One of the ladies who had the biggest influence on my during my youth passed away a couple days ago. Here is something I wrote a year or so ago for here .

My own tribute to Gloria Magleby

In the many years I’ve known Gloria Magleby I’ve seen many of the great and wonderful things she has done for the community of Bay Point.

One of the great, yet often unrecognized things she has done is the good she has done in the lives of many of the community’s youth through the years. Gloria has given a host of the community’s youth the privilege of working in her yard. I should know. I was one of them.

I was 14 and looking forward to a week of doing nothing for spring break. On Monday the phone rang and my mother answered. I heard her say that my older brother wasn’t home but to try talking to Marc. She brought me the phone, I said “hello” and a voice on the other side answered, “Hello, this is Gloria Magleby, I need some help with my yard, I was wondering if you’d like to make $80 this week.” I agreed not knowing I’d be returning to that yard to work nearly every Wednesday for the next 10 years.

Aside from a steady inflow of money she offered those youth that worked in her yard, she gave us many things. First, she instilled in us a good work ethic. Not only did she demand good honest work for the money we earned but she taught us by example what she expected of us by working right alongside us.

Second, she gave a listening ear. One thing I looked forward to each week was being able to talk to someone who both listened and cared for the things I talked about. What more she was fun to talk to. I’ll always remember our inside jokes about the “Stoopid Squirrels" and about our heavy duty tree branch cutters we named “Godzilla”.

Third, she wasn’t afraid to correct us. If we were doing something wrong or the wrong way, she always let us know about it. Yet somehow Gloria always seemed to chew us out in a way that just made us love her even more and try harder to do things right.

The last thing I’ll mention (for there is much more I could say) is she instilled in us youth a spirit of service. Weather it was taking time to teach a group of us Boy Scouts how to conduct music, or in drafting us youth in one of her community projects, she taught us to love and the value of the service by example.

I’ve since moved from Bay Point but what I learned while trimming plants in Gloria’s garden about the value of work, community, service and the value of me, I’ve taken with me and the community I now live in. If she had done nothing else in her life, what she did for me and many other youth of the community would still have made her one of Bay Point's greatest ladies.

By Marc Van Pelt

While she never had any children I know many of us would be more then happy to claim her as a  parent. She will be missed.