Gloria Deal Peterson

I've been divorced for a long time. Gloria Deal Peterson was one of the first women I dated after I somewhat recovered from that trauma. I guess it was a year after the divorce.

Gloria was great. She was kind (she was such a devoted mother to her daughter, Blair), intelligent, a fascinating conversationalist, and altogether beautiful. And she very much recognized the importance of libraries.

Gloria was the widow of Clyde Deal, a former U.S. Coast Guard officer and adventurer who, in the early 1950's sailed on a tiny boat, with just his dog for company, from the Canary Islands to New York City...a perilous voyage, which made headlines at the time. Over the course of many years, Clyde Deal amassed a large collection of books on nautical topics. Some time ago, Gloria, his then young widow, who maintained residences in both Manhattan and Southampton, generously donated the entire collection to the library of Long Island University's Southampton College. The Clyde Deal Maritime Collection remains an important part of that library.

I just learned that Gloria died suddenly on February 6, 2005, at the still-young age of fifty-five. We had lost contact and I didn't know. A death notice I found on the internet remarked that: "She will be deeply missed." That is for sure!