelor's degree magna cum laude in elementary education at Buffalo State Teachers College in 1955, then taught for a year in North Tonawanda before entering the Army.

He served until late 1957 as a Private 1st Class in the Intelligence School at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, and was an instructor in counter-intelligence.

In 1961, Dr. Burr earned a master's degree magna cum laude from Buffalo State and in 1970 a doctorate from the University at Buffalo.

On May 28, 1955, he married Barbara C. Scheitinger in Buffalo. They raised their children in Snyder.

"Every summer, we took a trip somewhere – all five of us and the dog!" said their daughter Elizabeth. The trips were typically to a national park or place of historical significance, such as Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Williamsburg or Gettysburg. "After all, there was always learning to be had!" she said.

Dr. Burr began his 36-year career at Smallwood Drive Elementary School in 1958, when he was hired as a teacher, a position he held for one school year. The next year, at 27, he became assistant principal. He was principal of the school from 1975 until he retired in June 1994.

In 1961, he received a National Science Foundation Grant for math education and spent the summer taking classes at Rutgers University.

He received a State Administrator’s Award for his support of the Smallwood School library and in 2013, received a Distinguished Educator Emeritus Award from the Amherst Central Schools Alumni Foundation.

Dr. Burr was an active member of the Buffalo State Alumni Foundation, which founded the Burchfield Center at Buffalo State in 1966. He was chairman of the Buffalo State Alumni Board in 1967. He was an adjunct professor at Canisius College, where he taught graduate level education courses.

He was a longtime member and served in leadership positions at Christ United Methodist Church in Snyder.

"He was a humble, modest man," said Elizabeth Elliott. "His faith was very important to him."

In retirement, he and his wife enjoyed traveling. An avid toy train collector, with most of his collection dating from his childhood, he especially enjoyed leading train trips for toy train enthusiasts in Europe and the United States.

He and his wife volunteered at Friends of the Night People and Habitat for Humanity.

The Burrs spent summers at the Chautauqua Institution, where they assisted with the renovation of the United Methodist House, for which he served as president of the Board of Trustees.

The couple spent winters in Dunedin, Fla., and were avid antiques collectors.

He was an accomplished bridge player and enjoyed golf. He adored his grandchildren and rarely missed a game, concert, play or event, his family said.

Besides Barbara Burr, his wife of nearly 65 years, he is survived by two daughters, Carolyn S. and Elizabeth B.; a son, Peter A.; and five grandchildren.

The family is planning a memorial service at his church at a later date.

Joseph A. Palmeri was a high school science teacher who was fascinated by worlds far beyond our own.

On clear nights, he would spend hours outside his City of Tonawanda home, gazing through one of his many telescopes at the stars and planets.

“Anything to do with planets, space, Star Trek, unidentified flying objects – he was fascinated with all that stuff,” recalled Thomas Palmeri, one of his sons. “He loved sitting out there with his telescopes. He also enjoyed conspiracy theories.”

Palmeri, 76, became one of the region’s Covid-19 victims on April 19, when he died at the Weinberg Campus senior community in Amherst.

“What made losing him so much tougher was not being able to be there with him when he died,” said Kristen Palmeri, his daughter. “Because of state regulations, I was not able to visit him for the last month of his life. It’s really upsetting that so many of these Covid-19 victims are dying all alone.”

She said she was able to talk with her father by phone a few times in the last weeks of his life, but he was not able to communicate well.

Palmeri also suffered from dementia and had lived at Weinberg for about two years, his family said.

Donna Burke, his wife of 45 years, died in 2009.

The son of Sicilian immigrants, Palmeri graduated from Hutchinson Central Technical High School and Buffalo State College before he began his teaching career in the mid-1960s.

He taught for 40 years, spending almost his entire career at Grover Cleveland High School in Buffalo.

“He loved astronomy and really enjoyed working with students from immigrant families who had limited English skills,” Kristen Palmeri said. “He really connected with his students. At times when I visited the school, kids would come up to me and tell me Mr. Palmeri was their favorite teacher.”

“He developed bonds with these kids from Vietnam and other countries,” Thomas Palmeri said.

And Thomas Palmeri added one more recollection about his father – he loved donuts.

Palmeri is also survived by another son, Daniel; a sister, Jeanne Lanzieri; and two grandsons.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

Ninety-eight percent of the Covid-19 deaths in New York State involve people 40 years old or older.

Danielle N. Frank-Sasiadek, 39, a mother of two, including an 11-year-old son, was among the exceptions, one of only five Erie County residents under 40 to die from the virus.

She died April 21 at Sisters of Charity Hospital, a few days after her family was told she tested positive, said her daughter, Marissa Frank-Sasiadek, a 19-year-old college freshman.

Danielle N. Frank-Sasiadek had persevered for almost two decades with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a hereditary neuromuscular disorder that left her in constant pain. Years ago, she quit her job selling insurance through M&T Bank because she was physically unable to climb the stairs to her office building.

Despite her health problems, Frank-Sasiadek made it to as many of her children's school music events and awards ceremonies and her son's Boy Scout events as she could, and celebrated their birthdays and holidays with parties featuring cool treats and prizes, her daughter said.

When Marissa Frank-Sasiadek entered Niagara University to study nursing last August, she said her mom was excited to go to the campus with her on moving-in day.

There was romance in her life, too. Frank-Sasiadek had become engaged to a high school classmate, Edward Glinski. A wedding date had not been picked.

But on April 9, an ambulance rushed Frank-Sasiadek to Sisters Hospital after her family feared she had suffered a stroke, her daughter said.

"Her speech was slurred and garbled. She couldn’t control her movements. Her hands and arms were all over the place," said Frank-Sasiadek's mother, Rhonda Frank. "I kept saying, 'Danielle, what’s wrong?' She kept saying, 'Help me, mom. I don’t know what’s wrong.' "

For days, doctors told her family that Frank-Sasiadek had encephalopathy – her brain was not functioning normally – but they didn't know why.

“We at first all had hope," Marissa Frank-Sasiadek said. "She was in the hospital again, she’ll get better like she always had. We thought she was a fighter and she would get through this.”

But on April 19, the Erie County Health Department called Frank and told her that Frank-Sasiadek had tested positive for Covid-19. By that time, she was in a medically induced coma and a ventilator was keeping her alive.

"I don’t know how long she had the virus," Frank said. "That keeps me awake at night. Where did she get this?"

Frank-Sasiadek's mother and younger sister, Nicole Frey of West Seneca, were allowed to visit her for 15 minutes in the ICU, wearing protective gear.

Marissa Frank-Sasiadek said she and her brother were unable to even talk to her mom on the phone until she was already in a coma.

"A nurse held the phone up to her ears," Marissa Frank-Sasiadek said. "The nurse said, 'Keep talking to her, she can hear you.' That was how my brother and I said good-bye to her. We said 'we love you, you’re going to be OK.' "

At the small funeral service, the casket was kept closed as a precaution.

"I tell people who aren’t taking Covid-19 precautions that I had to say goodbye to my mom in a cellphone call," Marissa Frank-Sasiadek said. "Earlier today, I saw a group of people standing together outside a church. I was like, 'Do you not understand the severity of this?'

"You don’t know who has this," she said of the virus.

Richard Charles Canazzi survived the Vietnam War and the exposure to Agent Orange that led to his Parkinson's disease.

He survived a year of being shuttled around to different hospitals and rehab centers.

But contracting Covid-19 proved too much for the former Erie County sheriff's deputy.

His son, Richard "Rich" Canazzi, recalled speaking with his father two weekends ago. When they talked, he told his father he loved him and promised to call back later because his father was having difficulty holding the phone for long.

He didn't get that chance. His father, who was married and had six children and a stepdaughter, died on April 22 at the Buffalo VA Medical Center without any of them. He was 69.

"That’s the hardest thing," the son said. "He loved his family like you wouldn’t believe."

Canazzi was born in Buffalo, graduated from South Park High School and was a lifelong South Buffalo resident. He was drafted and served a little over a year in the Vietnam War as a member of the Army cavalry. While there, he contracted malaria, was treated stateside and was sent back.

"It was brutal," said his son, who serves as president of the Erie County blue-collar union. "It was a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion."

Canazzi moved on to a career as a sheriff's deputy from the mid-1980s through 2005. Once, while off duty, he noticed a disheveled kid walking down South Park Avenue and asked about his welfare. He eventually learned the young man had pulled a gun on a student at South Park High and held him for the Buffalo police, said Rich Canazzi.

After his father retired for health reasons, Canazzi was well enough to continue his pursuits as an outdoorsman, hunting and fishing for a few years. He was also present for many family events. But his physical ailments, many of which resulted from the war, caught up with him.

"He put up a nice fight," his son said.

Canazzi was diagnosed with Covid-19 two Saturdays ago and later placed on a ventilator, but he did not improve. His family honored his wishes to not extend extraordinary life-saving treatment.

"He couldn't hold on anymore," his son said.

Mark Schroeder poured himself into his interests, from hockey and pop culture to work and most of all, his children.

Schroeder died from Covid-19 at Buffalo General Medical Center on April 22 after being hospitalized for heart surgery. He was 54.

"Mark was selfless and generous to a fault," said Amy Abbey, his partner since 2018. "He was a provider in every sense of the word, whether financially for his family or emotionally for everyone around him. Everyone pretty much felt he was their best friend."

Schroeder was born in Orchard Park and graduated from Orchard Park High School, where he was active in athletics. He had a career in technology and telecommunication sales, most recently at Spectrum and AT&T.

Schroeder played hockey through high school, in college at SUNY Geneseo and in adult leagues. He was a die-hard Sabres fan and participated in a hockey fantasy league.

Schroeder's eclectic taste in music spanned many genres, from Pink Floyd to Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five to Irish music. In his early days of collecting music, Schroeder and his friends would scour Western New York record stores for rare bootleg recordings, carefully storing each album in its own protective covering.

Mary Margaret Schroeder, Mark's older sister, often went with him to concerts in their younger years. He was an unabashed fan of the cowbell.

Science fiction was another interest of Schroeder's. He particularly liked Dr. Who and could recite lines from "The Princess Bride" in chorus with his children.

Schroeder enjoyed typical Buffalo food fare such as chicken wings and Buffalo-style pizza, but he was also a skilled cook who enjoyed cooking for others.

Schroeder had quadruple bypass surgery at Buffalo General Medical Center in early April, and it is believed he contracted the coronavirus while in recovery. He was put on a ventilator for more than two weeks before succumbing.

Other survivors include two daughters, Claire and Maggie; and a son, Jeremy.

"He prioritized their well-being above all else, and loved them fiercely as his shining stars," Abbey said.

An outdoor memorial gathering will be held at a later date.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

Two weeks ago, Steve Robinson developed a cough.

After he tested positive for Covid-19 and was discharged from Mercy Hospital of Buffalo, the 62-year-old Robinson died in his South Buffalo home on April 23.

Now his wife, Maureen, is alone, worried about her own health, while she mourns and waits to spread his ashes in Sturgis, S.D., host of the annual motorcycle rally the couple loved to attend.

"He was the nicest person around," she said. "He would do anything for anyone, no matter what."

The Brooklyn native began working as a police officer in small-town Rosendale, near Kingston, at 17.

An Eagle Scout, he attended John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He worked in security and law enforcement for Albany Medical Center, Target and the New York State Park Police, among others.

The Robinsons met in Syracuse in the 1990s at Pinkerton Security. They clashed before falling in love. "He always said he saved me," she said.

The couple married on Valentine's Day 1998 and moved to her native Buffalo 10 years later.

Steve Robinson started Intelli-Check Investigative Services and worked for Family Dollar as an internal theft investigator.

He first said he felt sick on April 16 and got a chest X-ray later that day, his wife said. The next day, he passed out at home.

Lethargic and struggling for breath, he agreed to go to the hospital on April 20. A test confirmed he had Covid-19. He was discharged on April 22 and died the next day.

"I still don't believe it," his wife said. "I guess I will when I pick up his ashes."

Survivors also include his mother, Irma, 92, and four siblings.

Steve Robinson had just made the first payment on a 2011 Harley Davidson Screamin' Eagle Road Glide but hadn't taken the motorcycle out on the road. Maureen Robinson doesn't yet know what she will do with it.

"It's a beautiful bike," she said. "He was so proud."

Wednesday afternoon, Maureen Robinson learned she had tested positive for the virus.

"I'm fine. I don't have any symptoms but this is becoming very overwhelming," she said.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

James Little loved it whenever he shared a shift with John Poleon at the Buffalo General Medical Center, reverence he boils down to a thought Little knows his colleagues would embrace.

“In a lot of ways,” he said, “it was like working with your grandpa.”

Poleon, a fellow X-ray technologist at Buffalo General, died last week. He is the first known front-line hospital worker in greater Buffalo lost to a virus that had claimed 266 lives in Erie County as of Thursday, leaving Poleon's colleagues to grieve over what they describe as his distinct and salty integrity.

Little, who is helping collect donations at the hospital for Poleon's family, said his friend always used the stairs, never the elevator, and only made use of cash, disdaining credit cards. During breaks from working his “bazoons off,” as he loved to put it, he would ask younger workers why they were staring at their phones.

As his wife Cindy recalls, it was not long ago that he grudgingly accepted a flip phone – one he typically left on his dresser – only because his daughters insisted he carry it when he was in the woods, hunting by muzzleloader.

There should always be places, he told them, where the world cannot reach you.

Once Poleon bought a car or truck, he would drive it “until it won’t go anymore,” Cindy said. He liked unsweetened black tea, preferably Red Rose, and ate cake without frosting. While he loved talking sports, including the Bills and Sabres, he was one of those guys who would get a name wrong and figure that was close enough, forever.

New England tight end Rob Gronkowski was always “Rob Gronowski,” said Little, a union brother in the Communications Workers of America, Local 1168. Tech Lynn Siener grew so accustomed to hearing “Lynn Steiner” that she once responded to a hospital page for a real person of that name, thinking it must be from Poleon.

At 63, not so far from retirement, he was beloved for his workplace selflessness, for the way he would always do a little extra to allow his co-workers to stretch out lunch or leave on time. If he saw anyone building toward a heated argument, fellow technologist Patricia Carey recalls, he would abruptly erupt into a tension-busting version of “Kumbaya.”

"Things were just always better when he was here," said Rebecca D'Amaro, another colleague, a gift that seemed eternal because he so rarely called in sick.

When he missed work just before Easter, his friends guessed something was wrong.

Poleon had tested positive for Covid-19. He died April 23, seven days after he was admitted to Buffalo General and more than 30 years after beginning a career that his colleagues say exemplifies the unsung stalwarts of the medical profession.

No one can be absolutely sure how he became infected, but those who love him want you to understand: He could have chosen to stay home. While his mission typically involved surgical X-rays, he cheerfully embraced other tasks once elective surgeries were put on hold.

"John wasn't the one to say no," Cindy said of work that included cleaning public hallways and elevators, a task of high significance in a pandemic. Juliette Mader, Kaleida Health's director of surgical services at Buffalo General, spoke with gratitude of Poleon's diligence, of the way he did “whatever he was asked.”

Cindy Poleon said her husband worried about Covid-19, yet still did his job. Taneshia Davis, another X-ray technologist and a close friend, spoke of Poleon as an "awesome guy, an awesome worker, an awesome friend" who had accumulated a mountain of sick time over the years. He could have simply "burned it" and stayed home.

“Here’s a man who didn’t have to come in,” Davis said, “a man who was here only because he wanted to help.”

She and her colleagues say Poleon was a legend long before Covid-19. Mary Janice Keller, a nurse who now serves as a vice-president with the CWA local, said Poleon’s shout of “X-ray!” as he walked into recovery rooms still resonates with generations of Buffalo General staff.

He graduated from both the old Seneca Vocational High School and Trocaire College, where he did his X-ray training, Cindy said. The couple met when they both worked at a wax factory, marrying just before Poleon enlisted in the Army – service that led years later to his deployment in the Desert Storm combat operation.

The couple raised two daughters, Janice and Melissa, and Poleon was close to grandsons Patrick, Adian, Nathan and Tyler. While the family lived on the West Side, Poleon liked “outdoorsy things” like hunting, fishing or riding an ATV, Cindy said, and he was a regular – joined by Adian – in Buffalo’s bicycling “slow roll.”

The Buffalo Bandits, the city's lacrosse team, became another passion. He and Cindy held season tickets, which gave Poleon the chance for many one-on-one outings with his grandsons. With such colleagues and union brethren as Michael Dunphy and Karen Taggart, he was a regular on a Kaleida Health volleyball team. Cindy often showed up to watch, reinforcing what his teammates sensed.

“He was all about his family,” Dunphy said.

For years, Poleon seemed indestructible and indefatigable, which only underlined his family's fear and then relief two years ago, when he went through successful treatment for prostate cancer.

He returned to work, seemingly back to his tireless, stair-climbing self until the virus hit him hard this month. While Cindy also tested positive, she was asymptomatic – even as Covid-19 left her husband struggling to breathe and trying to push back the symptoms through his fierce will.

“He didn’t want to go to the hospital,” Cindy said. He kept arguing he was well enough to stay at home, even after the ambulance crew arrived and told him there was no choice.

Poleon was admitted to one of the wings devoted to Covid patients at Buffalo General. While his wife and children were not allowed to be at his side, their one consolation was the proximity of a hospital family he had known for more than 30 years.

Some of the X-ray technologists, draped in protective gear, found ways to stop by, including Davis and another worker. They told him they were checking in to help out Cindy, and Poleon responded in exactly the way they would expect, pushing out the words even as he fought for breath.

“I’m just sitting here,” he said. "They won't let me do nothing."

Rob Prawel, another X-ray tech, spent time with his friend after Poleon's worsening condition required the use of a ventilator, visits that Prawel describes as almost sacred in their intensity.

“The rest of the world doesn’t see what’s going on,” he said of the Covid floors. Prawel spoke of the daily efforts of the medical staff as “stressful, dangerous and sad,” and he said the notion of John Poleon, intubated and battling for his life, shook a hospital in which Poleon was a kind of pillar.

“This was one of our own,” Prawel said.

So Prawel would come in and play songs on his phone by such bands as Grand Funk Railroad or Creedence Clearwater Revival, the classic rock Poleon always loved. He would call Cindy and then put the phone by his friend's ear, or share messages from the family, which always came down to this:

We love you.

Prawel did that at every chance he could, until the day he walked into the room and the bed was empty, without linens. He turned around and asked, disbelieving, if Poleon was in a different room.

A quiet nurse responded, "Sorry, Rob. We lost him.”

Someday there will be a memorial in this community to those claimed by this pandemic, and every name will have its own vast gravity and meaning. Among those on the list will be John Poleon, a Buffalo front-line hospital worker taken by Covid-19, whose colleagues see an ethic revered in their city.

Put to the test, he always tried to give someone else a break.

Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Buffalo News. Email him at skirst@buffnews.com or read more of his work in this archive.

Joe Pitts started getting sick the first weekend in April.

He was admitted to Buffalo General Medical Center a few days later and spent 17 days on a ventilator in intensive care as he battled Covid-19. The last call to his family came April 24. Nurses put the phone up to Joe's ear. Family members prayed.

"We were able to ... give him our love and goodbyes," said his mother, Danetta McKinnon.

About 10 minutes after the phone call ended, Pitts died. He was 34.

Friends and family who gathered at True Bethel Baptist Church for his wake and funeral on Saturday saw lines marked on the floor of the sanctuary every 6 feet. Seating was blocked off during the wake, to discourage people from staying.

Death amid a pandemic means restrictions on how families mourn. Fewer people can attend funerals – only immediate family were allowed to attend the service for Pitts.

Not even a hug can be shared.

"It's just not the norm," McKinnon said.

The church's rules amid the pandemic incorporate social distancing guidelines.

At True Bethel, the time allowed for the wake was lengthened in order to give mourners an extended time to gather with the hopes of avoiding masses of people at once, said Bishop Darius G. Pridgen. While the church has offered families the ability to stream funeral services online for about 10 years, during the pandemic True Bethel has been allowing families to also stream the wake, if they choose.

Pridgen knows Covid-19 well.  He is the church's senior pastor and presided over Pitts' funeral. Pridgen was diagnosed with Covid-19 in March, and three of his adult children had it, including a daughter who had been on life support but recovered.

True Bethel encourages close family members not to arrive at the wake until close to the end so there is less of a possibility mourners may congregate with the family, Pridgen said. About a half-hour before the funeral, the church empties so it can be sanitized.

The length of services, which in the past could be as long as 90 minutes, are now typically less than 45, Pridgen said. For funerals in which the service continues at the gravesite, the church is limiting the size of the gathering there to 10 to 15 people.

True Bethel has a sign in the front of the lobby about Covid-19 and safe practices.

"Something we'd never thought we'd have to do is warn people about health before coming into church," Pridgen said.

Pridgen knew Pitts since he was an infant. As children, Pridgen grew up in the same church as Pitts' mother, who works for True Bethel as pastor of administration and worship.

"Joe was like a big teddy bear," Pridgen said. "He would lift up my little frame, grab me from behind, surprise me and lift me up. It was like a guy who you would be surprised if he ever hurt an ant.”

Joseph Earl Pitts graduated from Lafayette High School and worked at Cracker Barrel and FedEx before getting his commercial driver's license, his mother said.

Pitts is among the youngest Erie County residents to have died from Covid-19. Through Friday morning, five of the 270 people who died of Covid-19 were in their 30s, according to data released by the Erie County Department of Health.

Except for a roughly two-year period a few years ago when he lived in Maryland, he spent his life in Buffalo. He had been a truck driver between eight and 10 years, his mother said.

"He loved to drive," she said.

She described her son could be seen as "the rock of our family." As a child, he had a learning disability and dyslexia, overcoming both, she said.

Whenever the mother and son drove together, either on the way to their destination or on their way back, they had to drive through downtown Buffalo. Her son was fascinated by the city's architecture, she said.

"He loved family and he loved the City of Buffalo," she said.

McKinnon, herself, recovered from Covid-19, having spent four days in the hospital. The day she was discharged was the day her son started feeling ill, she said.

Her son loved all kinds of music, according to his younger brother, Timothy. He was a big Seattle Seahawks fan. So much so, he was laid to rest in his casket wearing Marshawn Lynch's No. 24 Seahawks jersey.

In addition to his mother and brother, Pitts was survived by his father, Kevin Pitts Sr.; a sister, Evan Pitts; another brother, Kevin Jr.; and three stepsiblings.

Joe and his mom were close – Joe's mother "was probably his best friend," Pridgen said.

"His biggest thing was about pleasing and taking care of family, his brothers, his sisters, his mom, especially his mom," the pastor said.

On Thursday night, about 70 people joined in a virtual memorial service using a video conferencing application. In addition to a slide show with pictures of Joe, there was an entire program, including prayer and expressions of love from the people closest to him.

McKinnon said she recorded the call, so the family can watch it in the future.

She said she doesn't have any indication about why the novel coronavirus hit her son so hard and ended up taking his life.

"With this virus," she said, "you just don't know."

Jose Rivera filled his life by helping people, as a medic in the U.S. Navy, as a volunteer building Habitat for Humanity homes and as a union safety officer at General Mills in Buffalo.

"We’d be driving and see someone who needed help. It was instinctive that either one of us would pull over," said Maureen Rivera, his wife of 15 years. "He had an infectious smile, and a unique way of making anyone feel comfortable.”

Maureen Rivera, who works as a visiting nurse, cared for her husband at their home in Lancaster until the 11th day of his battle with Covid-19 when she said he began to shake uncontrollably.

He was rushed to Mercy Hospital on April 4, and he tested positive for Covid-19.

Rivera, 65, who has six children, was transferred the next day to Catholic Health's Covid-19 treatment facility at the St. Joseph Campus, and put on a ventilator. He died on April 24.

Maureen Rivera said she could not visit her husband at the St. Joseph Campus because of the virus, and had to rely on daily phone calls from the staff for updates on her husband's condition.

“ ... He was bad, and I could see the writing on the wall,” said Maureen Rivera.

While Rivera was in the hospital, neighbors created an illuminated fairy garden on his front lawn as a tribute, said youngest daughter, Logan Rivera.

Rivera was raised in South Buffalo and attended South Park High School before moving to San Diego, where he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1973. He served six years in the Navy and was stationed for a time in Okinawa, Japan, where he served as a medic.

It was there he learned to be a disc jockey, a craft he would draw on throughout his life. Known as “Gigger,” Rivera worked parties, weddings and reunions, recalled his wife.

Rivera worked for 40 years as a forklift operator at General Mills before retiring when he was 61. He also served as safety chairman with the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers Local 36.

Eight months ago, the Riveras moved from Cheektowaga to Lancaster. Just before he became ill, he was planning a driveway dance party in his neighborhood because he thought people needed a fun diversion, said Maureen Rivera.

In Cheektowaga, he had fought for neighborhood stability, against zombie homes and served as a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, recalled Diane Benczkowski, the town supervisor.

“He was always respectful, never adversarial and became a partner with the town. When Garden Village Plaza stood vacant for 20 years, Jose advocated for redevelopment. He was always willing to help anyone he could,” Benczkowski said.

About 20 of Patricia Rowe's children and grandchildren celebrated her 94th birthday with a party in the atrium at Beechwood Homes in Getzville in late February.

It was a special time, with youngsters able to run around, and Rowe watching them with delight.

"She loved seeing children," said her daughter, Barbara Rowe.

The mother of 12, grandmother of 38, great-grandmother of 36 and great-great-grandmother of two spent her life caring for her children. Guided by the values of faith, education and service, she was generous and loving, and for years she helped immigrants and refugees get on their feet.

But February's party was the last time most of her family saw her. Shortly after that, visitation at the nursing home was suspended because of Covid-19. Her family got regular updates on their mother, who was in the dementia unit. And then came a phone call that she had a fever, and a day or two later, word that she had tested positive for the coronavirus.

She died April 24 at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, just a week after coming down with symptoms. Barbara Rowe met her mother in the emergency room, and spent the night with her in her room.

"She did recognize me. She smiled at me," Barbara Rowe said. "By the morning she became unresponsive."

Barbara Rowe went home and quarantined herself. Her mother died the next day.

"It's really a shame this had to be the way it happened," she said. "I know the staff at Beechwood did everything they could for her."

Born in South Quincy, Mass., the former Patricia Sullivan was a registered nurse who worked at Bellevue Hospital in New York City during World War II. After the war she married the late Robert Rowe and they moved to Williamsville, where he was a vice president for John W. Cowper Construction Co. Eventually they moved the family to Charleston, S.C. Nine years ago she returned to Buffalo, where two of her children live.

Her children fondly recall family dinners at their Mill Street home, with all 14 family members plus assorted friends, sitting around an old library table and chairs. Sometimes there were so many people Patricia Rowe served two shifts.

"She was strong and she was tough," said her son, David, but he added she was also pretty easygoing and always smiling.

"She was pretty fierce about standing up for yourself," Barbara Rowe said. "She was very much about doing everything you can do to develop yourself."

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

The owner of three German Shepherd dogs over roughly 40 years, Caroline M. "Carol" Fields was affectionately called "the German Shepherd lady" by her Riverside neighbors.

"That was how people knew her," said North Common Council Member Joseph Golombek.

Born Caroline Hofmann in Buffalo, she grew up in Black Rock. Both her parents were German immigrants who came to the United States in the 1920s, her son James said.

She graduated from Riverside High School, went to business school and worked in medical billing and as a medical secretary.

In 1963, right before her oldest child was born, Fields and her husband, Edward, moved into a home in Riverside, where "she was always kind of quietly very involved" in the community, James said.

An "all-around volunteer" at All Saints Catholic Church, Fields helped clean the church and worked in its food pantry.

Fields was a founding member of the defunct Elgas Argus Roesch Skillen block club – EARS for short, an acronym for the four streets – and "wouldn't hesitate to let me know what was going on the community," Golombek said.

Fields continued living in the family home in Riverside until her family moved her into an assisted living facility in 2018.

She was 83 when she succumbed to Covid-19 on April 26 at St. Joseph Post-Acute Center in Orchard Park.

Her family believes she contracted the virus after moving to a second assisted living facility about six months ago, before she was transferred to Catholic Health's Covid-19 Treatment Facility at St. Joseph Campus in Cheektowaga, where she was also treated.

Since February, Catholic Health staff at the Orchard Park facility helped keep her connected electronically to her loved ones, who were not allowed to see her face-to-face, her son said.

"It was kind of surreal. They would hold an iPad in front of her for hours while we talked to her and told her it was OK. The hospital personnel was our surrogate," he said. "We weren't able to be there. We owe them a special thank you."

Her husband of 39 years, Edward, died in 2001.

In addition to James, Mrs. Fields is survived by two other sons, Ronald and Gary; two granddaughters; two step granddaughters; and one sister, Sylvia Regan.

A memorial service will be held at a later date.

The last time Cheryl Wind saw her grandmother, Arline Yaw, was on March 1.

"She walked me to the door at the nursing home," Wind said.

Her grandma was 99, but remarkably healthy and strong, and Wind couldn't have imagined as she left Father Baker Manor that she'd never see her again.

On March 12, as cases of Covid-19 were quickly multiplying downstate, Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order barring visitors to nursing homes. A few weeks later, officials at Father Baker Manor in Orchard Park announced 41 residents and 25 workers had tested positive. Yaw was not among them.

But later she tested positive. She was faring well at first.

Then "it just really hit her hard," Wind said.

Yaw died on April 29.

The family had a small graveside service in Collins on May 4 and plans to hold a larger memorial service whenever that's possible.

Yaw was a kind and loving woman who put her family first.

She was born in Ellicottville and grew up on a farm. "She went to a one-room schoolhouse," Wind said.

She was one of eight siblings, the oldest daughter. "So she did have to help with all of her siblings quite a bit," Wind said.

Yaw, who moved to the Town of Boston, was widowed in the 1960s. She had one child, a daughter, Joy Wind.

For over four decades, Yaw worked as a hairdresser at a shop in Hamburg Village Plaza.

"She was a really hard worker," Wind said. "She worked well past retirement age. She loved it. She loved all her clients. Her specialty was shampoo-and-set. She did a lot of old ladies' hair."

She retired only after she fell on ice and broke her wrist.

"She couldn't grip scissors anymore," Wind said.

Still, Yaw kept busy. She loved to go camping with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren at Allegany and Letchworth state parks. She volunteered with Boston Senior Services and was a longtime member of the Faith United Church of Christ in Boston.

In the nursing home, she walked every day. She was a huge fan of the Buffalo Sabres and her room at Father Baker Manor was decorated with Sabres calendars. She liked being with the other seniors there, Wind said.

"She felt they took really great care of her," she added.

With visitors barred, Wind tried a couple of times to FaceTime with Yaw.

"She couldn't hear so well so I wrote questions, like 'Do you know what's going on?' But she didn't understand the technology so she hung up both times," Wind said.

Yaw lived a long life, but Wind said she still had so much life left in her.

"We think she would have made it to 105," Wind said.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

Oct. 16, 1928 – April 30, 2020

For Fraser Mitchell Mooney of Snyder, medical care ran in the family.

His father, Dr. Fraser D. Mooney, became director of Buffalo General Hospital at age 30. For a time, Dr. Mooney's oldest son Fraser, known to all as "Mitch," wanted to be a pediatrician. But after earning a master's degree in hospital administration from Yale University, he worked for three decades as an administrator at E.J. Meyer Memorial Hospital and later at Erie County Medical Center.

Mr. Mooney also cared for people directly. As a 44-year volunteer firefighter with the Snyder Fire Department, he trained as a paramedic in 1973, and maintained his certification as an Emergency Medical Technician until 2011.

"He was very proud of the fact that he was our oldest EMT and that was Mitch, always willing to help in any way possible," said Paul Griebner, a past chief of the Snyder Fire Department and a current member of its Board of Commissioners.

Mr. Mooney "loved to help people and make a difference in their lives," said his family. "Everything he involved himself in was better for his participation."

Fraser M. “Mitch” Mooney, 91, died April 30 in Harris Hill Nursing Home after contracting Covid-19. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for several years.

He was the first of four sons and a daughter born to Fraser D. Mooney and Norma DuBois Mooney of Buffalo.

A graduate of Bennett High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Buffalo and a master's degree in hospital administration from Yale University.

From 1948 to 1951, he served in Texas as part of the Medical Service Corps of the Army's 174th Infantry. He was honorably discharged as a first lieutenant.

He and Lois Wilson married on June 14, 1952, and moved to Snyder in 1962, where they raised their five children.

Mr. Mooney started at Meyer Memorial Hospital, which became Erie County Medical Center, in 1961 as associate administrator, a post he held until retiring in 1990. Mr. Mooney also served as president of the Western New York Chapter of the American Hospital Administration Association.

He joined the Snyder Fire Department on April 1, 1968, at age 39, and was awarded Life Membership 25 years later in 1993.

He was one of the original class of 42 Snyder paramedics graduated in 1973, and maintained his certification as an Emergency Medical Technician until 2011.

Mr. Mooney served as department secretary from 1969 until 1984, when he became a commissioner, serving in that role until 1998. During those years, the department bought some adjoining land, demolished its aging firehouse and constructed a new one.

He was a member of the Board of Directors from 2001 to 2003. He responded to calls for 44 years, until 2012.

"He was always smiling, reflecting the fact that he was just a plain nice, friendly individual," said Griebner. "He would always ask about members’ families and he was sincere, he truly cared."

Mrs. Mooney died on Sept. 18, 1983. On Nov. 22, 1984, Mr. Mooney married Lucile K. "Sissy" Vahldieck.

At fire department events, he and his wife "always enjoyed a nice dance on the dance floor – they were great slow dancers," said Past Chief Tom Merrill, a commissioner. "He was a very friendly man, and also extremely intelligent."

In the 2000s, he served on the Board of Directors of the Schofield Nursing Home.

A member of Christ United Methodist Church for 57 years, he sang in the choir and served on the finance and other committees. He also sang with the Amherst Male Glee Club and the Shrine Chanters.

In his younger days, Mr. Mooney trained Labrador retrievers and participated in dog shows throughout New York state.

After his retirement, he and his wife spent winters in Destin, Fla., where he was an active golfer and enjoyed the beach.

Besides his wife, Lucile K. Vahldieck Mooney, he is survived by three sons, Scott, Fraser and James; two daughters, Kimberley Wroblewski and Jane Nopanen; two brothers, Robert and Thomas; a sister, Charlann Duffy, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Memorial visitation and a celebration of his life will be held at a date to be determined.

Rita Thurston was a constant presence at Kenmore United Methodist Church for decades, working with youth groups, supporting educational efforts in underserved communities and attending Sunday adult education class.

“She wasn’t showy. She wasn’t a person who drew attention to herself. She was kind of a servant who would do anything you asked her to do. She didn’t have to be in charge,” said the Rev. Gail Lewis, a former associate pastor at the church.

Thurston’s involvement with the church ended in 2002 when she entered the former Blocher Homes in Williamsville.

Thurston celebrated her 100th birthday on Nov. 13, surrounded by her family, including many of her 14 great-grandchildren at Beechwood Health Care Center, where she would die of Covid-19 on May 1.

During the past year, Lewis visited Thurston regularly at Beechwood.

On the day after Thurston's 100th birthday, Lewis brought her a rose from the church altar. They often chatted about the church.

"She was a very intelligent person with a great sense of humor. She was concerned over the split in the Methodist church caused by the debate over gay and lesbian marriages," said Lewis. “I tried to explain both sides to her, and she asked, ‘What is the objection?’ I explained that some people thought it was contrary to Scripture. She asked me, ‘What’s the matter with them?’”

The church was life to Thurston, who met her husband, Richard M. Thurston, at United Methodist. He served as an usher. He died in 1998.

They raised two children in their Town of Tonawanda home and vacationed often at Jack Lake in Central Ontario, where they were “spitting distance from the lake,” said Paul Thurston, her son.

Thurston worked at the Hoover Elementary School cafeteria, said Paul Thurston. He recalled attending the dedication of the school by former President Herbert C. Hoover in 1951.

Paul Thurston was only four at the time, but he remembered his mother holding tightly to his hand in the heavy rain.

“It was a disgusting day, rainy and windy,” said Paul Thurston. “But she was holding me up so I could see, there was a lot of people there. It was cool.”

Edward Crogan wasn't the typical local lacrosse star of the 1950s and 1960s.

Although he played on primarily Native American teams, Crogan and his brother Sam were Buffalo natives who were introduced to the game after their father married a Tuscarora Indian Reservation woman.

Both Crogan brothers eventually were inducted into the Ontario Lacrosse Hall of Fame.

Edward Crogan, 85, died May 4 in Newfane Rehabilitation and Health Care Center of "respiratory illness complicated by Covid-19 and underlying medical conditions," according to his death notice from Rhoney Funeral Home.

As of Wednesday, the state Health Department said 22 people had died of Covid-19 in that facility. 

Crogan entered the nursing home after breaking his hip in a fall in December, according to his niece, Bonnie Crogan-Mazur.

He shared a room in Newfane Rehabilitation with his wife, Lorna, who also tested positive for Covid-19, Crogan-Mazur said. She moved there from another nursing home after she voiced dissatisfaction with the care she was receiving.

Ed Crogan fell in love with lacrosse after his father, Stephen Crogan, moved the family to the Lewiston reservation after his remarriage, which occurred when Ed and Sam were teenagers.

“Their father was a goalie on the reservation. That’s where they started playing," said Crogan-Mazur, Ed's niece and Sam's daughter.

Ed was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2004, a year after Sam, who was honored posthumously. He died in 1994.

“They were like the Kilgours of their day. They were really awesome," Crogan-Mazur said, referring to Rich and Darris Kilgour, former stars of the Buffalo Bandits.

Like the Bandits, the Crogans played box lacrosse, the indoor variety of the sport played on an iceless hockey rink.

“They played it from usually May until September, because then everybody wants to start putting the ice back in," Crogan-Mazur said.

According to the Hall of Fame, the Crogan brothers were key members of two Ontario Lacrosse Association senior "B" champions, the 1955 Tuscarora Indians and the 1960 Niagara Falls Scobies.

"Known as both a high scorer and a defensive player, recognized for his power play ability," Ed Crogan's Hall of Fame citation said.

According to "Power's Bible of Lacrosse," the 1955 Tuscarora team defeated Owen Sound, three games to two, in the provincial final.

Ed scored 20 goals in 24 games for the 1960 Scobies, who won 20 of 24 regular season games.

In 1968, when he was 34, Ed was captain and leading scorer for the Fort Erie Hawks, another senior "B" team, the Hall of Fame citation said. He later coached and managed that team, and also served on the Fort Erie Minor Lacrosse executive committee.

Ed Crogan served in the U.S. Army as a communications specialist from 1952 to 1954, including duty in the Korean War.

After his discharge, he and his brother became roofers, belonging to Local 74 of the Roofers Union in Buffalo. He also enjoyed fishing and traveling with his wife, occasionally visiting local casinos.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

During almost 29 years as a federal probation officer, Joseph D. Parkinson developed an unusual relationship with some of Western New York’s notorious criminals.

Some of them were men of violence – drug dealers and mobsters, out on bail or under supervised release – and he was always on his guard when he visited them.

At the same time, the accused knew a bad report about their behavior from the probation officer could land them back in jail.

“You had to walk a fine line,” Mr. Parkinson told The Buffalo News when he retired as Western New York’s senior probation officer in April 2000. “I always treated these people with respect, but I also knew they had gotten into trouble for a reason. I was not going to let them take advantage of me.”

On May 5, Mr. Parkinson became a victim of the Covid-19 virus. He died at the Mease Countryside Hospital in Safety Harbor, Fla. He was 77.

“He died alone, not cognizant of what was going on. That was a terrible way for us to lose him,” said his son, Joseph Jr. “He was one of about 20 people all infected with Covid-19 at the same nursing home, St. Mark Village.”

Born and educated in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Mr. Parkinson moved to Western New York in the early 1970s. He and his family lived in North Tonawanda, where he enjoyed coaching his children's baseball, soccer and softball teams. Before becoming a probation officer, he had investigated organized crime as a U.S. postal inspector.

His co-workers at federal court – including the judges and attorneys – respected Mr. Parkinson and loved his sense of humor, said Karen Renzoni Monteleone, a retired probation officer who worked with him. She said Mr. Parkinson was an expert in firearms and home electronic monitoring systems.

"Joe was a mentor to many younger probation officers," she said.

As he prepared to retire in 2000, Mr. Parkinson told a News reporter he had encountered some scary and upsetting incidents – and also some good moments – while visiting criminals under his watch.

As he spoke, he pointed to a beautiful vase of mixed flowers sitting on his desk.

“Those came from a drug dealer I supervised,” he said. “I helped him get a job after he got out of prison.”

Mr. Parkinson spent 12 years teaching law enforcement courses at Hilbert College after leaving government service.

He moved to Palm Harbor, Fla., in 2018. A lifelong Pittsburgh Steelers fan, he also loved the Buffalo Bills, and was a former Bills’ season ticket holder.

Besides his son, he is survived by two daughters, JoDee McVea LaBombard and Anne Nicole Theisen; and a sister, Leslie Ann Parkinson.

Concetta Pierro loved to sit in the front row during Masses at St. Amelia Catholic Church, beaming with pride as her son – the Rev. Sebastian "Sibby" Pierro – delivered his sermons.

And she was enormously proud of her other son, Joseph, a doctor of radiology, and of five other family members who work as doctors or nurses.

“Our mother was all about family,” said Rev. Pierro. “She and our father were strong believers in education and made a lot of sacrifices for her sons and grandchildren.”

Concetta Pierro died on May 6 at the St. Joseph Sub-Acute Facility, a nursing home for Covid-19 patients in Orchard Park. She tested positive for the virus in the McAuley Residence in Kenmore on April 27, two days after her 85th birthday.

“She got excellent care in both facilities, but unfortunately, we were not able to visit her the last two months of her life,” said Rev. Pierro, pastor of the church in the Town of Tonawanda. “Even for a priest, even for the doctors and nurses in our family, there were no exceptions made. We were able to communicate with her by FaceTime and cellphone.”

Born in Buffalo, the former Concetta Cavalieri grew up on Vermont Street on the West Side, graduating from Grover Cleveland High School. In 1953, she married Nicolo Pierro. They moved from the West Side to the Town of Tonawanda in 1985.

Pierro worked for 26 years in data processing at Buffalo City Hall, and her husband was a four-decade civilian employee of the Buffalo Police Department, overseeing the upkeep of police vehicles. They retired in 1992, within one day of each other.

Nicolo Pierro died in 2010.

Nothing delighted Concetta more than having her family over for a Sunday feast of homemade pasta and red sauce.

“She was renowned for her cooking and her baking,” said her daughter-in-law, Joanne Pierro. “If someone in the family got married, one of our traditions was that she would make bushels of really good cookies for the wedding.”

Pierro was very proud of the other health care professionals in her family: Joanne Pierro, an intensive care nurse and educator; grandson Michael Pierro, a doctor of internal medicine; his wife, Merritt Tuttle, a pediatrician; granddaughter Nicole York, a professor of nursing; and Nicole’s husband, Richard York Jr., another doctor.

“All of them, in one way or another, have been involved in the fight against Covid-19,” Rev. Pierro said.

She is also survived by two brothers, Pasquale Cavalieri and Vito Cavalieri.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

Oct. 22, 1944 – May 6, 2020

Lorena “Lori” McDonald, active as a costume designer, director and fundraiser in Buffalo theaters, died May 6 in Southbury, Conn., from complications of Covid-19 after a period of declining health. She was 75.

She and her husband, Terence McDonald, an associate professor who taught acting, theater and film at SUNY Buffalo State College, established the Playhouse of American Classics, which for several seasons presented long-neglected plays at the Buffalo History Museum.

Born Lorena Brown in Washington, D.C., she grew up in Holbrook, Ariz., near Petrified Forest National Park, where her father owned a pharmacy, and attended high school in Mesa, Ariz.

She was active in theater while earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Arizona in Tucson, then moved to Los Angeles with friends and worked in costume design for television shows, notably “Hollywood Squares.”

She then landed an assistantship in the Theater Department at the University of Connecticut and completed a master’s degree in directing. There she saw Terence McDonald, tap dancing along a street with a friend, and resolved to meet him. Soon they were playing opposite one another in a production of Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan.”

“She was Lady Windermere and I was Lord Darlington,” McDonald said. “In the play, he doesn’t get her, but in real life, I did.”

They were married on July 4, 1968. According to her husband, “It was the only day we could get off from playing summer stock.”

When he went to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, to earn his master’s degree in theater, she ran the costume shop in the Theater Department.

She was a set designer for Studio Arena Theatre after they came to Buffalo in 1972 and worked with the newly established Theatre of Youth, first as a customer and designer, then as a fundraiser and managing director. She later returned to Studio Arena as interim director of development.

Drawn to New York City, she became an assistant vice president with the United Way of Tri-State, then was director of development for Adelphi University, the Joffrey Ballet and John Houseman’s theater, The Acting Company.

Moving on to the Brooklyn Center at Brooklyn College, she updated the computer system. There she and her husband presented plays with the first Playhouse of American Classics.

She then took teaching positions, giving computer instruction to students in private schools and in public schools in Harlem and the Bronx, before returning to Buffalo in 1995. Her teaching experiences inspired a play, “War Stories,” which was the centerpiece of a 1999 symposium on violence at Buffalo State.

“I wrote this screenplay for my students,” she told Buffalo News reporter Louise Continelli in 1999, “for my third-grader whose mother punished him by breaking his fingers, for my fourth-grader who wrote of her brother molesting her, for all the cigarette burns, the black eyes and cut cheeks and all the hair pulled out by the roots.”

Mrs. McDonald assisted her husband in establishing CADET, the Center for the Application of Drama to Education and Technology, at Buffalo State.

In 2007, they revived the Playhouse of American Classics here with a production of Jesse Lynch Williams’ irreverent 1917 comedy, “Why Marry?,” the first dramatic work to win a Pulitzer Prize. A variation on readers’ theater, in which the actors carry scripts, they called it “Chamber Theater.”

“We would rehearse the shows as long as a full production,” her husband said, “but we could do it without props.”

Residents of Buffalo and later the Town of Tonawanda, she and her husband moved to Connecticut in 2014.

Survivors also include two sons, Jason and Ryan; a brother, Troy Brown; and four grandchildren.

A memorial service will be streamed on Zoom at 2 p.m. May 31.

Joan Neudecker hated to get sick, her daughter said, largely because it kept her from the work she loved, caring for patients at the McAuley Residence in Kenmore.

But in late April, Neudecker tested positive for Covid-19, her daughter Kathryn Kitchen said. She suspects, as her mother did, that she caught it at work.

Neudecker, a licensed practical nurse, tried to get better at her home in the Town of Tonawanda, but her condition worsened.

She died Saturday in Kenmore Mercy Hospital. She is the first nursing home worker in Erie County known to have died with Covid-19.

Neudecker was 60, with a husband, two daughters, a son and four grandchildren.

"She was a very strong woman," Kitchen said. "She spread herself thin to make everybody else happy. She always put everyone else before herself."

Kitchen said her mother should have been issued better equipment to protect her from infection. She was given a procedural mask and not the fitted N95 mask that better guards against the spread of disease.

Judging by her Facebook page, Neudecker considered it important that she and other nursing home workers have the equipment needed to protect themselves and patients from Covid-19. Among her many posts on the topic was a story about a nursing home worker in Kansas City, Mo., who fought for better protective equipment and then died, reportedly from Covid-19, days before the worker was to retire.

Neudecker posted articles about nursing homes being hard hit by the virus and tips on how people could make better masks to wear in public.

But in a private Facebook message sent after she was diagnosed with the virus, Neudecker lamented that she had been caring for residents, who were later known to have contracted Covid-19, with only a procedural mask.

"Obviously better PPE was required," she wrote.

In the run-up to Neudecker's diagnosis, the McAuley Residence had no known cases of Covid-19, so she and other staff met state and federal safety guidelines by wearing the simpler procedural mask, said JoAnn Cavanaugh, a spokeswoman for Catholic Health. It runs the McAuley Residence, a five-star nursing home, and its affiliated hospital, Kenmore Mercy. Catholic Health's policy is to give N95 masks to the staff who care for people with confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19, she said.

While the state Health Department does not require nursing home staff to always wear the N95 mask, it does urge that N95s be worn, similar to advice from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

State Health Department spokesman Jeffrey W. Hammond said: “The department recommends, consistent with the CDC’s guidance, that facilities use N95 respirators in all health care settings unless they’re not available or the facility doesn’t have fit-tested staff, in which case a face mask is recommended.”

He said the state has distributed more than 10 million pieces of personal protective equipment, such as gowns, face shields and N95 masks, to long-term care facilities.

The Health Department, as of last week, did not track the number of nursing home workers infected with Covid-19 although the workers care for people described as among the most vulnerable to the deadly virus.

The federal government last week issued a rule requiring the nation's nursing homes and adult care facilities to report Covid-19 deaths and infections among residents and workers. On Sunday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced the state would require nursing homes to test workers twice a week.

Neudecker learned she was Covid-19 positive through a test performed at her workplace, her daughter said. Catholic Health, in a written statement defending the protective equipment it gives staff and its overall safety protocols, indicated how the test came about.

On April 25, as part of the routine screening the McAuley Residence had been performing since early March, before it was required, the facility found two residents with elevated temperatures, Catholic Health said. Those two residents tested positive for Covid-19, triggering an expanded round of testing that found more residents and even staff members with the virus, even though some had been asymptomatic, Catholic Health said.

While Catholic Health will not indicate whether Neudecker can be counted in those newly discovered cases, her daughter surmises Neudecker was among them. On April 26, she revealed that a test performed at work had come back positive, and she soon after had a sore throat and showed other symptoms, Kitchen said.

"She was trying to get better," Kitchen said. But, she said, her mother also was telling people who called with concern that her recovery was slow. When she reached out for medical advice, she was told to remain at home and rest, Kitchen said.

Just days ago, as Friday night turned to Saturday morning, Lawrence J. Neudecker called for the ambulance that brought his wife, who was unresponsive, to Kenmore Mercy. She was placed on a ventilator, her daughter said, but did not survive.

Her death certificate states the cause as a myocardial infarction – a heart attack – from septic shock due to Covid-19, Kitchen said.

Since then, Kitchen has begun a GoFundMe page to help pay for an unexpected funeral, whenever a funeral might be held. On Wednesday, the family was more than halfway toward a $5,000 goal.

In its statement, Catholic Health said it sent the McAuley residents who tested positive for Covid-19 to its St. Joseph Post-Acute Center, a nursing home in Orchard Park that opened in April to care for patients with the novel coronavirus.

Catholic Health also extended its sympathy to Neudecker's family. "She will be missed by her McAuley Residence family," Catholic Health said.

"And she will be," stressed Kitchen, "because they loved her."

News Staff Reporter Lou Michel contributed to this story. 

Francis A. Kennedy’s habitual tinkering led to inventing a telephone caller ID device in the 1970s and a patented insulated concrete block that’s been used in more than 200 commercial buildings in the Northeast.

Kennedy never formally studied engineering, but he enjoyed reading about inventions and thinking up ideas for products that might be an improvement over what was available.

“The dream of his was always to do something to leave his mark,” said his daughter, Kathleen Campbell.

The 95-year-old Korean War veteran died May 10 of Covid-19 at Safire Rehabilitation of Northtowns, his daughter said.

When Kennedy’s family noticed him struggling with dementia, he moved about 10 months ago into the nursing home in the Town of Tonawanda.

Campbell said the nursing home first notified her around Easter that Kennedy had Covid-19 symptoms, including a low-grade fever and pink eye. The nursing home was unable to test him at the time, because it didn’t have access to tests, so Kennedy was quarantined in his room, and his condition improved, according to his daughter.

“He was fine, and then all of a sudden it just reared its head,” she said. “It just took him over. His lungs were clear. His heart was good, and his kidneys were fine. But his oxygen level on his blood just dropped drastically. So, they had oxygen on him, but he had no energy. He couldn’t even eat and drink anymore.”

The nursing home eventually confirmed Kennedy had Covid-19, said Campbell.

The day before he died, a hospice nurse put the phone up to Kennedy’s ear, so Campbell could tell him how much she loved him and that it was OK to go and be with his wife of 70 years, Jacqueline, who died in 2018.

The nurse told Campbell that her dad moved, a sign that he had heard her.

Through Wednesday, eight residents have died at Safire Rehabilitation of Northtowns in confirmed or suspected Covid-19 cases, according to the state Department of Health.

Born in Pittston, Pa., Kennedy attended high school in Sayre, Pa., and ran away from home at 16 to fight in World War II. When the military learned his real age, Kennedy was honorably discharged.

After finishing high school, he joined the Army again and worked stateside as an airplane mechanic. He studied history and theology at St. Bonaventure University, but left before earning a degree.

He returned to the military and served as an artillery spotter on 156 forward observer air missions in the Korean War. He also directed artillery fire during the war. He survived the Battle of Chosin Reservoir and earned a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

Kennedy held numerous jobs, including sales with the liquor distributor Eber Brothers, at Bethlehem Steel, at the General Motors plant in the Town of Tonawanda and at a Buffalo railroad company.

Kennedy invented his Instatrace caller ID device in the 1970s and he and a partner, Wayne Baldridge, formed a company called Sci Tech to market it. Popular Mechanics magazine in 1978 hailed the device as technology that “would virtually eliminate nuisance calls.”

But Campbell said AT&T Corp., which controlled the phone industry, refused to buy the technology and waited until Kennedy’s patent ran out to replicate it.

Kennedy also created a prototype for an illuminated walking stick that blind people could use at night to make themselves more visible to drivers, said Campbell.

Years later, he invented an insulated block system in the basement of his Williamsville home by sandwiching a piece of insulating foam between two slabs of concrete. He received his first patent for the insulated block in 1992 and started Niagara Regional Group, or NRG, to market and sell it.

“He was lifting those 66-pound blocks up until he was almost 90 years old,” said Marty Walters, a friend and general manager of NRG.

The wall systems have been used in more than 200 buildings, including a handful in Western New York and many in Manhattan and New Jersey, said Walters. The buildings include dormitories, schools and big-box retail facilities.

“His ethos really was he just wanted to leave the world a little bit better place than when he found it,” said Walters.

Predeceased by his wife and a son, Patrick, Kennedy is survived by three daughters, Kathleen Campbell, Mary Lou Schultz and Jacqueline Rindfleisch; nine sons, Michael, Daniel, Thomas, Kevin, Robert, Sean, Mark, Timothy and John; 38 grandchildren; 38 great-grandchildren; and a great-great grandchild.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

William J. Pujolas thought nothing of getting up at 5 a.m. to chauffeur his daughter and her friends to the local ice rink for figure skating practice.

He loved sports and was willing to go the extra mile, Liz Pujolas said of her father.

When he was admitted to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital last Friday as a Covid-19 patient in need of comfort care, a hospital employee turned on some soothing music in his room. But Pujolas’ children knew he would prefer something else.

“We turned on the television to ESPN. He loved sports and would even watch reruns of games,” said Liz Pujolas of her 85-year-old dad.

Pujolas died May 10 while the cable sports channel was on. “The speaker was right by his ear.”

Pujolas, a longtime Amherst resident, was also devoted to his country and the community. He was a Korean War Army veteran and served for more than half a century as a member of the Ellicott Creek Volunteer Fire Company.

For years he organized card games at the fire hall and hosted games at his home with his wife, Betty.

When he became a resident at the Rosa Coplon Living Center, a nursing home on the Weinberg Campus in Amherst, Mr. Pujolas soon organized a weekly card game with fellow residents.

“When the card game was on, he’d leave his phone in his room. He did not want to be interrupted, even if it was for something urgent,” said Paul Pujolas, one of his sons.

Liz Pujolas added, “His Irish charm and wit captured young and old especially those who joined him at the card table.”

Pujolas tested positive April 30 while at Rosa Coplon, his daughter said.

Over the years, Mr. Pujolas supported his family in different sales positions, ranging from selling cars to beer and snack foods.

In addition to his wife, daughter and son, he is survived by another son, Peter, and four grandchildren. A celebration of his life will be held at a later date.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

As a boy, William L. Burch would have been the geek or the nerd of his generation, said one of his three sons.

He liked to deep dive into a topic, or the latest technology, and then tell others what he had learned, Roger Burch explained.

After a career as an engineer, working in Buffalo on some of the biggest projects of the 20th century – including the Manhattan Project and the Apollo lunar module – Burch lived since 2016 in the McAuley Residence, a nursing home hard hit by Covid-19.

In late April, McAuley detected its first case of the virus in a resident. Ten days later, Burch's fever spiked, and he, too, was tested. When his case of Covid-19 was confirmed on May 7, he was moved to the St. Joseph Post-Acute Center, a nursing home for Covid-19 patients in Orchard Park.

His son, who was able to Skype with him twice, doubts that his father recognized him.

Burch died May 11. He was 100 years old.

Roger Burch said his father had been in mostly good health before he caught the virus. He had avoided many of the ailments that often hit people at an advanced age: diabetes, heart disease, cancer. But dementia had "caught up with him,'' his son said.

Burch was born in Gary, Ind., and grew up in other places, including Denver, Colo. When he worked in a chemistry lab, he impressed a supervisor who suggested he study at the Colorado School of Mines. He graduated in 1944, after three years of coursework rather than four. He was part of an advanced program that tried to move engineers through quickly because they were needed for the war effort.

With his bachelor of science degree in metallurgical engineering, Burch began work at the Linde Corp. in Kenmore. His first engineering assignment was on the Manhattan Project, helping Linde develop methods to concentrate fissionable uranium isotopes for use in the first atomic bomb.

At Linde, Burch met his future wife, Olive Lightfoot, a chemical laboratory technician. When he died, they had been married for 72 years.

In July, Ronald Burch said he visited his father with a newspaper commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo mission that landed men on the moon. "That's the lunar excursion module," William Burch said as he saw that historic photograph. During a 35-year career with Bell Aircraft, Burch, among other tasks, trained welders to fabricate critical components for the lunar module.

In retirement, Burch threw himself into his passion for bird watching. When a pair of peregrine falcons nested atop Buffalo's Statler Hotel in the 1990s, he volunteered to help the state Department of Environmental Conservation install a camera to monitor them. He would watch the birds from street level, and when passers-by asked him what he was looking at, Burch would tell them all about the falcons, Roger Burch said.

Burch's oddest brush with history came in 1933. He was a teenager working in a radio repair shop in Joplin, Mo., where his family had lived for a while. A well-dressed customer had a radio installed in his car, then asked how it picked up police frequencies, Roger Burch said, repeating the story his father told his sons over the years.

William Burch told the customer that the radio could not pick up a police frequency, and such a radio could be installed only in police vehicles.

Days later, William Burch saw a news story of a shootout in Joplin where two police officers were killed when they tried to arrest a gang of suspected robbers in their hideout. The robbers got away but left behind undeveloped film in which they were pictured mugging for a camera.

Looking at the pictures, William Burch, his son said, realized he had installed a radio for Clyde Barrow, who was one half of the outlaw couple known as Bonnie and Clyde.

Dennis G. Golombek didn’t have just one career.

He had three: newspaper reporter, sheriff's deputy and art teacher.

His first was his dream job: working as a reporter at the Courier-Express. When rioters threw rocks and police threw tear gas during the 1970 Allentown Art Festival, he was there. When riots broke out at the University at Buffalo and Buffalo State College, he covered them.

“He was held captive in the dean’s office at Buffalo State,” said his wife, Marie Golombek. “Students kept him there because they wanted him to report the story their way.”

The next year, when Marie was pregnant with their only child, Golombek covered the inmate riot at the Attica Correctional Facility. He and other reporters would phone in their stories from a restaurant near the prison.

“He would tell the story about one reporter who took the mouthpiece out of the phone so nobody else could call their story in,” his wife recalled.

Golombek eventually decided to become a deputy at the Erie County Sheriff’s Office, where he did fingerprinting and photography. He once donned a beard to work undercover at a Rolling Stones concert to take pictures of people buying marijuana.

One day, though, his neck and arm were injured, ending his career in law enforcement. While he was off from work, raising the couple’s daughter Carrie, he returned to school to earn a second bachelor’s degree, this one in fine arts.

“He was like a professional student,” Marie Golombek said.

Golombek began painting and taking photographs. And then one day, he and his wife were at a party and ran into the North Tonawanda School District superintendent, who offered Golombek a job teaching art.

He primarily taught middle school students, whom he loved, Marie Golombek said. They fondly called him “Mr. G.”

“He would have detention, and he would play opera and Japanese flute music for those kids in detention,” she said. “And guess what – they never came back.”

He retired from teaching in 2005, but continued pursuing his photography, focusing on nature shots and macro photography.

Born in Buffalo, Golombek grew up in the Bailey-Delavan area, attending school and church at St. Gerard’s, then graduating from St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute in 1962. He earned bachelor’s degrees in English and fine arts, and a master of arts degree, all at UB.

He met his future wife, also a UB student, at an Ogden Nash lecture at the university.

“He was behind me. He kept bothering me and wouldn’t stop,” said his wife, the former Marie Siconolfi. “We got together eventually, but it took him five years to get married.”

Last summer, he fell at home and went to the McAuley Residence in Tonawanda for rehab. His dementia progressed, and he eventually lost the ability to walk.

On May 5, when his wife FaceTimed with him, Golombek had lost the ability to speak. That evening, the staff told her he had tested positive for Covid-19. He was sent to Catholic Health's Covid-19 treatment facility on the St. Joseph Campus.

The following week, Golombek was sent to Mercy Hospital for a breathing evaluation. Marie Golombek was allowed to spend 30 minutes there with her husband of 52 years on May 11. Two hours later, he died.

“We had an interment at Mount Olivet with 12 people. I couldn’t even hug my own daughter,” she said.

Golombek was 75 years old.

“It’s really upsetting when you hear people saying I don’t know why I have to wear this mask,” Marie Golombek said. “He would breathe in, but when he breathed out, the most horrible sound came out of his chest. It was horrible to watch.”

The first line in the email said everything.

"Buffalo lost a part of its soul yesterday with the passing of Joseph Giambra," a family representative wrote in a note about the death of a civic legend.

Giambra – almost always known as "Joey" – died at 86 late Thursday in a Covid-19 wing at Buffalo General Medical Center. He had been hospitalized since April 25.

"I am saddened to hear of Joe Giambra's passing," Mayor Byron Brown said in a statement. "His contributions to Buffalo's music and theater community will be felt for years to come."

In 2018, Giambra was described point-blank as Buffalo's most beloved citizen by longtime Buffalo News critic and columnist Jeff Simon, a point offered not only as accolade but as a reasoned observation, based on a passionate community response to this resume:

The retired sergeant detective with the Buffalo Police Department was a self-taught jazz trumpeter, a pianist, an actor, a singer and songwriter, a restaurant owner, a filmmaker, a poet, a chef, the author of four books, a historian and a one-time candidate for mayor of Buffalo. He spoke fluent Sicilian and his relentless creativity and productivity hardly diminished with age.

Less than two years ago, for instance, Giambra appeared in "Cold Brook," a movie filmed and directed in Buffalo by Cheektowaga native William Fichtner. In that same period, Giambra released "Sam Noto: A Life in Jazz," a biography of his longtime friend and a jazz trumpet luminary, and completed "Joey Giambra's Legacy: Up Close and Personal," his recording debut as a vocalist.

The album wrapped in the brilliance of celebrated jazz saxophonist Don "Red" Menza and included "I Love You, Buffalo," a song Giambra originally wrote for another icon, the late Jackie Jocko. Brown noted the composition is part of the city's sesquicentennial time capsule at Buffalo's City Court plaza, "a lasting legacy and remembrance of Joe for future generations."

'Buffalo lost a part of its soul': Joey Giambra succumbs to Covid-19

Beyond all else, Giambra thought, spoke and sang to the distinctive rhythm and melody of the city's West Side as he had known it from childhood, a connection that remained at the heart of who he was until the end of his life, in this pandemic.

"How I will miss, 'Come here, Maria, listen to this screenplay,' as I dutifully follow him to his overflowing study," wrote Maria LoTempio Dines, a niece, in an email. "Levi. Wilde. Terkel. He read everything and everyone. I am so grateful to have been witness to the power of true genius, generosity, and God-given talent."

Vince LoTempio, a nephew, lost his arm in an accident when he was 12. He remembered how Giambra was always intensely aware of the child's recovery and well-being, routinely taking the boy into the press box at Buffalo Bills games.

Years later, when LoTempio became a patent lawyer, he was moved and grateful to list Giambra as a client.

"You could always count on him, for sure," said Jo Frances Cipolla, a niece, speaking of Giambra's devotion to his family. Melissa LoTempio, Cipolla's cousin, recalled how her uncle loved to make a Sicilian breakfast of eggs, potatoes, and onions – cooking skills that also resonate in memory with many of his friends.

"Joey's life as an actor, musician, playwright, poet, chef and former detective would make an amazing film, from his start in the lower West Side to his brave struggle against the virus in the end, when he was really at the top of his game," said Darleen Pickering Hummert, a Buffalo actor, playwright and casting director who has known Giambra for many decades.

Giambra often visited her house, she said, where he taught her to make sauce the "Sicilian Way." Hummert said her old friend's most extraordinary quality "was an endless curiosity" that only accelerated as he moved deeper into his 80s, which helps explains the fierce sense of community loss.

When they discussed some new idea or project, Hummert said, Giambra would always respond:

"Let's get going now."

More times than not, that's what they did.

Ed Smith, a former Philadelphia police officer who later taught theater at the University at Buffalo, met Giambra 40 years ago when Smith was running the Buffalo Black Drama Workshop "and Joey used to drop by." It triggered a long connection built on theater, jazz and shared memories of police work.

"I never met anyone like that," said Smith, who later directed Giambra in a David Mamet play. "He was easy, a cool guy, very talented. He was like a brother to me. He was so indebted to the music and loved the theater so much."

Giambra was born in 1933 on Georgia Street on Buffalo's lower West Side. His family recalls that he received his early passion for music and drama from Anne Rodenhoffer, an elementary school teacher at the old P.S. No. 2. He went on to Hutchinson Central High School, where he formed a band that maintained a steady business at weddings, parties and other events.

In 1963, he joined the Buffalo Police Department after a long stint as a trumpeter, composer and bandleader and a few years as an aspiring actor in New York City. At 44, Giambra would earn a degree in criminal justice from SUNY Buffalo State.

He also was a restaurateur who operated the Rib Crib on East Chippewa Street and founded the Hard Times Cafe, an Italian restaurant that started up in Allentown and later moved to Hertel Avenue. His long writing career included "Bread and Onions," a performance piece inspired by the West Side of his childhood, and "La Terra Promessa," a documentary that chronicles the Italian American immigrant experience in Western New York.

His many movie appearances included such films as "Hide in Plain Sight," "Buffalo '66" and "Marshall."

Giambra is survived by his wife of 66 years, Shirley; a son and grandson, Gregory Giambra Sr. and Gregory Jr.; and he was predeceased by a daughter, Michele. Donations can be sent to the new Joseph G. Giambra Fund for Arts and Culture through the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo, 726 Exchange St., Buffalo, NY 14210.

In a passionate email composed after learning of his old friend's death, guitarist Tom Naples – who often worked collaboratively with Giambra – described a sheer, passionate humanity on such a scale that Naples does not see how Buffalo can be the same without it.

"We, the many many people he loved and touched, are left with a big hole in our lives," he wrote. "For me, there will always be something missing."

Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Buffalo News. Email him at skirst@buffnews.com or read more of his work in this archive.

Oct. 9, 1936 – May 16, 2020

After his retirement from Niagara Mohawk, Norman S. Davis and his wife moved from Elma to Florida, then to the western shore of Lake Champlain, and finally to Clarence before failing health required him to move into Brothers of Mercy nursing home in Clarence 15 months ago.

There he found his final home.

Mr. Davis needed around-the-clock care for his dementia and diabetes, which became too difficult for his wife to provide. At Brothers of Mercy, she said, "He received extra fantastic care. It was absolutely beyond my wildest dreams; they were there every minute of the day for both of us."

His family hadn't been able to visit Mr. Davis since March 13, although he and his wife saw each other through a window on the 60th anniversary of their marriage on April 30, 1960, in Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Cheektowaga. They raised their family in Elma.

On Monday, May 11, Mr. Davis, who showed no symptoms, was tested for Covid-19. The next day, before the results arrived, he suffered a severe stroke. The next day, his Covid-19 test came back positive, but given his dire condition, Mr. Davis wasn't moved to another unit. Mrs. Davis is comforted that her husband spent his final days with the people who had cared for him for more than a year.

"They went over and above," his wife said. "We were treated as family."

Mr. Davis died on May 16. He was 83.

He was born and raised in Angola, and worked for more than 37 years in station construction for Niagara Mohawk, retiring as an electrician foreman. One of his final projects was the substation across from the Walden Galleria.

Mr. Davis served in the New York State National Guard from 1959 to 1965.

After his retirement, the Davises moved to Lakeland, Fla., in 1994. From there, they moved into the first home built at the Harmony Golf Club and Community in Port Kent, on the western shore of Lake Champlain. In July 2015, they returned to Clarence for medical care and to be close to family.

Before his health failed, Mr. Davis "was a tinkering person; he had to have something going on the workbench seven days a week," his wife said. He specialized in small electrical repairs, but was also skilled as a general handyman. "Anything that was around that had to be repaired, you did not get a new one, you fixed it," she said.

While they lived in Florida, the couple bought and completely renovated several homes before reselling them, Mrs. Davis said.

Mrs. Davis is annoyed by people who don't take precautions against Covid-19, including social distancing. "When are they going to wake up to how severe this is?" she asked. "Until you go through this, you have no idea."

Besides his wife, Mr. Davis is survived by two sons, Martin and Michael; a daughter, Sharon Kennedy; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Doris M. Mathias was born on Buffalo’s East Side on March 17, 1918, when the Spanish Flu was beginning its deadly march to claiming 50 million lives worldwide.

She survived that pandemic, but the 102-year-old woman is now among the lives lost to Covid-19.

Early Sunday afternoon, Mathias' daughter Mary M. Barber said she received a phone call saying her mother had died.

Mathias had tested positive for the virus on May 6 at the McAuley Residence nursing home, where more than 65 residents became infected.

Between the two global health crisis bookmarks, Mathias did a lot of living, her daughter said.

The mother of four children, the former Doris Schurr was married to Daniel J. Mathias for 51 years. He died in 1999.

“Even as she raised us four kids, she worked her whole life outside the home,” Barber said. “One her jobs was as the secretary to the headmaster at Nichols School.”

Mathias, a longtime Town of Tonawanda resident, was an avid golfer, bowler and usher at Shea’s Performing Arts Center.

She also traveled to Central America on tobacco-buying trips with her husband, who operated Mathias Cigar store, a downtown Buffalo institution for decades.

On hearing the news of a neighbor who died but was not discovered for nearly a day, Mathias asked Barber to call her every morning to make sure all was well.

“My mother didn’t want to be found hours after she died. I started calling in the morning. When she answered, I’d say, ‘Hey, Mom, you’re up. Talk to you later.’ In the afternoon, I’d call and we would discuss our days,” Barber said.

When Mathias was admitted to McAuley Residence in 2018, the two phone calls a day from her daughter ended.

“She couldn’t receive phones because of a stroke, but I visited every day, and that was the joy of her day,” Barber said.

After she tested positive for Covid-19, Mathias was transferred first to St. Joseph Post-Acute Care Center and then to the St. Joseph Campus hospital for Covid-19 patients in Cheektowaga, where she died.

In addition to Barber, Mrs. Mathias is survived by her son, Daniel Jr.; an older daughter, Nancy Ford; 11 grandchildren; and six great grandchildren. A memorial Mass will be held at a future date.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

For a time in May, a mother and her two daughters were in Olean General Hospital, all attached to ventilators, all struggling with Covid-19.

All had led distinguished lives. All were members of the Seneca Nation's Heron Clan. And all had made such a mark that the Seneca community now feels an "unmistakable emptiness," Nation President Rickey Armstrong Sr. said in a statement.

Norma Jean Kennedy, 91, died first, on May 23. Her oldest daughter, Diane L. Kennedy, 71, of Salamanca, died May 29. Diane's sister, Cynthia J. Mohr, also of Salamanca, died at age 65 on Friday, June 12.

"I don't know where to begin," said Marc Papaj, Diane Kennedy's son. "To lose my mom, my grandmother and my aunt, all three of the matriarchs of our family, has been an absolutely devastating blow to my family."

Some people in a position to understand the devastation of Covid-19 don't know of any family in the region taking such a tragic loss in such a short time.

As a board member of the Erie Niagara Funeral Directors Association, Charles F. Castiglia talks with other directors and has cared for the remains of dozens of coronavirus victims at his Castiglia Funeral Home and Erie County Cremation Service. He said he knows of a husband and wife who died within a week of each other. But he knew of no family that lost three members in less than a month. It was actually 20 days.

Before the virus struck them, Norma Kennedy had a broken wrist and the daughters, who were always coming to visit anyway, would help her with ordinary tasks, Papaj said. In time, they were in rooms that were side by side in Olean General's intensive care unit.

All were fighting, Papaj said. But as the extended family planned his grandmother's services, his mother died. Soon after, his aunt died. Cynthia Mohr's mourners came for two days this week. She will be laid to rest Friday.

"There's no words for this," he said. He tells people who struggle for something to say that they don't have to say anything because, he repeated, "there are no words."

Norma and the late Frank Kennedy had raised their children in Buffalo. Norma Kennedy worked for Calspan, under a top-secret security clearance, her obituary said. In the 1980s, she chartered the first Seneca Nation Human Services Department to advocate for tribal rights and provide social-welfare programs, and she became one of the first Native American-credentialed alcohol counselors.

Norma Kennedy later moved to Syracuse to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a tribal liaison. She served in Seneca government roles as a clerk, peacemaker, court judge and committee member of the judicial conference.

She spoke the native language and mentored those who wanted to learn it through the Seneca Language Department master apprentice program. "She could always be found at her table, ready to engage in conversation with a cup of Tim Hortons coffee in hand and a huge smile," her obituary said.

"We are all a very close family, so we did everything together," said Jessica Ludwick of Wilmington, N.C., Norma Kennedy's granddaughter and the daughter of Cynthia Mohr. She and other family members have been going through pictures and videos of their travels together and special moments. On Facebook, Ludwick posted one of her and her grandmother in Italy and others of her mother with her grandchildren.

On May 30, she wrote of her thoughts on the death of Diane Kennedy, her "Aunt Didi."

"She was vibrant and adventurous! She was so funny and would do anything for her family," she wrote. "I loved every time she called, because I knew she would soon be planning a trip down south. I’d get so excited when the phone would ring with her number because I knew I’d hear “Jessie-Wessie, I’m coming down, is that OK?'

"It was always OK,' Ludwick wrote.

Diane Kennedy had held a distinguished position, clerk of the Seneca Nation government. Born in Buffalo, she earned a bachelor's degree from Marymount University in Arlington, Va., and worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., for almost 30 years. After she retired in 2005, she returned to Western New York and became involved in Seneca Nation government, serving as its clerk from 2010-12.

Marc Papaj said his mother fought for 14 days. But with Covid-19, other health complications conspire to make the virus more deadly. "For my mom, it was diabetes," he said.

During the 28 days that Cynthia Mohr struggled to overcome the virus, her daughter, Ludwick, kept the network of family and friends informed on Facebook.

On May 31: "Mom is stable, still on ventilation and improving with her oxygen levels."

On June 3: "Mom is continuing to show us all how absolutely amazing she is! She continues to follow/track voices with her eyes and responds with yes and no by nodding to any question asked. The medical staff has talked to her about teaching, reading in the classroom and her grandchildren!"

And on June 10, two days before she died: "We are taking each day moment by moment. This virus is not kind and has given mom some setbacks but she is a fighter and is not giving up! We need prayers for all of her organs to heal, for her to begin to communicate once she has had some time to rest and for complete healing."

Cynthia Mohr earned a bachelor’s degree from Buffalo State College and, according to her obituary, became the first Native American teacher in the state to have a dual certification in elementary and special education. With a master's degree from St. Bonaventure University, she taught elementary school for over 36 years and "loved her students like they were her own," her obituary said. Among her survivors is her husband, Brian, son Travis Mohr of Salamanca, and brother Ralph Kennedy of Steamburg.

Rickey Armstrong Sr., the Seneca Nation president, issued a statement Thursday, as the community mourned.

“Norma, Diane and Cindy were each beloved and well-respected members of our Seneca family, whose passion and spirit made our Nation stronger and our lives better," he said. "It’s impossible to truly quantify the impact they made in their lifetimes, whether serving the Seneca people, working on important Native American issues, or inspiring generations of elementary school students. Their passing has left an unmistakable emptiness in our Seneca community. They will be missed.”

Maggy Woodward’s sprawling family, the siblings and nieces and nephews who revered her, were pleased more than a year ago when Maggy wound up with Natalie Hanlon as a roommate at the Beechwood Continuing Care nursing home in Getzville.

“They were comfortable together,” said Natalie’s son Rick. He understood the two women were joined by a kind of grace they never relinquished, even after they learned they had tested positive for Covid-19.

Natalie – who built a career as a manager with the old S.H. Gow insurance company in Buffalo – was only 6 when she lost her own mother to tuberculosis. In a situation that would foreshadow the goodbyes said last month by her children, she would visit her mom at a sanitarium, forced to wave and say hello only from a distance.

As for Mary Margaret Woodward – always "Maggy" to her family – she was delivered in Buffalo in 1941 on the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. Amid a wave of national chaos, a doctor was not immediately available when her mother, Margaret Woodward, went into labor.

Maggy was born struggling to breathe, umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. By the time she was 2, the doctors realized she had cerebral palsy. While that condition affected her speech and left her with profound physical disabilities, it had no impact on her mind. Those who love her say it only seemed to strengthen her most enduring gift.

“She was always so empathetic,” said her youngest sister, Ann Canty of Snyder. “I could tell her anything, and she always had the right words.”

To Maggy's family, like Natalie’s, there was a kind of hard arc of American experience to the beginning of her life and the way it ended, in the pandemic. Maggy's grandmother and an aunt were both lost to the Spanish flu, and she was born on a day eternally linked to national crisis.

Suzanne Szustakowski, another sister, recalls how Maggy from a young age “wore braces and had special shoes and our mother would take her to children’s rehab at Children’s Hospital.” Szustakowski became a nurse, among many in the family who embraced professions involving service. Canty, with the watchful perspective of the youngest child, believes Maggy's example played a lasting role in the way many of her siblings – and now their children – see the world.

As a young woman, her mom worked as an executive assistant at the old Pierce-Arrow Motor Co., while her dad ran a service station called the North Park Garage. The couple made a decision about their daughter that was evident by the time Maggy began attending classes for children with disabilities at Buffalo's P.S. 84.

In a world that too often made assumptions based on a lack of knowledge – including the false belief that a condition like cerebral palsy must equate to a cognitive deficit – Maggy’s parents raised her to be fully ready to confront the world.

They lost their son Daniel, born with Down syndrome, when he was only 7. That pain only redoubled their commitment to Maggy, who for the rest of her life spoke with particular joy of childhood visits to the Cradle Beach camp for children with disabilities.

Many decades later, not long before her death, she would occasionally come out of sleep to say, “What’s the lake look like today?”

'One of our own': Covid-19 claims Buffalo General X-ray technologist who put colleagues first

At 63, John Poleon was beloved for his workplace selflessness, for the way he would always do a little extra to allow his co-workers to stretch out lunch or leave on time.

Her family knew, at those moments, she was a girl again at camp.

In eighth grade at P.S. 84, Maggy earned a Jesse Ketchum Medal, a traditional award in Buffalo for scholastic excellence. She went on to graduate from Kensington High School, and then was accepted at D’Youville College.

“She was a trailblazer,” Szustakowski said. Canty, 14 years younger than Maggy, remembers how her oldest sister would keep an eye on her while her parents went out for their Friday fish fry, usually at Gabels on Hertel Avenue. The rule was that the kids could only watch television for 30 minutes while their folks were gone, a rule that barely covered "The Addams Family" – and a time frame Maggy, a soft touch as a babysitter, always extended.

Canty suspects her parents knew full well and did not care.

At D’Youville, Margaret Woodward would sit in each class with her daughter to help in taking notes – problems with Maggy's hands made it difficult to write, and hard for her later in life to use a cell phone – and then would type up homework each night as Maggy dictated. The children grew accustomed to the clatter of the typewriter before they fell asleep, a comforting sound that continued until Maggy graduated.

"She defied the odds," wrote Michael Canty, a nephew, in a tribute to his aunt's life. She worked for years at the Robert Warner Rehabilitation Center, while building her free time around her family. She routinely sent birthday notes to all 16 of her nieces and nephews, Michael wrote. Her sisters recall how much she loved rides in the country, especially if they included a stop for a strawberry milkshake and a sandwich from Anderson’s.

Maggy was also a person of deep faith. In one of the greatest moments of her life, she was in the audience when Mother Teresa spoke at the 1982 Niagara University commencement – about a quarter-century before she became Saint Teresa of Calcutta.

Afterward, in the crowd, the two women met. The family has a photo that shows the conversation, a moment when Mother Teresa took Maggy’s hands and told her, “Pray for me.”

In the last decades of Maggy's life, as age compounded the toll of cerebral palsy, she typically made use of a wheelchair. But she lived her own life in an apartment, and it was only in 2018 that her level of escalating need caused her to move into Beechwood, where she and Natalie Hanlon roomed together.

“We were very thankful,” said Natalie’s son Rick. He said the families visited regularly, grew to know each other and joined forces in looking out for both women. Rick reflected that in the same way as Maggy, his mother's childhood trials not only taught her "to be strong and persevere,” but gave her a deep well of empathy. The little girl who lost her mother to tuberculosis ended up with a career of such success that she eventually traveled to China, as a citizen’s ambassador.

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the two families struggled with the reality that they could no longer pay bedside visits to Maggy or Natalie, a separation that took on frightening intensity when the roommates both tested positive for the virus. Beechwood moved them together to a new room on the Covid floor, where Natalie’s children set up a tent outside the window, allowing the families to shout their greetings through the glass as they kept anxious watch.

Toward the end, as Natalie was clearly losing strength, Rick said his family gathered in a vigil that lasted for the better part of three days by the window. Maggy, 78, was also tired from attempting to cope with Covid-19, “but I think it was evident to her that mom was in her final hours,” Rick said.

As the people who loved them watched from outdoors, Maggy wheeled herself to her friend’s bed, then held her hand.

Natalie died at 84 on May 23, Maggy eight days later. It was Pentecost Sunday, and Szustakowski stood at that window, joined by Canty and the rest of their family in singing hymns and “Tura Lura Lural,” a song Maggy loved. Szustakowski, moved by the compassion of the nurses, said the enormity of the pandemic swept across her – how the sheer magnitude of losing 120,000 lives can make it easy to skip past the breadth and scope of each one.

“These are people of courage and deep faith,” Szustakowski said. She spoke with gratitude of tens of thousands of singularly monumental lives, such as a sister who understood until the end what matters most, and made sure the virus did not mean her friend would die alone.

Ann Canty lost her sister, Mary Margaret Woodward, to Covid-19

Philip Beckman survived the Holocaust, forced at age 18 from the Krakow ghetto to the Nazi concentration camp featured in the movie "Schindler's List."

He told his daughters that he vividly remembered one of the movie's horrific scenes: After the concentration camp's brutal commandant, Amon Goeth, executed his stable boy, Beckman was ordered to dispose of the teen's body.

Beckman's brother, Samuel, was among the more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazis' Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp in Poland whose lives were saved by industrialist Oskar Schindler, but Beckman wasn't lucky enough to get onto Schindler's list.

The 95-year-old Beckman outlasted the Nazis, but he could not survive Covid-19.

He tested positive for the virus on May 15 at Northgate Health Care Facility, a nursing home in Wheatfield where he had lived for four months, said his daughter, Melissa Beckman. He was quickly transferred to Harris Hill Nursing Facility in Lancaster, a Covid-19 dedicated facility.

Beckman suffered from impaired cognitive abilities, headaches and finally a high fever and cough before he died of Covid-19 at Harris Hill on June 2, his daughter said.

She said she does not know if her father fully understood that he had Covid-19.

"He was getting more confused. When he was at Harris Hill, he really thought he was going to get better and was coming home," said Melissa Beckman.

In death, Philip Beckman was once again part of a historic world event, a pandemic that has killed more than 411,000 people worldwide, including more than 700 in Western New York.

"All these vets who survived the war, and other Holocaust survivors, are passing because of the virus. We're losing a generation," Melissa Beckman said.

She said her father had a full life between the Holocaust – which killed his father and four of his siblings – and Covid-19.

In 1947 he married another Holocaust survivor, Marta Roth, then 18, who had survived the Nazi's Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland, where about one million Jews were killed. They met in a displaced persons camp in Italy.

They emigrated to the U.S. in 1950 and immediately settled in Buffalo, where Marta had an aunt. They raised two daughters, Melissa, who now lives in Queens, and Deborah, who lives in Winter Park, Fla.

Beckman worked for three decades at the Ford Stamping Plant in Woodlawn as a truck driver and in quality assurance before retiring in 1982.

Before his wife died in 2012, she and Beckman frequently met other senior citizens at the Boulevard Mall in the morning to walk and talk, Melissa Beckman said.

Beckman was also an avid organic gardener, who grew tomatoes, cucumbers and pole beans on an 8-foot-tall trellis he built. He would also harvest 30 to 40 pints of raspberries a season from bushes he grew.

"If you talk with people who knew him, they will say he was feisty," his daughter said.

In October, Beckman was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer that had spread to his bones. Beckman was discharged from Buffalo General Medical Center to Northgate nursing home in January.

"He was still climbing ladders until October," Melissa Beckman said, noting that he used a ladder to harvest the beans growing on the trellis.

Unlike his wife, Beckman was not reluctant to talk about his Holocaust experiences with his children or others he met one on one. But he rarely spoke publicly about the concentration camps, his daughter said.

In 1944, he was put in a steaming hot cattle car packed with Jews who were being moved from Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp in Poland. A man whom Beckman believes was Schindler used fire hoses to spray water on the train cars, Melissa Beckman said, perhaps saving her father's life.

The Nazis sent Beckman to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he was beaten and whipped before the U.S. 11th Armored Division liberated him in 1945.

"To his dying day, my father bore physical scars on his head and torso from the beatings," Melissa Beckman said. "Beatings also caused permanent hearing loss that could not be improved by hearing aides or surgery.

The mental and emotional scars were much deeper. He rarely had a night without nightmares," she said.

In 1993, several months after "Schindler's List" was released, Beckman went to the theater alone to watch it, Melissa Beckman said.

"Sitting at the back of the theater, he said it was the first time in decades that he cried," she recalled.

In 1996, he gave a 2 1/2-hour videotaped interview about his experiences, including at Krakow-Plaszow, that is archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

He also dictated to his oldest daughter about 15 years ago a three-page written account that includes this passage about seeing Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp's commander murder his valet, a scene that is included in "Schindler's List."

"Later on, I was assigned work in the horse barn. While I was in the barn with a fellow inmate, two German high officials showed up. One of them was camp commandant Amon Goth, the other was Heinrich Himmler. The commandant was well known for his brutality and random killing.

The other inmate was supposed to give a report. He became speechless and froze. The commandant ordered us to report to the police station to get twenty-five lashes. Under the supervision of the Chief of Police Chilowicz, I was whipped by Policeman Kerner. The end of the lash had metal points that cut my skin, including my right hip.

I witnessed Amon Goth execute his valet. The valet, a clean-cut young boy was named Lisek. My group foreman, Edek Feferman, sent me and another inmate to retrieve his body in a wheelbarrow. Together we took him for burial."

Related: Survivors of the Holocaust, a 2017 Buffalo News project 

Dec. 15, 1930 – June 3, 2020

Loren A. Keller, a teacher, actor, playwright and award-winning author, died June 3 in Williamsville Suburban Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing of complications from Covid-19. He was 89.

Born in Lancaster, he was a 1948 graduate of Lancaster High School, where he played on the basketball and tennis teams. He also acted in school plays and a play that he wrote was performed there.

While attending Buffalo State Teachers College, he enlisted in the Army during the Korean War. He attained the rank of second lieutenant and trained soldiers at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa., and Fort Benning, Ga.

When he returned to complete his bachelor’s degree at Buffalo State, he ran track and cross-country. He later studied at Cornell University, Canisius College and the University at Buffalo.

He also received a Ford Foundation John Hay Fellowship in 1964-65 to study at University of California, Berkeley, where he witnessed free speech demonstrations.

Mr. Keller spent his entire career teaching high school English in the Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda schools, beginning in Herbert Hoover School in 1956 when it was used for high school classes before the district built Kenmore East High School.

When Kenmore East opened in 1960, he was one of the original faculty members and served as English Department chairman. He transferred to Kenmore West in 1970 when his children began attending Kenmore East. He played a key role in establishing humanities programs at both schools.

An accomplished bowler, he coached the Kenmore West bowling team. He retired in 1990.

Acclaimed for his writing, he published poetry, novels, plays and essays.

His six books of poetry included a collaboration with artist Robert Freeland and “Evening Everything: The Collected Poems of Loren Keller,” in 2005. His poems appeared in The Buffalo News and he was featured frequently at local poetry readings.

His fiction included short stories and a novel, “Four and Twenty Bluebeards,” in 1999.

An annual fiction award is given in his name at Kenmore West High School and he helped select the winners until his death. He also helped judge entries in the annual writing contest sponsored by the Holocaust Resource Center of Buffalo.

Mr. Keller became playwright-in-residence in the 1980s at Buffalo Ensemble Theatre, which produced five of his plays.

They included “What Dreams May Come,” which was based on his experiences as a suicide prevention counselor with the Suicide Prevention Center of Western New York, now Crisis Services. It received a producers’ production in New York City in 1986. Another play, “Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde,” was given a staged reading in Los Angeles.

A one-act play he wrote with his son Jim, “A Pitch From Satchel Paige,” was the winner of the New York New Works Festival in Manhattan in 2018 and was performed Off-Broadway. Discussions have begun for staging another production of the play in New York.

As an actor, he appeared in “The Runner Stumbles,” “The Elephant Man” and “On Golden Pond,” an Aurora Players production for which he won an acting award.

In 2015, he was inducted into the Performing Arts Hall of Fame at Kenmore East.

He donated his extensive collection of literary and art books to the Medaille College library in 2005.

His marriage in 1954 to the former Jean Kingston, an elementary teacher, ended in divorce. She died in 2002.

Survivors include two sons, Jim and Bob; two daughters, Kathy Otto and Barbara Yendall; nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Services will be private.

Sept. 25, 1925 – June 6, 2020

Spurred by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Donald G. Symer Sr. of Lancaster enlisted in the Navy on his 17th birthday, and he went on to serve in combat in the South Pacific during World War II.

According to his family, Mr. Symer, who died from Covid-19 on June 6 at Elderwood at Amherst, rarely, if ever, spoke about his experiences during World War II. A notable exception was about his brief encounter with then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt while on shore leave on the island of New Caledonia in 1943.

Mrs. Roosevelt was on an extended tour of the South Pacific to boost American service members’ morale and assess the war effort. His family said the 1942 Depew High School graduate vividly recalled the first lady exclaiming that he looked too young to be enlisted and asked him what his mother thought about his serving in active duty so far from home. But his response to her was never made clear.

Mr. Symer also talked about the night, while serving as an aerographer aboard a naval ship, when he stood beside Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, who asked him a few questions about his duties and advised him to reach for the highest goals in life and to continue pursuing his education.

Soon after he was recalled from the Pacific Theater, Mr. Symer was invited to join the V-12 Naval Training program. The wartime V-12 program was for commissioned officers at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. As part of the concentrated wartime curriculum, Mr. Symer attended lectures by the American poet Robert Frost. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth in 1947 and from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth with master’s degrees in science and in engineering in 1948.

After graduation, he married the former Gloria Jean Erickson in 1951 and built a house in Lancaster, where the couple raised six children. Mr. Symer lived there until only a few years ago. During that time, he pursued a career as a mechanical and design engineer that spanned many decades, until his retirement from Buflovak in 2012 at age 87.

He worked at New York Central Railroad, Symington Wayne, Worthington, Dresser Rand, Ingersoll-Rand and Buffalo Technologies, all in the Buffalo area. Mr. Symer was issued several U.S. patents for various inventions. As a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, he served as national secretary. He also maintained his professional continuing education requirements and engineering licensure after his retirement.

Mr. Symer contracted the coronavirus in April while a resident at the Brompton Heights Assisted Living Facility, his family said. While his condition appeared to be improving at first, his condition eventually worsened and he succumbed to the virus.

He was a lifelong Yankees fan and community-minded resident of Lancaster who attended countless Town Board meetings.

He was predeceased by his wife of 50 years, who died in 2002.

He is survived by five sons, Robert S., Dr. Donald G. Jr., John M., Dr. David E. and Derek S. Symer; a daughter, Linda J. Cykert; a brother, Laverne; and a sister, Joan Chongor.

A burial service was held June 10 at Lancaster Rural Cemetery, 70 Cemetery Road, Lancaster, where a Navy honor guard detail provided funeral honors.

The lights at Klimek’s Tavern on Oliver Street in North Tonawanda aren’t burning as brightly, now that one of its best-loved patrons has been claimed by Covid-19.

William “Billy” Fanto was more than just the guy seated at the end of this hometown bar. He was the fellow whose smile and laugh drew you toward him in order to bask in the joy he unfailingly exuded, said his friends and family.

Fanto, 59, a lifelong North Tonawanda resident, died Nov. 25, three weeks after he was admitted to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital’s intensive care unit.

“He had been sick a couple days at home with sinus and upper respiratory ailments before he called for an ambulance. I spoke with him on the phone just before they intubated him. I begged him to fight. He said he would and I told him I loved him,” said one of his two sisters, Patti Fanto-Holdaway, who confirmed Fanto had Covid-19. 

“People were drawn to him because he was a gentle giant,” she said.

Among the many people who had nothing but kind words to share about Fanto was his friend Ed Helinski, who wrote this on Facebook: “The lights at Klimek’s aren’t as bright anymore with yesterday’s passing of Bill Fanto. Thank you for being a friend to many, a loyal Bills, Sabres and Notre Dame fan, and always a huge fixture at Klimek’s. Please let us know if the house wine in heaven is as good. Until we meet again ... ”

A season ticket holder for the Buffalo Bills and Buffalo Sabres, Fanto freely shared those tickets.

“He’d give them to anybody to make them happy,” said Brenda Klimek, whose husband, Paul “Corky” Klimek, operates the tavern.

An electrician at JM&R Electrical in Holland for 30 years, the 1979 North Tonawanda High School graduate was also generous with his electrical skills, helping out anyone in need, according to Brenda Klimek.

Paul Klimek said he had been friends with Fanto for 40 years and is having a hard time accepting that his friend is gone.

“I never saw him angry in his life. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t like him. If you didn’t like him, there was something wrong with you,” Paul Klimek said.

Friends of Fanto were so worried about him that during his battle with the virus, approximately 50 gathered for an impromptu prayer service, according to his sister, who described her bachelor brother as a devoted son.

“In mom’s later years before she went into a nursing home, he made it possible for her to stay in the house they shared because of his care for her,” Fanto-Holdaway said.

In addition to Fanto-Holdaway, Fanto is survived by his mother, Irene Fanto; his other sister, Lori Russ; a niece, Melissa Russ; and two nephews, Josh and Jacob Holdaway.

The family held a private service, and asks anyone who wants to honor Fanto’s memory to make a charitable donation.

Another way to pay tribute to “Billy,” they said, is by “cheering for his Buffalo Bills this season.” The family said they were certain that would bring him great joy.

As an 82-year-old woman who battled emphysema and lung cancer, the Rev. Barbara Jane Herling was fearful of catching coronavirus.

But that is exactly what happened to her last month, and several days after being diagnosed with Covid-19, Herling, a spiritualist minister from Depew, was dead.

Herling’s death brought a sad end to the life of a woman who raised five children and helped many people with meditation and spiritual healing as the founding minister of the Northern Lights Christian Center For Metaphysical Development in West Seneca.

“Barbara was a psychic, a gifted musician, a meditation leader, a mentor and friend to many people, including myself,” said Robin Bean, a minister who served with Herling at Northern Lights. “She taught us to take responsibility for our own actions and to be nonjudgmental of people who were on a different path.”

Her family said Herling tested positive for Covid-19 at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, after spending about 19 days at the Garden Gate Health Care Facility, a Cheektowaga nursing home. The family said she was sent to Garden Gate for physical therapy in October after treatment for breathing problems at Millard Fillmore.

“Because of her lung issues, she was terrified about catching the virus and terrified about going to a nursing home,” said Herling’s daughter and health care proxy, Nancy Kidder.

According to Kidder, hospital officials advised Herling to go to Garden Gate because she needed physical therapy to get stronger after her stay in Millard Fillmore.

Garden Gate's staff said Herling tested negative for Covid-19 on Nov. 10 at the nursing home, according to Kidder.

Kidder said hospital officials told her that her mother tested positive for the virus on Nov. 12, shortly after arriving from the nursing home.

Where did Herling become infected with the virus? Spokespersons for the hospital and the nursing home both declined to comment on her case, citing federal laws on patient privacy.

Staffers at Millard Fillmore Suburban "work tirelessly" on behalf of all patients, including those suffering from the virus, said Michael P. Hughes, senior vice president for Kaleida Health, which operates the hospital.

"That includes patients transferring into and out of the hospital. In any situation – Covid-19 or not – the clinical leaders, nurses and staff will always do what’s best for patient care. That includes working with the patient and their family to ensure that is accomplished," Hughes added, while declining to comment on Herling's death.

A spokeswoman for Garden Gate said the nursing home is "very aggressive" in efforts to fight Covid-19. But she said she would only discuss Herling's case if the executor of the dead woman's estate sent nursing home owners a letter giving them permission to do so.

Kidder said no executor has been appointed yet because her mother had not completed her will at the time of her death.

Herling was friendly with many psychics and spiritualists at the Lily Dale Assembly, the famous spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, Bean said.

“She would lead members of our church on trips to Lily Dale once a year, and we would provide meditation services and hands-on healing services at their Healing Temple,” Bean said.

As the leader of the small Northern Lights congregation since 1991, Herling also led efforts to raise money for the Salvation Army and to deliver food and clothing to Buffalo’s City Mission, Bean said.

Describing Herling as “an incredible person,” Bean said her friend had been unable to attend church services for about a year because of her health issues.

“She was treated for Stage 1 lung cancer over the summer and had radiation treatment in August,” said Kidder, who works as a nurse.

Kidder said problems with her breathing caused her mother to spend about a week at Millard Fillmore in October.

“During that time, she told us she had an extreme fear of being sent to a nursing home and catching Covid-19. She wasn’t just scared about it, she was terrified,” Kidder said.

Herling’s family gave The Buffalo News a copy of the death certificate issued by the State Health Department. The certificate lists “acute chronic respiratory failure” as the cause of death, with “complications of severe Covid-19 pneumonia.”

Like many nursing homes throughout the nation, Garden Gate has had Covid-19 infections this year.

Through Nov. 22, the Cheektowaga facility had 33 residents die with confirmed Covid-19, 160 residents test positive for Covid-19, and 86 staff members test positive for Covid-19, according to data the nursing home supplied to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 

Garden Gate is among 10 nursing homes in New York State with the highest number of confirmed Covid cases for residents. 

Garden Gate had 135 residents as of Nov. 22. The federal government gives Garden Gate a five-star rating, meaning "much above average."

Dawn M. Harsch, a spokeswoman for the McGuire Group, which runs the facility, confirmed on Nov. 16 that 22 Garden Gate residents had tested positive for coronavirus “over the past several weeks.”

She said McGuire Group has instituted numerous safety measures, following all state and federal guidelines on Covid-19 "to the letter." Despite the 33 Covid-related deaths this year, Garden Gate has had 74 total patient deaths this year, which is nine less than it had during the same period of 2019. 

In addition to Kidder, Herling is survived by two sons, Jerry Herling Jr. and Steven Herling; and another daughter, Bonnie Frisbie. A third son, Robert Gonzalez, is deceased.

She is also survived by two brothers, Robert Adams and William Adams.

“My mother was a very unselfish woman who devoted herself to helping other people, not herself,” Kidder said. “She believed in helping the underdogs of this world.”

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about Buffalo area people who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

Everywhere he went, he brought a little magic with him.

That’s how family members remember Edward Barszcz, a longtime math teacher, magician, traveler and adventurer who died of Covid-19 earlier this year at the St. Joseph campus of Sisters of Charity Hospital. He was 74.

The East Aurora man performed magic tricks in the classroom to get the attention of his middle school students in the Iroquois Central School District. He put together a team of magicians who performed at charity fundraisers for the Hydrocephalus Association. He was a former local president of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. 

“If we were at some family event, and the conversation lagged for even a few seconds, Ed would pull out a deck of cards and do a trick,” recalled his sister-in-law, Louise Mruk.

Barszcz was also an expert card player who taught a class on casino gaming statistics at Buffalo State College. And he was an adventurer who engaged in skydiving and flying a glider.

He was delighted and fascinated by animals, including wolves, and would sometimes bring to school assemblies wolves from a sanctuary run by one of his friends.

“He was one of those people who is full of energy from the moment they wake up in the morning," said his wife, the former Christine Kostrzewski. "He had friends everywhere we went. He was the anchor of this family, and it's going to be so difficult getting through these holidays without him. My first Thanksgiving in 42 years without this man at my side."

"He was such a special person ... it's so sad that we have lost people like him to Covid-19," said Jennifer Barszcz, one of his three daughters. "People need to take this virus seriously. Those who haven't been touched by it are lucky that they didn't have to lose someone the way we lost our father."

His family said Barszcz suffered in the hospital for almost a month – spending most of that time on a ventilator – after he was diagnosed with Covid-19. He died on April 29. Family members recently contacted The Buffalo News to talk about his life, the painful way it ended and the importance of masking and social distancing.

Lives lost to Covid-19

At the end, her father was unable to speak to loved ones, who were not allowed to visit with him but could look in on him during FaceTime visits set up by a kind nurse at the hospital, Jennifer Barszcz said.

"Not being able to talk with my dad, that was the most painful thing I've ever been through in my life," she said.

Born in Niagara Falls on Oct. 22, 1945, Barszcz graduated from Niagara Falls High School. He spent most of his life in East Aurora. He began teaching in the Iroquois district in 1968, after earning master’s degrees in math and science from Buffalo State and the University of Virginia.

After retiring in 2006, he taught classes at Hilbert College and Buffalo State.

In addition to his wife of 39 years and daughter Jennifer, he is survived by two more daughters, Aleta Watkins and Jennessa Barszcz; a sister, Barbara Gardner; and one grandson.

"In Ed's casket, he wore his full tuxedo, including cummerbund and dress shoes," his wife said. "In his hand, he had a poker hand of cards. A royal flush."

This is a confession. I still go by my breakthrough lesson in storytelling, the way wildly separate circles sometimes come together as if preordained, which I thought about last week when I received a Facebook message from Julie Murray Ahrens.

Her father, Tom Murray of West Seneca, was an old friend and a high school teacher of meaning in my life. Julie told me he had died from Covid-19, at 70. The note arrived while my wife Nora, our daughter, our younger son and I remained in isolation after we all tested positive for the virus, a moment when the concern and selfless gestures of friends, family and neighbors reaffirmed everyday gratitude I should never allow myself to forget.

Nora has a medical history that left her particularly vulnerable. She has gone through the hardest time, but her doctors believe she will be fine. As for the rest of us, we are thankful – deeply thankful – to have experienced only mild symptoms and to be back into the world. 

The note from Julie, in the middle of it all, was an aching reminder of perspective, of what I love and what I owe.

In the late 1960s, when I was a little kid, her dad was a teenage neighbor on a Dunkirk street where my parents rented half of a double. Tom went to school with my older brothers. He was nicknamed “Rock,” a childhood joke about foot speed that took on larger meaning. When he spotted you, he always offered this unforgettable sunrise of a smile, a sense of joy at seeing you before he said a word.

On Dec. 1, he was claimed by this spike in the pandemic.

Tom was a retired operator at Dunkirk's sewage treatment plant and a longtime substitute teacher. After reading the note, I spoke to his widow, Linda – she was a high school freshman when Tom started to walk home with her from dances, more than 55 years ago – and to Julie and her older siblings, Kelly and John. They each wept in describing what they lost, reinforcing the point I need to make.

Before I knew Tom, I knew his mother, Mary Murray, whose dad had worked in a Buffalo grain elevator. Mrs. Murray – even now, that is what I call her – was a white-haired English teacher who spent many summer days looking out on the neighborhood from her front porch. In the late 1960s, my family kept moving from rental place to rental place, and I found a touch of lasting stability once my mother allowed me to walk alone to the Dunkirk library.

I lost myself in reading, as grade school solace and escape. I would return with an armful of books, and Mrs. Murray would call to me as I walked past. Up the walk, up the porch steps, to hand over the books. She would study each one, nodding in solemn approval.

Before long, my family moved. I did not see Mrs. Murray again until I attended the old Cardinal Mindszenty High School, where she came out of retirement to teach English. I sat in a row by the door, as far back as possible, and I had settled there on a long-ago January day when she gave my class an assignment.

"Tell me," she said, "how you spent Christmas vacation."

It hardly seemed a transitional moment, except it was. Somehow I realized, for the first time, that I had a distinct choice. I could scribble down a load of shallow baloney just to muscle through, or I could do something not always typical at school for my 16-year-old self:

I told the truth. I wrote what was on my mind, every day of that vacation. I described how both my parents were heavy smokers. I wrote about my dad, survivor of a massive heart attack, and how he routinely filled a kitchen ashtray with crumpled butts. I wrote of my mother – of memorable insight and volcanic emotion – and how emphysema left her with a rattling cough deep in the night, and how I had already learned that to suggest she quit smoking was not, to put it mildly, a fruitful strategy.

The point I made was that I knew my parents would not live to see old age – a prophecy, unfortunately, that turned out to be true. I wrote of how you realize such a thing and never speak of it, though it changes how a kid looks at Christmas morning, a reflection that turned the essay into a gamble.

There were two ways for Mrs. Murray to react. She could approach my desk and ask quietly if I "needed to talk to someone," which from a teenage perspective would have meant utter disaster, or she could do exactly what she did:

She returned the paper with a good grade, and a note saying essentially: "This is a piece of writing."

There it was and really, here I am. The lesson was that if you write with simple clarity of what you see and feel, then the chances are good a lot of others will be feeling the same way, and the intimate ignites into community.

Mrs. Murray retired again, soon afterward. In my senior year, we had a fine replacement. I see him in front of class in a brown jacket - a young teacher with a smile that won over every wise guy in the class, a young teacher who carried on his mother's passion for the written word.

Tom Murray. The Rock.

Mindszenty closed two years later, in 1979. Tom went on to work the 4-12 p.m. shift at the treatment plant, and by day he was a substitute teacher. Decades later, we reconnected when I wrote a tribute to his mom. Over the years, we stayed in touch from time to time, and his faraway voice over the phone always carried that same familiar warmth.

Linda and her grown kids spoke of what it meant to feel that presence, every day. They said Tom was a master of Trivial Pursuit and a champion at winning free pizza in radio trivia contests. He was a devoted reader of newspapers and magazines, a guy who would pull Sports Illustrated from a mailbox and go through it, front to back.

Beyond all else, he was a dad and grandfather. His children remember how their parents would routinely coax them into the car on some pretext about a boring destination, before using unexpected routes to show up by surprise at the Midway amusement park. Years later, when Tom and Linda moved to West Seneca, they would put up bulletin board notes in their apartment complex, inviting anyone alone at Thanksgiving to join them for dinner.

John, looking back on it, said his dad brought particular humanity to one of the toughest jobs of all – being a parent as your kids grow into teenagers, and then young adults. Kelly cried in recalling a day years ago when she realized her first marriage would end in divorce, and she knew the voice of comfort she needed to hear.

“He always made me feel I was doing right in life,” said Julie, the youngest child.

For years, Tom had struggled with his health. Severe arthritis eventually caused him to use a wheelchair. He endured hearing loss, many surgeries, respiratory illness. Last month, Linda told me, he entered Autumn View nursing home for what he hoped would be a brief rehab from a lingering infection. He tested positive there for Covid-19, which he and Linda had spent months trying fiercely to avoid.

For more than a week he showed no symptoms, even as he was transferred back to Mercy Hospital. His family was confident he would return home, until the virus surged and took his life. There will be no formal service, because Tom wanted his remains donated for study at the University at Buffalo. Over the weekend, Linda began a family effort in their apartment: She learned of a clothing drive for people in need in the pandemic, and she knows what Tom would want her to do with his clothes.   

With Julie's note, for my part, the response seemed clear. Mary Murray taught me to see and write about the truly consequential. It was a lifetime assignment, and it includes her son.

Watch now: Deaths are climbing at Western New York nursing homes

LaDUCA, Blase

Nov. 14, 1935 – Dec. 2, 2020

At 5 feet, 2 inches, Blase J. LaDuca was larger than life, said his daughter Michelle Mathews.

He was the unofficial mayor of Buffalo’s West Side and Canada’s Crystal Beach, where his family spent the summers, she said.

“I once heard our dad say out loud but to himself, ‘How did a kid from the West Side, who did not finish high school, end up as lucky as me?’ This was said as he looked at the beautiful beach in front of him. He considered the 44 years spent on that deck in Crystal Beach as the happiest times of his life,” Mathews said in an online tribute to her father.

He worked three jobs at a time so the family could afford the summer-long "privilege," said his daughter Cheryl in the tribute.

“We would be walking halfway up the driveway on the last day of school – the car would be packed and running – and we would be whisked away for the summer,” Cheryl said.

Mr. LaDuca died Dec. 2 at Autumn View Health Care Facility in Hamburg due to Covid-19. He was 85.

Born Nov. 14, 1935, in Buffalo, Mr. LaDuca attended Grover Cleveland High School.

His West Side roots and Sicilian heritage were a source of tremendous pride, his family said.

He was a member of the Per Niente Club of Buffalo, a social club that embraces the history of the local Italian-American experience.

And he appeared in two local documentary films about Western New York’s Italian heritage.

The first was 2007’s "La Terra Promessa [The Promised Land]," which was produced by the late Joseph G. Giambra, said Angelo F. Coniglio, a longtime friend of LaDuca. The men had known each other since the 1950s.

Mr. LaDuca also appeared in the 2013 sequel, "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," Coniglio said.

He worked for 30 years at AM&As, turning what would seem to be a job into a career, Mathews said. He kept a journal dating back to 1964, listing his sales and commissions. The goal was to outperform the results of the day from the previous year. He retired in 1988.

Mr. LaDuca regaled old friends with stories of the West Side and about his days as the “rock” of the AM&A’s Menswear department, Coniglio said. 

Mr. LaDuca married the former Joan A. Mancuso in 1955. She predeceased him in 1998, shortly before their 43rd wedding anniversary.

Also surviving are one brother, Salvatore “Sam;” one sister, Mary Ann Dietrick; seven grandchildren and his companion, JoJo LaMantia.

He was predeceased by two sons, Blase R. and Michael.

The New York State Health Department has a backlog of nearly 5,000 unresolved complaints filed against nursing homes during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Citing privacy laws, the Health Department refuses to shed any further light on those complaints other than to say they are pending and under review. 

While fighting the virus that killed more than 6,300 nursing home residents, the Health Department gave top priority to investigating complaints of infection control and immediate jeopardy. Other complaints – including at least one about a local fatality – have not received the same attention.

“Amidst one of the worst pandemics in history, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mandate all state agencies nationwide only conduct focused infection control and immediate jeopardy surveys,” said Jeffrey Hammond, a spokesman for the Health Department.

Since March 1, 4,927 complaints were filed against nursing homes and 965 of them involve facilities in the 17 most western counties of the state, including Erie and Niagara.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on March 23 suspended all other types of inspections to allow states to concentrate on halting the spread of the new coronavirus amid the country’s frail nursing home population. On June 1, the agency issued a memo providing guidance to resume enforcement of other regulations governing nursing homes.

"Due to the risk the Covid-19 poses to the health and safety of nursing home residents, our primary focus remains on ensuring facilities are prepared to prevent its spread. However, we are also concerned about nursing homes’ compliance with other federal requirements. Therefore, we are prompting states to begin to survey for compliance with these requirements," the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a statement to The Buffalo News.

Among those who have had to wait months for a complaint to be addressed are the daughters of 83-year-old Leona Post, who died May 1. Her children complained Post did not receive enough assistance in eating while in an East Aurora nursing home. They say Post’s eyeglasses and dentures were also lost at the facility, making it all the more difficult for their mother to eat, according to the complaint.

An official at Absolut Center for Nursing & Rehabilitation at Aurora Park said Post died May 1 because of ailments that made her vulnerable to Covid-19.

Jason Newman, an Absolut spokesman, said an on-site state Health Department inspection Wednesday "found no wrongdoing whatsover" in the treatment of Post. He said the Health Department has not provided the nursing home with that determination in writing. 

Hammond said there was no information publicly available Thursday when asked by The Buffalo News if the Health Department had determined the complaint was unfounded.

Post’s daughters filed their complaint May 6 with the Health Department seeking an investigation into the care given to their mother at the nursing home. Michele Vaillancourt, her mother's health proxy, said Thursday they still had not heard back from the Health Department on any findings.

Since March 1, state Health Department inspectors have conducted more than 1,300 on-site “infection control Covid-19 focus inspections,” at the state’s 613 nursing homes and 544 adult care facilities, according to Hammond. Those inspections included 143 at Western New York nursing homes.

When pressed on the status of the 965 complaints, Hammond said the ones involving infection control and immediate jeopardy were investigated. As to the overall status of the complaints and whether any were resolved, Hammond said, "The 965 complaints remain under review. All complaints are kept confidential and privacy laws prohibit the department from discussing an individual’s medical history."

In further explaining the Health Department's position, he said, "It’s important to note annually DOH receives more than 15,000 nursing home complaints statewide." 

Advocates: State should investigate complaints

Advocates for nursing home residents believe the state has a backlog of complaints that are not directly related to the pandemic. Delays in investigating those complaints, now that the deadly wave of deaths in New York nursing homes has subsided, is doing a disservice to residents, according to the advocates.

“Nursing home residents have suffered for months under an inhumane, untenable lockdown that has separated them from their families and friends and any chance of monitoring or enforcement of even the most basic, essential care standards,” said Richard Mollot, director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition in New York City.

On March 13, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered a ban on visits to nursing homes in response to the highly contagious coronavirus. But Wednesday, limited visiting resumed at some long-term care facilities that filed visitation plans with the Health Department.

An official at the Empire Center, an independent nonpartisan think tank and watchdog group in Albany, said it is understandable that the government focused on the most serious complaints when the pandemic struck, but that other complaints should not be put aside.

“In a crisis, you would focus on the most urgent complaints as a kind of triage. At the same time, because there are no visitors and the access of ombudsmen have been restricted, the role of inspections becomes that much more important,” said Bill Hammond, health policy director at the Empire Center.

The limited visiting also allows for ombudsman visits.

“So as soon as possible, after the crisis has passed, you would want to redouble inspections and look at all kinds of complaints,” said Bill Hammond, who is not related to Jeffrey Hammond.

Lisa Newman, local program director of the state’s Long Term Care Ombudsman Program, said the ban made it “challenging” to follow up on concerns expressed by nursing home residents and their family members.

“We’re not able to have eyes on the situation and verify what is happening in the nursing home,” Newman said. “We have reached out to our volunteers at specific nursing homes to make sure they have contact with a staff social worker or administrator in order to resolve concerns.”

Even before the pandemic, the Health Department was already backlogged with complaints against nursing homes and questions regarding the department’s ability to enforce corrections for cited violations, according to Lindsay Heckler, supervising attorney at the Center for Elder Law & Justice in Buffalo.

“The State Legislature had concerns about the DOH’s ability to enforce the regulations which is why they passed legislation that established an independent quality monitor of the written corrective action plans,” Heckler said.

The bill was signed into law by the governor last December.

Heckler said she realizes the state Health Department is “overwhelmed at the moment and likely under-resourced and short staffed,” but that steps need to be taken to resume investigations into all complaints.

Complaint against Absolut 

Vaillancourt, one of Post's daughters, said a Health Department investigator promised Tuesday to get back to her within 10 days about the complaint against Absolut at Aurora Park. 

Newman, the Absolut spokesman, said Post’s eyeglasses were found and returned to the family, but her dentures remain missing. Nursing home documents on Post’s care, he said, prove she continued to receive “food and nourishment leading up to her Covid diagnosis.”

Post, who had a number of medical conditions, including dementia and diabetes, died May 1 at Buffalo General Medical Center, five days after she was transferred there from Absolut at Aurora Park.

Absolut records indicate Post weighed 155 pounds when she became a resident on March 11, according to documents provided by Post’s relatives and the nursing home. She was moved to Buffalo General on April 26, three days after she tested positive for Covid-19. Her weight upon admission to the hospital was 110 pounds, according to hospital records.

That would mean she lost 45 pounds in 46 days at the nursing home.

But Newman said another record indicates Post lost less weight. 

Post weighed 138 pounds on Feb. 27, according to a record the family obtained this week from Eden Heights, the assisted living facility where Post resided at the time, Vaillancourt said.The daughter added that she remains concerned about her mother's weight loss.

The main purpose of the complaint, Vaillancourt said, is for the state to determine if her mother received adequate assistance in eating her meals.

His children and grandchildren were pulling for Harold L. Meacham to mark his 100th birthday in a year and a half, but he didn't make it.

His death notice in The Buffalo News said he was "defeated by Covid-19."

It may have been the only thing that could have defeated him.

The longtime Kensington-Bailey resident, World War II veteran and Mason was 98. He would motor outside his assisted living apartment on the Weinberg Campus once or twice a day on his electric cart to smoke a cigarette, said his son, David.

"He was trying to be as careful as he could. I’m not sure where he got it," David Meacham said of the virus.

Mr. Meacham fell May 1, and was taken to Kenmore Mercy Hospital for a couple days. He was about to be released, when a test for the virus came back positive, so he went to St. Joseph Post-Acute Care Center in Orchard Park instead.

"He kept the nurses and staff on their toes out there," his son said.

A tool maker who later worked for 30 years for Niagara Mohawk, the grandfather of four and great-grandfather of four served on a Navy minesweeper during World War II. He and his wife, Gladys, were married for 65 years before she died four years ago.

When visitors were barred from the Weinberg Campus because of the pandemic, David Meacham said he talked to his father two to three times a day to keep in touch. One day his father was craving the orange chocolate he loved, and he asked David to bring some to the campus, and to leave it in the salt bucket outside for Mr. Meacham to pick up.

"That was the hard part, not being able to see him," David Meacham said.

He and his brother, Timothy, did see their father one more time on May 9, the day before he died at St. Joseph. They donned personal protection gear, and went into his room.

"He said, 'I'm glad you guys are here,'" David Meacham said. "The last thing I said to him was 'Dad, I love you.' "

Harold Meacham lived in the house he was born in for more than 90 years, and he was excited to be part of "Our Stories, Our Neighborhood," a documentary about Kensington-Bailey produced a couple of years ago. He was recognized at City Hall for his part, and given a certificate and Buffalo trophy. He was proud of being in the Navy, and liked to go to Ted's for a hot dog with his son and great-granddaughter.

"He loved his country, he loved his city, he loved his family," David Meacham said.

Joseph J. Thomas looked frightened.

He was dying from Covid-19, without his family around him. Each of his five children were saying their goodbyes remotely, on Thanksgiving day.

They were still reeling from their mother's death from Covid-19 two weeks before.

Both parents had contracted the virus in different nursing homes. Marie S. Thomas, 94, was in Autumn View Health Care Facility in Hamburg with advanced Alzheimer's disease. The disease had progressed to the point where she had not been able to talk with her children since the spring.

But Jay Thomas, as he was known, a retired lawyer living at Canterbury Woods in Amherst, was alert until the end.

He called each of his children after Marie, his former wife, died Nov. 13 at Harris Hill Nursing Facility in Amherst. While they had been divorced for more than 40 years, neither had remarried and he knew how much their children were hurting.

"I'm so sorry about your mom," he told his children, Catherine Watson, Lisa Ashbrook, Linda, Christopher and Daniel Thomas. 

He asked Ashbrook, who lives in North Carolina, if she was coming up for her mother's services.

"Oh honey, I don't think you should, it's not safe," he told her, referring to the surge in coronavirus infections in Western New York.

But he had already been exposed. And the virus moved quickly in the 98-year-old who had congestive heart failure. His children learned he had tested positive Nov. 23.

"When I saw him on camera, he looked so worried. I said to him, 'Dad, please don't fear, please don't be afraid. God has you, he has you in the palm of his hand,' " Ashbrook said.

She told him she would miss him.

"Honey, I will always be with you," her father told her.

She wanted to jump through the screen and hold his hand.

"I hung up that phone and made noises I've never made in my life," she said.

The Thomas family parents were just two among dozens of Covid-19 fatalities in Erie County in November as the second wave of the virus hit the region. From Nov. 1 to Dec. 4, 100 of the 171 Covid-19 deaths in Erie County had involved individuals residing in nursing homes and other congregate settings, according to the Erie County Department of Health.

Autumn View and Canterbury Woods have both been identified by the county Health Department as nursing homes with recent outbreaks of Covid-19, with each having more than a dozen positive tests in some weeks. Autumn View had 51 residents test positive the week Marie Thomas died. 

Through Nov. 29, Autumn View had nine residents with Covid-19 die, according to statistics nursing homes provide to the federal government. Canterbury Woods had its first Covid-19 death around the end of November, a spokesperson said.

Learned computer skills in her 80s

Ashbrook had rushed up to New York State the first week in March, right before the pandemic shut things down. She knew her mother, who entered the nursing home just three months before, was failing quickly. Her children knew what the coming months would be for her as the dementia quickly progressed. 

"I said a lot of what I wanted to say to her when she could understand me," Ashbrook said. "I felt at peace when she passed."

She and her mother were close because they both liked the arts. Marie Thomas loved opera and was a Russian history buff, passing those loves onto her granddaughters. She had always wanted to visit Russia.

She also was an excellent cook, learning how to prepare Italian dishes from her sister-in-law. She loved playing cards, and did a crossword puzzle every day.

When she was in her 80s, Marie Thomas bought a computer and taught herself how to use it.

She was the daughter of two German parents on the East Side whose siblings had been born in Germany. The former Marie Schreiber excelled in school and went to business school after high school. She worked in the insurance industry until she met Jay Thomas and they married in 1955.

"He was quite debonair. She fell for him," Ashbrook said.

Son of a shoeshine man

Jay Thomas's parents came to America from Italy around the turn of the last century. His father was a West Side shoeshine man who scraped together money to send his son to college. He graduated from Canisius College, and worked in insurance while he saved money for law school. He graduated from the University of Buffalo Law School. 

A 20th century Renaissance man, he drew up plans for the family home built on South Creek Road in Derby. Although he was born with the lower portion of his left arm missing, he manned a rototiller, planting gardens, grape vines and fruit trees on the 3.5-acre property. He also loved art and collected antiques and played tennis.

And he was a great conversationalist. Ashbrook recalls having a robust discussion about the 2020 presidential election with him.

He didn't worry too much, so when his children saw him remotely for the last time, they were struck by how worried, frightened and alone he looked. 

"I couldn't hold his hand, I couldn't do anything," Ashbrook said. "It was quite otherworldly."

He died two days later, on Nov. 28 in Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital.  

Ashbrook misses her conversation buddy.

"I was so mad, just mad at our country, you know? Now, seeing that weeks later he could have been vaccinated, maybe. He just missed it," she said. "We were trying to pray him through to the vaccine."

The first Covid-19 vaccines in the United States were administered Monday. Nursing home residents and workers are to be the first recipients of the vaccine in New York State, followed by health care workers. 

"I just wanted so much to see him when it was over. I was really hoping for that. But God had other plans," she said.

She said she has gotten past her anger and sadness. The family is concentrating on how long they did have their parents, who also had eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

"Our situation was hard, but we had parents who lived a long and relatively healthy life," Ashbrook said. 

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about Buffalo area people who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

Oct. 30, 1970 – Nov. 10, 2020

Michael J. Burns "approached every single day with a determination to fit as much as he could into whatever time God gave him," said his daughter, Caitlyn Grace Burns.

He met people through his work as owner of a financial advisory firm, as co-owner and bartender at Adolph's Old First Ward Tavern, as chairman of the Board of Trustees of Bishop Timon-St. Jude High School, and as a firefighter and department chaplain of the Hamburg Volunteer Fire Department. No matter where he went, he "lit up every room he walked into," his daughter said.

Mr. Burns became ill and died a few hours after entering Buffalo General Medical Center. The Village of Hamburg resident was 50.

He embodied the term "larger than life," his daughter said in a written tribute. "Countless times, he had hourlong, lively conversations with people, only to turn around and say, 'I don’t even know who that person is.' "

James Newton, principal of Bishop Timon-St. Jude High School, said in a statement that the school community deeply mourned the death of Mr. Burns, a 1989 graduate who had been chairman of the Board of Trustees since June 2018.

"Mike was a loving family man who was deeply passionate and committed to the success of Bishop Timon," Newton said. "He epitomized the spirit, grit and perseverance of a Timon man. Mike’s faith was grounded in the Franciscan education that he received at Timon and he demonstrated those Franciscan values in the life he lived."

Mr. Burns was one of three sons and two daughters of James P. and Mary Jo Flanagan Burns. He grew up in South Buffalo, graduating in 1985 from St. Thomas Aquinas grammar school. In high school, he played football, and competed in swimming and track and field.

In 1994, he earned a master's of business administration with a concentration in accounting at the University at Buffalo, where he was a member of the Rugby Football Club and the Accounting Association.

On Oct. 15, 1994, Mr. Burns married Mary G. Boswell in SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, Hamburg.

Through the years, he worked as an accountant and manager at several financial firms, including BDO Seidman and Ernst & Young. He opened Strategic Entrepreneurial Advisors in 2005 and worked as assistant dean of finance and administration in the UB College of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and 2018.

In the fall of 2015, Mr. Burns and three partners reopened Adolf’s Old First Ward Tavern at 555 South Park Ave.

He joined the Hamburg Volunteer Fire Department in March 2010. Over the years, he was lieutenant in charge of the STAR ATV team and fire prevention officer. He was named chaplain of the department two years ago.

From 2012 to 2018, Mr. Burns was a member of the board of directors of the 100 Club of Buffalo, which supports first responders and their families.

Mr. Burns enjoyed hunting and fishing, and did handyman work in his free time. He was an avid fan of the Buffalo Bills and Sabres, the UB Bulls and the Timon Tigers.

On Oct. 31, the day after his 50th birthday, Mr. Burns confessed on his Facebook page that for a year he'd been telling people he was already 50.

He wrote, "If I had said 49 people would always respond, 'Oh, holding on to that last year, huh?' Nope, don't care, 52, 48, 51 – I always believe in simply living your best life!!!"

 Mr. Burns expressed gratitude for the "tidal wave of well wishes" he'd received, including many Facebook comments, all of which he acknowledged.

 He ended with, "Well, I guess it is true I turned 50, but if yesterday is any example, age is irrelevant and I am living my best life!!! Thank you all – I Love You!"

Besides his wife of 26 years, Mary Burns, and their daughter, Caitlyn Grace Burns, Mr. Burns is survived by two brothers, John and Tom Burns; and two sisters, Maura Sheehan and Katie Giardina.

A celebration of life will be planned for the future.

Oct. 9, 1942 – Dec. 6, 2020

June A. Valenzuela spent much of her professional career as a registered nurse in obstetrics, assisting with labor and birth.

But even after she left the profession, she continued as a teacher, advocate and supporter for any women she knew who was giving birth.

Mrs. Valenzuela "worked unofficially providing 'Baby Boot Camp' to her children when grandkids were on the way, as well as family friends, even joining some in the delivery room to help," said one of her sons, David. "It wasn’t unusual to have her pull out videos used in her prenatal classes and give family members and family friends unofficial prenatal classes. I remember practicing diapering and swaddling with a baby doll."

June A. Valenzuela died Dec. 6, 2020, in St. Joseph's Hospital, where she had battled Covid-19 for three weeks. The Grand Island resident was 78.

During her hospitalization, "She had her good days and bad days, and spoke every day with her children," her son said. Because of her medical training, "she knew very well to follow Covid protocols, but it still managed to find her," David Valenzuela said. "She only went grocery shopping, the doctor's office, and random errands, as needed."

The daughter of Martin and Ina Ash Gardinier, Mrs. Valenzuela was a native of Buffalo and a 1960 graduate of Bennett High School.

She spent the first part of her career as a hospital dietitian, which is how she met Dr. Luis A. Valenzuela, who went on to become chief of pathology at St. Joseph's Hospital. They married on Sept. 11, 1964.

After earning her nursing degree from Trocaire College in 1981, Mrs. Valenzuela worked in labor and delivery at Children's Hospital of Buffalo, DeGraff Memorial Hospital and Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center. She then went to work in the Niagara Falls office of an obstetrician, and taught prenatal classes in various physicians' practices.

She retired from nursing in the 1990s to become more involved with her grandchildren, a maternal role she relished.

Mrs. Valenzuela always welcomed her children's friends, "so she’d know everyone," her son said. "We had a pool and a nice screened back porch, and she’d let everyone hang out all day, feeding them, mothering them.

"She definitely was Mom to everyone."

When her daughter Sara Calabrese was pregnant, Mrs. Valenzuela carefully monitored her blood pressure and diet, accompanied her to medical appointments and cared for her grandchildren, her daughter said. "She was a great grandmother," Calabrese said.

The family received a sympathy card from the eldest daughter of some family friends who told them that when she was pregnant with her first child and "terrified," Mrs. Valenzuela arranged to be in the delivery room. "She helped me get through it, and I'll always love her for that," the woman wrote.

Mrs. Valenzuela enjoyed sewing, producing many clothes and quilts and embroidering many pieces, some designed on her laptop. She was involved with the River Lea Quilters Guild on Grand Island.

She was also an avid reader, and recently enjoyed many novels with sewing and quilting woven through the plots.

Mrs. Valenzuela enjoyed hosting family vacations to Myrtle Beach and Disney parks.

Around 2000, she and her husband moved to Williamsburg, Va., and she encouraged her children to bring their families for vacations and holidays there. She would return to Western New York soon after school ended to pick up one grandchild, taking them to Virginia for a week or two of solo attention, said Calabrese.

The Valenzuelas moved back to Western New York in 2012 to be closer to family after Mrs. Valenzuela was treated for breast cancer.

Besides her son David Valenzuela and daughter Sara Calabrese, Mrs. Valenzuela is survived by her husband of 56 years, Dr. Luis A. Valenzuela; two other daughters, Lisa Moore and Marta Rodin; another son, Michael Valenzuela; and 10 grandchildren.

A Celebration of Life will be held at a later date.

July 11, 1932 – Dec. 18, 2020

Raymond G. Koegel, an executive at The Buffalo News and the operator of Pine Meadows Golf Course in Clarence for many years, died Dec. 18, 2020, of Covid-19 in Port St. Lucie, Fla. He was 88.

His family and friends described him as a generous, gregarious man who always had a smile on his face.

“We are certain that his positive attitude contributed to his long and fulfilling life,” said his eldest daughter, Susan Koegel.

A Buffalo native, he was the youngest of two children of George Koegel and the former Genevieve Nowak. He graduated from St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute in 1950. After high school, he worked at Siegfried Construction Co. until joining The News in 1951.

He started as a driver, earning $35 a week. Over the years he rose through the ranks, working as a dispatch clerk, local advertising assistant and night supervisor. In 1975, Mr. Koegel was named manager of the Layout Department, and eight years later added the title of interdepartmental coordinator. He was instrumental in the creation of the weekly Gusto entertainment section, as well as the addition of the Sunday morning paper. In 1992, he transitioned to the Human Resources Department, where he was the assistant manager and head of labor relations. He retired in 1994, after 43 years of service.

He and the former Mary Lou Spangler were married on Sept. 10, 1955, at St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Cheektowaga. They lived in Cheektowaga for 42 years, until her death in 1997.

From 1970 to 1990, Mr. Koegel was part of a group of 40 people who owned Pine Meadows Golf Course on Greiner Road in Clarence. After the land was sold to Spaulding Lakes, a sale he and several others opposed, he worked out a deal with the owner to keep operating the course until the land was converted to housing. When he retired from The News, Mr. Koegel embarked on his second career, working at the golf course daily from April to October. It became the home course of numerous leagues, including The Buffalo News Golf League. He also hosted many benefits, donating food and greens fees, to raise money for people in need, charities and organizations such as Re-Tree WNY.

He was a snowbird after retiring, and when Pine Meadows closed in 2012, he moved to Cape Canaveral, Fla. After his health began to decline in 2018, he moved to Port St. Lucie to be closer to his youngest daughter. He was a resident in an assisted living facility at the time of his death.

Mr. Koegel was an avid golfer, playing in leagues into his mid-80s. He also bowled and played slow-pitch softball for many years. A sports fan, he was a season-ticket holder for the Buffalo Bills, Sabres and Bisons for several decades. He was a longtime member of the Fraternal Order of Eagles Aerie 2692 on Broadway in Depew.

He is survived by two sons, Michael and Curtis; three daughters, Susan, Carol Feind and Eve Hilcken; and five grandchildren.

Because of the pandemic, a memorial service will be held at a later date.

March 27, 1936 – Dec. 10, 2020

Frederic K. Houston studied architecture under two of the masters of modern design. More often that not, however, his projects involved accommodating the ornate styles of the past.

The last surviving original partner in the Buffalo firm of Hamilton, Houston and Lownie, now HHL Architects, he frequently was engaged in historic preservation efforts.

His work included adaptation of the Butler Mansion for the offices of Delaware North and an addition to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery to incorporate an expanded gift shop, for which he was honored in 1995 by the American Institute of Architects.

He was principal-in-charge on restoration work for Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Cathedral – he led the design of Cathedral Park – and on projects for the Gow School, Western New York Psychiatric Center, the West Seneca Developmental Center and the former Children’s Hospital.

He also led the design of two new buildings on the University at Buffalo North Campus in Amherst – Knox Lecture Hall and Bonner Hall.

He died Dec. 10 in Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, Amherst, from complications of Covid-19. He was 84.

Born in Wilmington, Del., he attended high school in Concord, N.H., and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1959 from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. He came to Buffalo after he completed a master’s degree in 1962 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied under major architects Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi.

During graduate school, he met Marie Sturges, a staffer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the daughter of an architect. They were married in 1963 and moved to Buffalo.

Mr. Houston first worked for Duane Lyman, the dean of Western New York architecture, and then for pioneering African-American architect Robert Traynham Coles before spending two years with the Department of Urban Renewal in Buffalo City Hall.

After Lyman died in 1969, he joined with Lyman’s grandson Peter Castle and two other local architects, Mike Hamilton and Ted Lownie, to form the firm now known at HHL Architects, which was devoted to contemporary designs.

Mr. Houston’s projects featured clean lines, clear spatial flow and bright color. His fullest expression was seen in “The House in the Woods,” a home he designed and built for his family outside East Aurora in 1971.

“Anyone who visited in the winter will remember the remarkable sensation of walking barefoot on the carpeted radiant heated floors, while just a yard away, snow blanketed the same plane outside,” said his son, Thomas R., who also is an architect.

“A lot of the commissions he got because he had good relations with people in the community,” said Matthew W. Meier, a managing partner at HHL. “It was about impossible to dislike Fred. He was such a sweetheart. He was so dynamic and personable.”

He retired in 2002, but continued to serve as a consultant. He also taught architecture at the University at Buffalo for nearly 20 years.

He helped found the Landmark Society of Western New York and served on the boards of the Elmwood Franklin School, Nardin Academy, the International Institute of Buffalo, the Episcopal Church Home, the Church Mission of Help Counseling and the Salvation Army. He also was a member of the Thursday Club.

He enjoyed swimming in the pool at his East Aurora home and hosting parties around it. A connoisseur of food and wine, for many winters he took to the ski slopes at Holiday Valley and ski resorts in the West. 

“He was one of those totally elegant skiers, so calm and cool,” his son said. “Even after skiing changed, he was old school with the long skinny sticks.”

Mr. Houston and his wife moved to Buffalo about 10 years ago and were among the first residents of the Canterbury Woods Gates Circle retirement community.

In addition to his wife and son, survivors include a daughter, Virginia Houston Meenan; and four grandchildren.

A celebration of his life will be held at a later date.

This is part of a series of stories on Western New Yorkers who have died from Covid-19. Read more at "Profiles of a Pandemic."

Richard L. Odien never forgot the 1954 fire that took the lives of 15 of his sixth grade classmates in Cleveland Hill Elementary School. In fact, he told their story to educate youngsters in the Depew school district, where he taught for 27 years.

He served on the planning committee for a memorial to the youngsters who lost their lives. At its dedication, he told a reporter, "When I was a teacher and my fifth graders went outside for a fire drill and were talking and laughing, I would bring them back in and tell them about this fire. Every year, I would tell them about this fire."

Odien, a beloved teacher, coach and stage manager for musicals, died Dec. 21, 2020, in Buffalo General Medical Center after being diagnosed with Covid-19 while being treated for an unrelated medical issue. The Clarence Center resident was 78.

Odien, known as "Dick," was born in Buffalo on Nov. 25, 1942, the first of two sons of Laverne W. and Lorraine Odien. A member of the class of 1960 of Cleveland Hill High School, he earned a master's degree in education from SUNY Buffalo State.

He served for four years in the Air Force, and was stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage during the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964.

On April 20, 1968, he and Joyce S. Masi married in St. Joseph's Old Cathedral in Buffalo.

Odien started in the Depew school district in August of 1971. He worked there for 27 years before retiring in June 1998, teaching mostly fifth and sixth grades. He also coached girls swimming and diving at Depew High School, and was faculty stage manager for the annual high school musicals.

His family has received hundreds of tributes from students – some of whom didn't even have him as a teacher, but wished they had.

Over the years Odien kept in touch with many former students, said his son, Marc Odien, many of whom recalled his kindnesses and encouragement as being turning points in their lives.

Marc Odien's partner, Alison Burke, recalled that if Odien encountered a former student, as he often did, "he would remember very specific things about students; it was uncanny how he could remember a face, even a student he'd had years and years before. He had a very keen interest in keeping up with his students and learning of their successes in life. He was proud of his students."

Even after retirement, Odien enjoyed cheering on the Depew football and basketball teams and assisted with the school play. "He was very well-loved over there," Marc Odien said.

He was also supportive of his children's activities.

"Anything we did, he was right there," said his son. "He was my baseball coach, and he was the Town of Amherst hockey registrar when I played hockey."

An avid golfer who spent winters in Fort Myers, Fla., Odien loved "everything Disney," his son said. "He was a character, larger than life."

In 1999, Odien was named president of the board of trustees of Mount St. Mary Academy in the Town of Tonawanda, and helped prevent the school from closing.

His wife died in 2006.

Besides his son, Marc Odien, he is survived by a daughter, Jennifer Odien, and a brother, the Rev. Terry Odien.

A private service has been held and a Mass and memorial service will be held in the future.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

Thomas Kutas was a quiet family man who died of complications resulting from Covid-19 on Dec. 23 at Sisters of Charity Hospital, St. Joseph's Campus in Cheektowaga.

It is a bit a mystery as to how the 72-year-old North Buffalo man, who worked at American Brass for 41 years, contracted the virus, according to the eldest of his two sons, Aaron.

Aaron Kutas said his dad fell ill with Covid-19 at roughly the same time as his mother, younger brother and his brother's girlfriend.  

"In June, my younger brother, Adam, had a massive brain hemorrhage and was hospitalized for three months," said Aaron Kutas.

After his brother was discharged from the hospital in September, the younger man moved back into their parents' house, which had a first floor bedroom available for Adam because he was unable to walk and required a great deal of rehabilitation, Aaron Kutas said.

Depew teacher who helped memorialize Cleve Hill classmates dies of Covid-19

He said his brother's girlfriend, an emergency room nurse at Kenmore Mercy Hospital, helped care for his brother at their parents' home.

"So we don't know exactly what happened, but shortly after Thanksgiving, my brother woke up with a massive fever," Aaron Kutas said. 

Thomas Kutas, his wife, Adam Kutas and Adam's girlfriend all tested positive for Covid-19.

"They all had different symptoms, length of symptoms and severity. Unfortunately, my dad's, his was the worst," said Aaron Kutas.

Thomas Kutas tested positive for the novel coronavirus about a week after Thanksgiving while being treated at Sister's Hospital, said Aaron Kutas. He said his father was eventually transferred to St. Joseph Campus.

"I am a social worker. I received my first vaccination (for the Covid-19 virus) the day after my dad's funeral. It was very bittersweet," Aaron Kutas said.

Thomas Kutas grew up in the city's Riverside neighborhood and was a military veteran who served a year in Vietnam, from November 1969 to November 1970.

"He was kind of a quiet family man. He was a softball coach at Hertel/North Park for over 30 years. He also coached the Holy Angels varsity softball team," Aaron Kutas said.

'Warrior mom' said to be WNY's first mail carrier to die of Covid-19

"My dad was very proud to be Polish, and loved all the traditions: Dyngus Day and Christmas Eve. He enjoyed listening to polka music every Sunday. He loved the Broadway Market. He loved going there for the sights, sounds, smells and tastes," Aaron Kutas said.

Thomas Kutas is survived by his wife of 48 years, the former Susan Langer; two sons, Aaron and Adam; a daughter, Rachel Piazza, and two grandchildren.

Jody L. Kotowski, a postal service employee for 23 years, was a devoted wife and a champion for her special-needs daughter.

"She wanted to make sure that Francesca had as many fun, positive experiences in her life as possible," said Kotowski's brother, Richard Tomaszewski. "She was always so concerned about Francesca, and her whole life was spent worrying about her, at first.

Kotowski became involved with a group that engaged young people such as Francesca with activities, Fantastic Friends of Western New York, which set up a GoFundMe appeal. And she became active with her union, the National Association of Letter Carriers.

Both organizations expressed condolences for Kotowski after her death Dec. 20 from Covid-19 complications. She was 56.

She left behind her daughter, now 21; her husband of 22 years, Frank; her brother; and a sister, Dawn E. Both. Kotowski's mother, for whom she had been a caretaker, died in her own home while under hospice care on Dec. 9, Richard Tomaszewski said.

Kotowski, who lived in Depew, had gone into Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital with coronavirus symptoms on Dec. 18 and died in the early morning hours of Dec. 20, Tomaszewski said.

She was a "warrior mom," who provided the best life possible for Francesca, Fantastic Friends said on social media. "Our thoughts and prayers are with Francesca and her father, Frank."

Like most moms, Kotowski was her child's biggest booster. Her Facebook page features a clip of Francesca competing in a Special Olympics race. In posting a picture of her daughter taken by a professional photographer, mom wrote that "she did excellent work, but I have to say my model is beautiful!''

The National Association of Letter Carriers union said Kotowski was the first member to die of the virus in Branch 3, which represents some 2,000 members in Western New York.

"Jody was a good friend to all letter carriers she met, she was an active carrier in Niagara Square in the Buffalo Branch 3 area, she was a past editor of their local publication," the union said on Facebook as it urged members to wear a mask, wash their hands and socially distance.

Had she survived, Kotowski likely would have looked for some way to provide support and compassion for others hospitalized with the coronavirus, her brother said. Like other families who have lost loved ones during the pandemic, Kotowski's kin have not yet gathered to mourn her death, he said. Out of concern for Covid-19, he has not yet gone to express his condolences to Frank Kotowski.

"It's such an odd time," Tomaszewski said. "You can't even grieve properly. It's a terrible thing for a family to go through."

In 1969, Dr. Luis A. Valenzuela was stationed in South Carolina with U.S. Army Medical Corps. He was supposed to be sent to Japan, but his wife was pregnant with their son Michael.

Valenzuela "got in his car and drove from South Carolina to The Pentagon to say that he couldn't go because of my mother's pregnancy," said his son David. His superiors agreed, on the condition that he accept a later assignment to Germany. But he was discharged with the rank of major in 1970 without going overseas.

Along with being a devoted father, Valenzuela was a brilliant researcher and scientist who contributed to the development of the PSA test to screen for prostate cancer.

But the center of his life was his wife of 56 years, June. After she died Dec. 6 of Covid-19, Valenzuela, who was also diagnosed with the disease in late November, struggled to remain interested in life. He was hospitalized for five days in Erie County Medical Center and, after his release, died Dec. 23 in the Grand Island home they had shared.

"All he wanted was to be with her," said David Valenzuela.

Valenzuela had a "big bellowing laugh," his son Michael Valenzuela said. "He was a very carefree, spirited person. He would talk to strangers and make them smile or laugh. He was a very outgoing man, and if he could touch somebody in a positive way, he would do that." 

Valenzuela was born on April 22, 1937, in Tunija, Bogota, Colombia, and graduated from medical school at the Universidad Nacional De Colombia in 1962, second in his class. After immigrating to the United States in 1963, he met June Gardinier, a dietitian, while they were both working at Deaconess Hospital. They married on Sept. 11, 1964.

He served in the Army Medical Corps from 1968 until 1970, receiving the National Defense Service Medal.

Back in his wife's Western New York hometown, Valenzuela worked at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Kenmore Mercy Hospital and finally at St. Joseph's Hospital, where he was chief of pathology for some 20 years. He retired in 1995.

He also operated a private lab, often working 12-hour days.

In 1979, with researcher T. Ming Chu, Ph.D., of Roswell Park, Valenzuela and two others reported the discovery and purification of the Prostate-Specific Antigen. Blood tests for PSA can now find prostate cancer long before symptoms appear, when treatment can still be effective.

Around 2000, the Valenzuelas moved to Williamsburg, Va., then moved back to Western New York in 2012 to be closer to family after June was treated for breast cancer.

As busy as he was when his children were young, Valenzuela "was always around for soccer games, school concerts and plays," said David Valenzuela.

"My dad was very proud of his family; he always talked about his children, his grandchildren," said Michael Valenzuela.

And in later years, he and his wife were inseparable. 

"Where one went, the other was," Michael Valenzuela said.

Valenzuela was a fan of the Buffalo Sabres – he shared season tickets for many years with other doctors – and the Buffalo Stallions, who played professional soccer from 1979 to 1984. When his children got older, he was always happy to share the tickets, "and made sure we all got turns to use them," said his daughter Sara Calabrese.

He was also a history buff, with particular interest in the U.S. Civil War.

Besides his sons, Valenzuela is survived by three daughters, Lisa Moore, Sara Calabrese and Marta Rodin, and 10 grandchildren.

A celebration of life for Luis A. and June Valenzuela will be held at a later date.

Like many couples who had spent years together, James and Dottie Dojka developed a comfortable rhythm with each other that was alternately touching and comical to watch, according to her daughter and his stepdaughter, Michele Meredith.

"Me and my kids would sit back and laugh at them, because they were like a comedy show," Meredith recalled.

Diagnosed with Covid-19, James Dojka died at age 71 from complications related to the virus in Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital in Amherst on Jan. 2.

That was nearly a week after his wife, Dottie, 69, died from complications related to her treatment for non-small cell lung cancer, a very aggressive cancer for which she was first diagnosed in November, according to Meredith.

"She started her first chemo and radiation on Dec. 14," Meredith said.

Though her death was not directly attributed to the novel coronavirus, Dottie Dojka was diagnosed with Covid-19 shortly before she died, her daughter said.

James Dojka was diagnosed with Covid-19 on Dec. 27, the day his wife died.

Both had underlying illnesses that made contracting the virus especially dangerous for each.

"You know what? We don't know how they got Covid, because the only places they went were to the doctor's. So, who knows?" Meredith said.

Meredith recalled the last time she remembers seeing her stepdad was the day she said goodbye to her mother.

"He was in the ER, and I had to go get him so he could say goodbye to my mom, and then we had to leave him back in the ER. So he was grieving, and that was the last time we saw him," Meredith said.

"We like to think he died of a broken heart versus Covid," she added.

The couple married in 1993, but first met in the early 1980s.

James Dojka was born Oct. 20, 1949, in Cheektowaga. He was a 1967 graduate of Cheektowaga Central High School, and served as a medic in the Army in Vietnam in the early 1970s, his stepdaughter said.

He had a 40-year career as a Teamster truck driver with The Buffalo News, before illness forced him into early retirement about a decade ago.

Dottie Dojka was born Dottie Stachowski on Nov. 23, 1951, in Buffalo. She grew up on Buffalo's East Side near the Broadway Market.

She was a 1969 graduate of South Park High School, and also graduated from Bryant & Stratton College, where she studied to become a legal secretary.

Dottie Dojka had a 30-year career as a legal secretary with the same legal firm before she retired .

Meredith said her mother was a single mother of two when she and James Dojka first met. He also had a daughter.

The couple settled in an East Side Buffalo neighborhood near the Cheektowaga border where they raised Dottie's children together.   

Meredith said her parents shared many common interests that made them highly compatible.

"They liked going out to restaurants and they liked the casino. In their early years, they both enjoyed golfing and bowling with friends," Meredith said.

That included golfing trips to Byrncliff golf club and resort in Varysburg. They also enjoyed going to horse races in the Finger Lakes region, and took a few trips to Las Vegas.

"She did like to do arts and crafts, and all of her time was spent with her grandchildren, whether it was supporting them for baseball, football, cheerleading, taekwondo and basketball. She never missed any of their concerts. She liked to keep busy, but it was usually with her family," Meredith said.

"She would do lunch with longtime friends. She went to crafts. She liked to sew," she added.

Meredith said that, as a couple, they would best be remembered for their interactions during birthdays, holidays and other family get-togethers.

"The two of them were very supportive parents and grandparents. Anyone who met them just fell in love with them. It was just Dottie and Jim," Meredith said.

In addition to Meredith, the couple is survived by Dottie Dojka's son, William Goss; James Dojka's daughter, Christie Dojka; James Dojka's sisters, Barbara Mamrod and Nancy Falcone; James Dojka's brother, Daniel; and five grandchildren.

Dr. Joseph Masling, a pioneering researcher in Freudian psychology who taught at the University at Buffalo for more than half a century, also indulged an eclectic range of interests.

He played classical violin and listened only to classical music with a fierce antipathy toward anything composed after 1875. He was an oenophile, a connoisseur of fine wines. 

Dr. Masling also was described by his family as a strict grammarian and lover of language who never tired of pointing out the grammatical errors made by loved ones and strangers alike.

He was not only a bright intellect, but a fierce competitor in poker, boxing and, most especially, tennis, which he continued to play until age 95.

Dr. Masling died on Dec. 29 in Buffalo General Medical Center from complications related to Covid-19. He was 97.

His daughter, Susan Rubel, said her parents lived independently in downtown Buffalo, until her mother contracted Covid-19, followed by her father.

"They were both in the hospital together. Buffalo General was wonderful. They put them in a room together for almost two weeks. Then, my father, surprisingly, died, because my mother was much sicker," said Rubel.

Their final days together were special, she said.

"It made a huge difference. They spent every minute together. He sat there in a chair, holding her hand," Rubel recalled. 

A child of the Great Depression, he was born Dec. 18, 1923, in Rochester, and enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1943, interrupting his studies at the University of Iowa to serve as a weatherman in India, China and the U.S.

After receiving an honorable discharge, he completed his undergraduate studies at Syracuse University. He obtained a doctorate in clinical psychology from Ohio State University.

While conducting post-doctoral research in Philadelphia, Dr. Masling met Annette Chernoff, whom he married in 1953.

Dr. Masling returned to teach at Syracuse in the Psychology Department. In 1964-65, on a Fulbright Fellowship, he worked at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, helping to establish a clinical training program in the school’s psychology department.

From 1965 until his retirement, he spent more than 50 years as a professor of psychology at UB, also serving as department chairman, head of the psychology clinic and on many university committees.

According to Rubel, Dr. Masling was unimpressed with plans to move the Psychology Department at UB from the Main Street campus, with its classical buildings, to Ridge Lea, where a series of cookie-cutter buildings were planned.

"They said, 'What can we do to make it better?' He said, 'Plant trees,' and, sure enough, 20 years later, they're thanking him for that," Rubel said.

In 1972, Dr. Masling studied at the Anna Freud Clinic in London, where he endeavored to empirically verify principles established by Anna’s father, applying rigorous scientific methods to the exploration of Freudian theory.

Dr. Masling’s work culminated in his editing and publishing a 10-volume series titled "Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories." For many years, he also maintained a small private clinical practice.

In 2016, Dr. Masling and his frequent tennis partner, Morton Rothstein, were the subject of an article in The Buffalo News when they were 92 and 93, respectively.  Rothstein, a retired professor in the biological sciences at UB, said the two first met about 1963.

"We probably met through tennis. We kind of just fell in together. It was just a spiritual making, I guess you might call it," Rothstein said,

He said both men shared a passion for classical music, but while Rothstein described himself as bumbling on the piano, he said Dr. Masling's skills on the piano were professional level. Dr. Masling was the son of a cellist who played with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.

He was 15 when he started playing tennis in Rochester.

“When I was younger I could run all day," Dr. Masling said. "My nickname was ‘The Human Backboard.’ When I was teaching at various colleges, I would frustrate students that I played tennis with by keeping the ball in play until they made an error.”

He continued to play into his later years, even after major back surgery.

Besides his daughter, Dr. Masling is survived by his wife of 67 years, who is retired head librarian at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; a son, Mark; and four grandchildren.

This is part of a series of stories on Western New Yorkers who have died from Covid-19. Read more at "Profiles of a Pandemic."

Annette Masling, former head librarian at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, was the first one in her downtown Buffalo home to contract Covid-19 in December.

Then, not long after she was admitted to Buffalo General Medical Center, the virus struck her husband, Dr. Joseph Masling, a University at Buffalo professor emeritus and a pioneering researcher in Freudian psychology.

“They were both in the hospital together,” their daughter, Susan Rubel, told Buffalo News reporter Harold McNeil earlier this month. “Buffalo General was wonderful. They put them in a room together for almost two weeks. ... They spent every minute together. He sat there in a chair, holding her hand.”

She died Jan. 15 at the age of 91. Her husband, who was 97, died Dec. 29.

Born Annette Chernoff in Philadelphia, Masling was attending Temple University when she met her husband, who was doing post-doctoral research.

They were married in 1953.

They first lived in Syracuse, where Joseph Masling taught psychology at Syracuse University. Then, after a year in Israel while her husband worked at Hebrew University in Jerusalem under a Fulbright fellowship, they came to Buffalo in 1965 when he joined the UB faculty.

While raising two children, Masling earned a master’s degree in library science from UB and served as head librarian at the Albright-Knox from 1973 to 1989.

She had a passion for literature, art, music and travel and could recite poetry from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll and Ogden Nash from memory, her daughter said.

An avid reader, she audited college classes online and enjoyed gardening.

Masling was a gourmet cook and had an eye for bargain fashions, her daughter added. She cut her own hair and her husband’s for more than 50 years.

In addition to her daughter, survivors include a son, Mark, and four grandchildren.

A memorial service may be held at a later date.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

This is part of a series of stories on Western New Yorkers who have died from Covid-19. Read more at 'Profiles of a Pandemic.'

April 23, 1944 - Jan. 18, 2021

As an English teacher at Holland Middle School and St. William's Parochial School, Vincy O'Donnell always gave her pupils a dose of culture by bringing them to see theater productions in Buffalo.

She certainly left her mark.

"So many times we would be out and one of her former students would come up and say that she was their favorite teacher," said her sister Philomena Gallagher.

O'Donnell was indelible among family, friends and colleagues, too. She played a vital role as board secretary for South Buffalo Community Table soup kitchen, homeschooled her granddaughter and coordinated monthly lunch meetings for Mount Mercy Academy alumni, where she graduated in 1961 and was a former board member.

O'Donnell was known for the cuccidati cookies she made with family members each year at Christmas, which she distributed to friends, neighbors and even her dentist.

Most of all, she was a doting grandmother to her four grandchildren, who called her Nanie.

"She loved to make little meals for them. She used to make this pastina - little tiny pastas with chicken broth," Gallagher said. "They went crazy for it. You would think you were giving them filet mignon."

O'Donnell's vibrant life was cut short Jan. 18, after a two-week battle with Covid-19 that included time on a ventilator in the intensive care unit at Sisters Hospital, St. Joseph Campus. She was 76.

O'Donnell had seemed to be on the mend, her family said, but the virus had done permanent damage.

"It's just so surreal because it happened so fast," Gallagher said. "When she left her house for the hospital, I'm sure she had no clue that she wouldn't return."

Gallagher had a chance to say goodbye via Facetime.

"I don't know if she really knew what I was saying. I hope she did," she said.

O'Donnell's sons, Robert and Richard, were able to visit their mother in the hospital, but others remained apart, even after her death – visitors were discouraged from attending the funeral amid the pandemic. It showed O'Donnell's sister Angela Seltzer how Covid-19 "has changed everything."

"Not only how we live but how we die," Seltzer said.

The Buffalo News is publishing stories about people from Buffalo Niagara who have died due to Covid-19. Please contact The News at citydesk@buffnews.com if you know of someone whose story we should tell.

Nov. 22, 1931 – Feb. 11, 2021

Lothar "Larry" Gottlieb fled the Nazis with his parents as a boy of 9. At the request of his wife, Doreen, he talked about his experiences with a couple of classes, but he never discussed that era of his life with his three children.

Then, in February 2013, when he was 82 years old, Mr. Gottlieb was interviewed by students of Yeshiva University High School for Boys in Manhattan for the documentary series, "Names Not Numbers," funded by Steven Spielberg.

"My father, literally, said not a word until he did this interview," his son said. "We had never heard it from him."

"To suffer what he had suffered at a young age and still be so successful was just amazing and spoke volumes," Seth Gottlieb said. "And he wasn't the only one; he was one of thousands."

Mr. Gottlieb suffered a stroke in his Williamsville home on Dec. 24, 2020. He was recovering from brain surgery in a rehab facility when he tested positive for Covid-19. He died in Buffalo General Medical Center at age 89.

He was born in Nuremberg, Bavaria, the only child of Nelly Ottenheimer and Alfred Gottlieb, who owned and operated a factory that produced high-quality toys, Seth Gottlieb said.

On Kristellnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, Nov. 9-10, 1938, when Jewish people and their homes and businesses were attacked across Germany, Mr. Gottlieb's parents hid him and a young cousin in the attic. From there, the boys could hear the harrowing sounds of Nazi intruders beating his parents and destroying their house, Seth Gottlieb said.

In early March 1941, the Gottliebs secured visas to leave, but they needed assistance from an uncle in Yonkers – "they basically left penniless," Seth Gottlieb said. Finally, on July 11, 1941, in Lisbon, the small family were among hundreds of Jews on board the S.S. Exeter, seemingly safe from Nazi clutches.

Mr. Gottlieb told The Buffalo News, as part of the "Survivors of the Holocaust" series, of how he and his parents narrowly escaped being captured by Nazis after boarding the Exeter.

"The year was 1941, and it was almost impossible for Jews to get out of Germany or Europe," Mr. Gottlieb told The News. Before the ship departed, a Nazi truck convoy pulled up and the officer ordered the captain to turn the Jews over. The two officers met on the ship's gangplank.

"At one point, the American captain gave a signal, and I saw guns stick out of the porthole windows," Mr. Gottlieb said. "There was more talking on the gangplank, and finally the convoy gave up.

"On the way down, the Nazi officer said to the ship's captain – I'll translate in English – 'Those damn Jews aren't worth it!' "

When the Exeter was at sea, a Nazi U-boat fired a torpedo at it, which narrowly missed.

"We never found out if that was retribution for the captain not giving up the Jews on board," Mr. Gottlieb said.

After a voyage of 10 days, the Exeter arrived in the Port of New York on July 21, 1941. Mr. Gottlieb's father soon applied for permanent citizenship.

Mr. Gottlieb was a 1950 graduate of Brooklyn Technical High School and earned a degree in electrical engineering from the City College of New York. He then moved to Western New York to work as an engineer for Bell Aerosystems Co.

In November 1957, Mr. Gottlieb was one of a handful of engineers at Bell Aerospace to record and broadcast on WBEN radio and WBEN-TV the first signals received in Western New York from the Soviet satellite Sputnik II.

Mr. Gottlieb met Doreen Cohen when she and a girlfriend, both from Toronto, met two Buffalo men for a double blind date. Although they were not each other's dates, he still called her afterward.

In late December 1960, the couple married twice, once in Buffalo and once in Toronto.

In May 1965, Mr. Gottlieb joined the engineering department of Sierra Research Corp., where he was given a special assignment in advanced research. He retired at age 55 in 1986.

He first spoke of his Holocaust experiences to a class at Amherst Middle School, where his wife was secretary to the assistant principal, and only because a scheduled speaker canceled, Seth Gottlieb said. Eventually, Mr. Gottlieb encased his documents in protective Mylar "so people could pick them up, touch them and see that they were real," his son added.

Mr. Gottlieb was also part of a local Holocaust survivors' group.

"He was a very quiet man, but he loved traveling, he loved parties and he loved to throw parties," Seth Gottlieb said.

The Gottliebs were skilled and enthusiastic ballroom dancers, who would take to the dance floor at any opportunity.

"He was very, very smart," Seth Gottlieb said. "He was very logical, very innovative, he did all the plumbing, electrical work and anything else that needed to be fixed in their house."

Besides his wife of 60 years, Doreen Gottlieb, and his son Seth Gottlieb, Mr. Gottlieb is survived by another son, Jordan Gottlieb; a daughter, Rachel Gottlieb; and two grandchildren.

The family held a private service, followed by a daylong videoconference session that was joined by some 60 people.

Elaine M. Luparello was a dynamic, active woman, who with her sister founded and operated two of the first day care centers in the area in the early 1970s.

Her ambition ran in the family.

Her father, George A. Weichmann, started out as an office worker for a construction company, and at the time of his death in 1973 was president of B.A.W. Construction. He owned Leisureland in Hamburg and Amherst Manor Apartments near the UB North campus.

"My grandfather was one of those guys who started from nothing, his father died when he was quite young, and he built a business and had my mother working in it when she was a teenager," said Luparello's son Thomas.

Luparello, a Clarence resident, was hospitalized in Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital for congestive heart failure in November. After several trips to a rehab facility and back to the hospital, she was diagnosed with Covid-19. Her family was able to visit her the day before her death on Jan. 24.

She was born in Buffalo on May 14, 1936, the oldest of three children of George and Marion Danitz Weichmann.

She attended Buffalo's Public School 80 and was a 1954 graduate of Mount St. Joseph's Academy. She earned a degree in early childhood education from the University at Buffalo.

On Sept. 14, 1957, she married Oberdan F. Luparello Jr. in St. Aloysius Gonzaga Church in Cheektowaga.

They raised four sons and a daughter, and Luparello welcomed her children's friends.

"Our house was the one where all the neighborhood kids used to hang out, and she was like a second mother to a lot of them," Thomas Luparello said.

"She was a really nice person," he said. "She always put other people before herself."

In the early 1970s, at the suggestion of their father, she and her sister, Lois Floreale, opened the first Kiddie Koral Day Care Center at Amherst Manor Apartments with a third partner. After their father died in 1974, the sisters opened a Kiddie Koral at the Leisureland property in Hamburg.

"They got into it early," her son said. 

After 11 years, the sisters closed the Hamburg Kiddie Koral. Luparello soon "really got bored at home," her son said, and went to work at the Erie County Auto Bureau for 15 years, retiring in the early 2000s.

She also had a real estate license in the 1970s and 1980s and was a notary public.

She did an assortment of volunteer work, pushing a hospital magazine cart in the 1980s and working at various food pantries, including one in Williamsville. She was a member of St. Aloysius Gonzaga Church's Altar and Rosary Society, the seniors group at Evangel Assembly of God, the women's auxiliary of the Romulus Club of Kenmore and the Woman’s Federation.

She was also active in Democratic politics, serving as an elections inspector and on the Clarence Democratic Committee. She "did a lot of knocking on doors for candidates," Thomas Luparello said.

Her husband, Oberdan F. Luparello Jr., died Dec. 15, 2006. 

Her daughter Kaaren Luparello Lynch, chief of staff for the Buffalo Common Council, died on Sept. 24, 1999: her son, Robert O. Luparello, died on Dec. 3, 2017.

Besides her son Thomas, Luparello is survived by two other sons, Craig and Ronald Luparello; a brother, Ronald Weichmann; a sister, Lois Floreale; 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at a later date.

Paul L. Bohanna adored his family and was a great example of a father and a husband, said his daughter Shyla Kelcy.

Three weeks was the longest he and his wife Gladys had been apart in 34 years of marriage.

That occurred when Kelcy was stationed at an Air Force base in Japan and Gladys Bohanna traveled there to be with their daughter when her first child was born.

Other than the trip to Japan, Paul and Gladys Bohanna were “inseparable.”

“You never saw one without the other,” Kelcy said.

Though Bohanna never had biological children, his five kids all called him dad.

“He told us that he prayed for a woman with children because he didn’t have any of his own. He met my mom and walked into a ready-made family,” Kelcy said. “My mother couldn’t have picked a better person for her and for us.”

Bohanna, 69, died Feb. 4 in Banner Ironwood Medical Center in Queen Creek, Ariz., due to Covid-19.

Bohanna contracted the novel coronavirus after his wife tested positive following a visit to see a friend, who had just moved into a brand new home, Kelcy said. The friend’s husband didn’t know at the time of the visit that he had Covid-19.

“Mom got it first and took it home,” Kelcy said.

Born Feb. 20, 1951, in Montgomery, W. Va., Bohanna moved to Buffalo with his family as a child.

He was an altar boy at the former Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Buffalo and graduated from Father Baker High School, Kelcy said.

He attended Buffalo State College and was a Scottish Rite Mason.

Bohanna relocated to Florence, Ariz., seven years ago with his wife after he retired from Niagara Mohawk, where he had worked for 35 years as a licensed electrician.

While in Buffalo, he was an active member of Mount Olive Baptist Church for 28 years, serving on the Usher Board and in the Video Ministry. He and Gladys celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary by renewing their vows at Mount Olive.

In Arizona, he was an elder at Solid Foundation Bible Church located in Apache Junction. He also was a certified Biblical counselor and led a marriage ministry alongside his wife.

“He was a faithful servant. He read the Bible every day. He studied Bible like people watch TV,” Kelcy said.

Bohanna loved his morning coffee, traveling and listening to spiritual music, according to his family.

Bohanna is survived by three sons, Antoyne and Donyale Evans and Ivory Robinson Jr.; another daughter, Deanna Evans; three brothers, Clyde, Ernest Gladden and Cornelius Johnson Jr.; 16 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Services were held at Mount Olive Baptist Church on Saturday. It was a true homegoing service, his family said. It would have been his 70th birthday.

Dennis R. DePerro, the 21st president of St. Bonaventure University, was a dynamo.

Soon after taking office, he formed several commissions to examine critical issues, then launched a comprehensive capital campaign to build "A Bolder Bonaventure." Last year he reconstituted the Presidential Commission on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

During his four years as president, the university admitted the three largest incoming freshman classes in the last 11 years and increased the online graduate initiative by 329%.

But more important than his accomplishments was his nature – affable, authentic, insightful and humorous, said those who knew him.

"As much as he did, it wasn't like he came in and tore things down," said the college's chief communications officer, Tom Missel. "He guided us the way he felt was necessary, but he was so supportive of everybody. And he was a great leader because he commanded respect."

Dr. DePerro died Monday, March 1, 2021, of complications from Covid-19. He had tested positive for Covid-19 on Christmas Eve, was admitted to Crouse Hospital on Dec. 29, and was been placed on a ventilator in mid-January. The resident of Olean and Syracuse was 62.

"I know when people die it’s become cliché to say things like, ‘He was a great leader, but an even better human being,’ and yet, that’s the absolute truth with Dennis," Dr. Joseph Zimmer, provost and vice president for academic affairs, who was named acting president late last month, said in a statement. "We are heartbroken."

"He was one of the finest human beings I've ever met," said Missel. "His humanity, his insight, his ability to listen to all sides, his sense of humor – all of that made him a great leader."

“Words simply can’t convey the level of devastation our campus community feels right now,” Zimmer said.

Dr. DePerro became the 21st president of the college June 1, 2017, and was officially inaugurated Nov. 3 of that year.

John Sheehan, chair of the university’s Board of Trustees, said, "I know we believed when we hired Dennis that we made the right choice, but there’s no question he exceeded our wildest expectations."

"He was such a grand spirit that it just didn't seem fair for him to be taken away this soon. He had so much more to give us," said Missel.

Dr. De Perro was born on Feb. 18, 1959, the youngest of four children of Peter C. and Jennie DePerro and grew up on Tifft Street in South Buffalo. In his traditional Italian family, his mother made a Sunday spaghetti dinner for her family and anyone who stopped by.

He was a 1977 graduate of Bishop Timon High School and yearned to attend St. Bonaventure University to take a different path from his two older brothers, Peter and Rich, he told Missel in 2017. A generous scholarship from Canisius made up his parents' minds, he told Missel.

Dr. DePerro majored in biology at Canisius College and planned on becoming a doctor, following his sister Rose, a nurse, into the medical field.

But working as an orderly in the emergency department at Mercy Hospital convinced him that he would rather teach biology, he told Missel. A substitute teacher of biology at Timon for six months after graduation, he took a summer job in the finance office at Canisius, where he saw a job posting for an admissions counselor. He was hired for that job in 1982 and quickly fit in.

He spoke fondly of his early days as an admissions counselor, telling Missel, "The early 1980s was still an era where you were helping first-generation students get an education, when you were really a counselor and not just a salesman or marketer. I helped people get into college, helped them decide their majors, stayed in touch with them for four years."

Dr. DePerro earned a master's degree from Canisius College in educational administration and supervision in 1988. He worked in admissions and alumni relations at Canisius College until 1990, then spent five years as dean of admissions and financial aid at Marietta College in Ohio.

In 1995, he was named dean of enrollment management at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, a post he held for 18 years before becoming the first dean of LeMoyne's School of Graduate and Professional Studies in 2013. He was also a professor of management in the Madden School of Business at LeMoyne.

He earned a doctorate in higher education management in 2006 from the University of Pennsylvania.

In April 2019, Dr. DePerro was among the Catholic leaders who called on then-Bishop Richard Malone of Buffalo to resign in the wake of the diocese's clergy sex abuse scandal. 

"No organization in today’s world – including the Catholic Church – is exempt from accountability," Dr. DePerro said in a statement at the time. "I believe that a good leader would recognize that moment and step down."

On Dec. 4, 2019, Malone resigned.

In July, after an inquiry from a student newspaper reporter, Dr. DePerro wrote a resolution removing the name of a priest credibly accused of abuse from the university's administration building.

Praise for Dr. DePerro and condolences for his family poured in from those who knew him.

The Rev. James J. Maher, C.M., president of Niagara University, said in a statement, "Through his incredible vision and engaging leadership, he positioned the university for success for years to come. I have a deep admiration for Dennis as a faith-filled leader, an exemplary educator, a wonderful colleague, and a dear friend. His death is a great loss for all of us."

Besides his wife, the former Sherry Hunt, and siblings, Dr. DePerro is survived by two sons, Andrew and Matthew DePerro.

Funeral services have not been announced.

Oct. 4, 1943 – March 26, 2021

Jacqueline C. Groszkowski spent her life giving to others.

As a Cleveland Hill teacher, she encouraged and supported her pupils. An award-winning quilter, she gave hundreds of her creations to people in hospitals and serving in the military. She donated gallons of blood to the Red Cross and platelets to Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.

"Her generosity was far-reaching," said Sandra Ash, one of her two daughters. "She left the world a better place and that is testimony of a life well lived."

Mrs. Groszkowski died of Covid-19 in Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, where she had been a patient for 16 days. The Lockport resident was 77.

Mrs. Groszkowski, known as Jackie, was born in Buffalo, the only child of Eugene and Micha Salwa Bednarczyk Wajtkus, who raised her in Kaisertown. A 1961 graduate of South Park High School, she earned a bachelor's degree in Education in 1964 and a master's degree in Learning and Instruction in 1992, both from from SUNY Buffalo State.

After earning her bachelor's degree, Mrs. Groszkowski taught first grade at the Rice Road school of the Iroquois Central School District for two years, then moved to Cleveland Hill Elementary School, where she taught first and third grade, then kindergarten for 23 years.

She married Leon Groszkowski on Oct. 22, 1966, in St. Casimir's Church in Buffalo. 

While the family was living in Cheektowaga from 1968 to 1995, Mrs. Groszkowski was an active member and lector in Infant of Prague Church.

From 1977 to 1987, she led Troop 1261 Junior and Cadette Girl Scout Troop, which met at the Cleveland Drive Lutheran Church in Cheektowaga.

The family moved to Lockport in 1995, and Mrs. Groszkowski joined St. Mary's Church in Gasport, where she also coordinated Vacation Bible School.

Mrs. Groszkowski retired in 2002. 

She was an active member and past president and board member of the Amherst Quilt Guild. "She was an award winning quilter," said her daughter. "She made quilts of all sizes using traditional patterns and more recently designing her own."

The traditional quilts she sewed were based on antique patterns reproduced by the Amherst Quilt Guild.

Mrs. Groszkowski donated hundreds of her quilted creations to Roswell Park, Women and Children's Hospital, Erie County Medical Center, the Erie County Home, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Buffalo General Medical Center.

Through her friends in the quilt guild, she made contact with active duty military members and donated quilts to the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station and Wounded Warriors.

She also donated quilts to North Dakota Indian reservations and hand-sewed dresses for poor girls in Mexico to help them avoid being targeted by human traffickers.

From the 1980s to the early 2000s, Mrs. Groszkowski  donated whole blood to the American Red Cross, earning a 40 gallon award pin. She donated platelets to Roswell Park.

Mrs. Groszkowski enjoyed traveling, visiting 46 states. She enjoyed seeing Broadway musicals in local theaters, playing Yahtzee and cheering on her grandchildren at sporting, scouting and extracurricular events, her family said.

Besides her husband of 54 years, Leon Groszkowski, Mrs. Groszkowski is survived by her two daughters, Sandra Ash and Darlene Mischler; four grandsons and a granddaughter.

A Mass of Christian Burial was celebrated on Wednesday at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Swormville.

SCHOLZ, Patricia

Feb. 1, 1944 – March 25, 2021

Patricia A. Thompson Scholz, an award-winning real estate broker, died March 25 in Sisters of Charity Hospital St. Joseph Campus, Cheektowaga, 18 days after she was admitted for treatment of Covid-19. She was 77.

Born Patricia A. Thompson in Buffalo, the youngest of three girls, she was a 1961 graduate of South Park High School.

When a friend opened a Realty World office in Cheektowaga, she began working there as a licensed real estate salesperson in 1977, moving in 1980 to Century 21 Real Estate in West Seneca. There she worked for Robert Scholz and they were married on May 19, 1985.

She received numerous salesperson of the year awards at the West Seneca branch of Hunt Real Estate, where she had been affiliated from 1995 until her death. A graduate of the Realtor Institute and a certified residential specialist by the National Association of Realtors, she was recognized nationally for customer service by Century 21 International.

She was a member of the Buffalo chapter of the National Association of Realtors for 42 years and a member of the Women’s Council of Realtors for about 10 years. She was honored as a Realtor Emeritus by the National Association of Realtors.

Her charitable efforts included support for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

She was an avid gardener and loved to travel with her husband to Florida, California and on Caribbean cruises.

In addition to her husband, who is retired director of training for Hunt Real Estate, survivors also include three daughters, Kelly Strachan Joss, Vanessa Scholz Duhan and Dee Federico; and four grandchildren.

A Memorial Mass was offered Monday in Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Orchard Park.

Jan. 18, 1940 – March 27, 2021

Howard H. English worked as a systems analyst at the University at Buffalo from 1968 to 1980, designing and implementing systems that included physical inventory, integrated coding, statistical modeling and even a final exam scheduling system for thousands of students.

But what his coworkers remember most about Mr. English is his patience.

His son, Daniel English, and daughter-in-law, Linda English, both work at UB, where, Daniel English said, people who knew his father have often said, "He was so patient with me."

"It was very nice to hear that he had the same compassion for his coworkers as he did his own family," his son said. "In his eyes, everyone deserved support and respect."

Mr. English, an Amherst resident, died in Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, where he tested positive for Covid-19 after being admitted for another illness. He was 81.

He was born in Olean, the son of Howard F. English and Ann Nora Kenny English. He was a 1958 graduate of Lockport High School, where as a member of the Junior Engineering Technical Society, he designed and demonstrated a missile powered by sulfur and zinc at the Buffalo Science Fair. In 1964, Mr. English earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from UB.

On Aug. 26, 1965, he married Gail Patricia Hill in St. Margaret's Church in Buffalo.

From 1968 to 1980, Mr. English was a senior systems analyst at UB. For 10 years starting in 1978, he was also an instructor at UB's Millard Fillmore College, teaching classes in system design, introduction to computers and the programming language COBOL.

Starting in the early 1970s, Mr. English also worked with University Space Planning, helping to oversee the design and construction of the North Campus in Amherst and acting as liaison between UB and the town. Mr. English served on the Town of Amherst Planning Board from 1969 to 1989, for the last 11 years as chair.

On Dec. 1, 1989, when he announced his intention to resign from the Planning Board, Mr. English cited a workload "that has been excessive for some time."

When announcing his resignation, Mr. English said, "This has been one hell of a group, but it's time to retire," The Buffalo News reported, "at the conclusion of a monthly meeting that ran past midnight."

"He was very detail-oriented and was very good at listening to both sides and looking for the best options," his son said.

He was management information systems director at Howden Fan in Buffalo from 1980 to 2001, when he retired.

In the late 1980s, Mr. English also served on the board of the Urban Development Corporation Audubon New Community.

His wife said Mr. English was "dedicated, quiet and loyal," a devoted family man who enjoyed spending time with his family, creating memories with his two grandchildren and researching genealogy.

He was an active volunteer at St. Christopher's parish in Tonawanda.

Besides Gail English, his wife of 55 years, and his son, Daniel English, Mr. English is survived by a daughter, Kathleen English, and two grandchildren.

A Mass will be offered at 11:30 a.m. Monday in St. Christopher's Catholic Church, 2660 Niagara Falls Blvd., Tonawanda.

A "gentle giant" is how Mark Williams’ friends describe the man known as "Big Daddy" at Coles bar and grill on Elmwood Avenue.

The establishment was more than a haunt for Williams. He had spent time there as a bouncer, a patron and best friend of the owner, Mike Shatzel.

"He was like a giant teddy bear, just a big lovable guy that loved everybody," said Shatzel.

"At Coles, he was just a fixture there. Everybody wanted to be around him, and be introduced to him, the happiest guy in the world," Shatzel added.

On April 2, Williams was admitted to Sisters Hospital suffering from complications of Covid-19, according to Shatzel’s wife, Suzanne. In an effort to save Williams’ life, he was placed in a medically induced coma and put on a ventilator, she said.

Two doors away from Williams’ hospital room in the intensive care unit, his mother, Barbara Miles, waged her own fight against the coronavirus. Only five months prior, Williams’ brother Michael had succumbed to the virus in November.

Mark Williams lost his battle with Covid-19 at age 48 on Monday, casting a pall over his Elmwood Village neighborhood.

"There was no one on the planet like Mark Williams," said Suzanne Shatzel. "The world is a sadder place without that man here. It is a tremendous loss to this city and to all of us."

He also leaves behind a daughter, Elizabeth.

"I know he loved spending time with his daughter. She's 19," Mike Shatzel said.

Williams also was godfather to the Shatzels' daughter, Nola.  

Suzanne Shatzel set up a GoFundMe page to help defray funeral costs for Williams' family. More than $58,000 had been pledged as of Friday morning. 

"His gift was very much about how he made others feel," she said. "He was this larger-than-life person that gave nothing but love to the world.

"He even broke up fights with love. He calmly inserted himself and calmly guided people out. He just had a way of always being kind, always being loving," she said.  

Williams was born in 1972 in Buffalo, according to Mike Shatzel. He attended grammar school at Nardin Academy and graduated from Canisius High School in 1990.

Shatzel, who attended Nichols School, said he met Williams at a high school party in 1990 and they hit it off.

"I was pretending I was Christian Laettner, the basketball player, who I was friends with in high school, and we were pretending he (Mark Williams) was my teammate from Duke, and we were trying to impress some young girls. That was like our first time together hanging out," said Shatzel.

"From there, we just became like best friends really quickly," he added.

"I went away to college, but we kept in touch. Then he started working for us at Coles on Elmwood, working security, which he did for probably a good 10 years. Then he went into private security at a local company," Shatzel continued.

Mark Pcionek said Williams remained a fixture at Coles.

"He had a spot at the corner of the bar, far end. Everybody knew him there," said Pcionek.

Pcionek said he first met Williams while they attended Nardin Montessori in the mid-1970s.

"He would sleep over my house up in Hamburg, where I grew up, and my parents would take us out to dinner to Foit's on the Lake or Hoak's, when they used to be there, and my dad would say, 'this is my other son.' People would look at us funny walking in with Mark, and, yeah, he was a part of my family, and he still is," Pcionek said.

Pcionek said he was shocked that Williams died so suddenly.

"I think it's a virus that many are not taking seriously, but all of a sudden you do consider it serious ... when you lose someone close to you like this because of the virus," Pcionek said.

"And I'll tell you this: I did not take it seriously, personally, and Mark got sick and Mark passed, and a few days later I went and got vaccinated, because he left a family behind, a daughter, and I don't want to leave a family behind," Pcionek added.

Although working full-time and always chipping away at home improvement projects, Michael T. Roth looked for a way to give back to the community after guiding his son to the rank of Eagle Scout.

An avid outdoorsman, Roth found a home with the all-volunteer Niagara Frontier Search and Rescue Team, joining in 2013 and becoming vice president a few years ago. 

"That was his passion, and it took over our lives," said Amy Roth, his wife of 32 years. "He jumped in with both feet; he loved it."

The feeling was mutual. "Everybody loved Mike," said his fellow volunteer Kathy Galus, treasurer of the group.

Michael T. Roth, of Marilla, died Feb. 7, 2021, in South Buffalo Mercy Hospital after being hospitalized for 39 days with Covid-19. He was 55.

"He was perfectly fine, he had no underlying conditions, there was nothing wrong with him at all," said Amy Roth. "It ravaged his lungs, and damaged them so badly."

In Mercy Hospital, he was treated with ECMO, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, which oxygenates the blood without using the lungs.

Roth was born on Sept. 20, 1965, the oldest child of Kenneth and Patricia Fletcher Roth. He graduated from Iroquois Central High School and after studying electrical engineering for a short time at Ohio State University, graduated from Erie Community College.

He and Amy Serafin married on July 9, 1988, in East Aurora.

For about 12 years, he maintained the Buffalo office of Securitronics, a Syracuse-based firm that installs security and card-access systems for large companies. Before that, he worked for Makita USA tool manufacturer for more than a decade.

"He was definitely a very hardworking person, at work as well as at home," Amy Roth said. "He was always working on a project at home, which is a very old house that we've been slowly working on for 27 years. Two years ago he built a full deck off the back, he built a front porch, he's built all the closets and even furniture for the house."

After his father-in-law died, Roth was also happy to help out his mother-in-law, Mary Beth Serafin, who lives nearby. "He was either over here or over there," Amy Roth said.

Roth, a third-generation Boy Scout and an Eagle Scout, guided his son Jonathan through the organization until he earned his Eagle Scout rank.

After his son grew up, "Mike was searching for something else," Amy Roth said. The volunteer search and rescue team was a perfect fit.

"He accumulated all the equipment he'd need for searches, he outfitted the NFSAR trailer, he was on call all the time, ready with a pack, and the back of our truck always has gear in it should he have to jump in and go," Amy Roth said. "He would pack and unpack his stuff monthly to make sure he had everything that he would need for a search of any kind, and he trained with the team all the time."

Roth participated in rescues in Zoar Valley, and searched for missing persons. 

He played Santa Claus at Marilla Christmas ceremonies for several years, and helped out the Marilla Historical Society, of which his mother-in-law is president.

Mostly a quiet person, "he would listen to anybody," Amy Roth said. He enjoyed getting to know his children's friends, and telling silly "Dad jokes," Amy Roth said. He had hiked about a dozen of the Adirondacks' high peaks.

Besides his wife, Roth is survived by his mother, Patricia Roth; a son, Jonathan Roth; a daughter, Laura Hamann; a sister, Jennifer Crawford; a brother, Timothy Roth; a grandson, and many nieces, nephews and cousins.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at 10 a.m.  Thursday in Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, 520 Oakwood Ave., East Aurora. It will be live-streamed.

The Niagara Frontier Search and Rescue Team will provide an honor guard at his services, which will include a Boy Scout ceremony. The Erie County Sheriff's Department, with whom the search and rescue team often works, plans to send an escort.

For the past 20 years, Deborah A. Lytle, a registered nurse and health care administrator, cared for patients and taught medical professionals despite her own health challenges.

Since 2000, she had been treated for breast cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and a brain-stem tumor. After recovering, Lytle "continued to enjoy travel, golf, gardening, photography, good food and hearty conversations," said her friend, Kate Lulek. "She could not, however, overcome the ravages of Covid-19."

While on vacation May 5, Lytle was admitted to St. Joseph Candler Hospital in Savannah, Ga., where she died on May 16, 2021. The Williamsville resident was 70.

"She was one of the best nurses I have ever met," Lulek said. "She was so smart, and she had a wonderful rapport with all her patients – they just loved her."

Also, "She had a wicked, wonderful sense of humor, which you need to have," Lulek said. "She had grit, and survived all those illnesses – she was just a fighter."

Lytle was born in the Bronx on June 28, 1950, the older of two children of Edward and Geraldine Walz Bang. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Nursing in 1972 and a master's degree in Nursing in 1993, both from the University at Buffalo. At her 1993 graduation, she received the Graduate Faculty Award for Clinical Excellence.

In 1972, Lytle started her nursing career at Meyer Memorial Hospital, now Erie County Medical Center. In 1976, she moved to the Erie County Health Department, where she worked as a home-health visiting nurse until 1992, mentoring other nurses who were starting to work in homes. In 1992, Lytle was hired by Tender Loving Care Staff Builders, where she developed programs for orientation and staff development.

Lytle moved to the Philadelphia area in 1996 and became the national director of Clinical Development at Tender Loving Care. In the mid-2000s, she served as director of program development for Southern Care Hospice, then spent three years as director of the Souderton Adult Day Care Center in Souderton, Pa.

She returned to Williamsville in 2020, and was working part time training personal care aides for All Metro Health Care and easing into retirement.

From 1987 through 1995, Lytle served with the 338th General Hospital in the Army Reserve, achieving the rank of First Lieutenant. In 1989, she was awarded the Army Achievement Medal for her work in orienting new Army Nurse Corps officers.

In her younger years, she was also an avid softball player who played for Mother’s Bakery, Cold Play and Flash.

Lytle was an avid photographer, golfer and gardener, Lulek said.

"She had beautiful gardens when she lived in Pennsylvania, and she would spend her evening and weekends out there, tending to everything." 

Besides Kate Lulek, Lytle is survived by a brother, James. 

A Mass of Christian Burial will be offered at 9:30 a.m. Saturday  at St. Gregory the Great Church, 200 St. Gregory Court, Amherst.