While my little sister was working on writing mom’s obituary, she brainstormed and put together a list of assorted facts about her. She emailed me this:

  • She was part of the second generation of her family to be born in the United States.
  • She was born in Providence, RI, to Anne and Vincent Albanese on September 22, 1948.
  • She was raised in Warwick with her younger brother, [redacted].
  • Her first job was working in a movie theater which, at the time, was only playing “The Sound of Music”. She ended up seeing it countless times and loved to retell how she actually had an opportunity to meet Maria VonTrapp herself.
  • She got married in 1972 and had two children, David and Jenny.
  • After her divorce in 1978, she and her brother drove her children through a blizzard to Daytona Beach to live near her parents.
  • She became active in the local Jaycees and won a variety of writing competitions with them.
  • She wrote a short-story, “For Jenny Blue”, that was published in Woman’s World Magazine, one of her proudest moments.
  • She was always active in her children’s school activities, participating in PTAs and doing her best to attend every play her son was in and her daughter’s various sporting events.
  • She worked for the Daytona Beach Police Department and the Holly Hill Police Department as a dispatcher.
  • She worked at the Daytona Beach News-Journal as a copy editor.
  • She eventually moved into management positions with Webworld and Interlink Paging.
  • She was very excited to buy her first house right next door to her mother which was quite the fixer upper.
  • She returned to college in 1994 and proudly graduated from the University of Central Florida in December of 1998 (with better grades than her daughter who graduated from the University of Florida in May 1998). I think she was at some of her happiest times when she went back to school.
  • She eventually moved to Gainesville, where she worked at Cox Communications and then with the Alachua School System as the Program Director for their AmeriCorps Reads program. She loved that she was helping numbers of kids learn how to read.
  • In 2004 she fought her fears and finally got back on an airplane to go to Chicago, IL, to see her daughter baptized. After that, she was happy to jump in a plane to travel, eventually making a trip to LA to visit her son.
  • In 2010 she was able to make a trip to LA to hold her first grandchild, [redacted].
  • She was a dedicated daughter, mother, sister, and aunt.
  • She loved animals, at one time having 4 dogs and a cat. She was always donating to various charities looking to care for the ones she could not take in her own home.
  • She worked hard to provide not only the basic necessities for her children but also to give them a day at Disney here or there. One of her favorite memories was when she managed to save up and take her children and mother to River Ranch for a week.
  • She was a talented artist.
  • She loved word games.