Gloria J. ‘Glo’ Alvarez, executive secretary at BWI Marshall Airport for over 20 years and versatile home cook, dies

Gloria J. “Glo” Alvarez, a retired executive secretary and versatile cook, died of pneumonia Dec. 22 at the University of Maryland Baltimore Washington Medical Center in Glen Burnie. The longtime Linthicum resident was 89.

Born into a working-class Polish family — her father, William Michael Jones, was a laborer at the old National Brewing Co., and her mother, Anna Potter Jones, a sweatshop seamstress — Gloria Theresa Mildred Jones was born at home in the 2700 block of Dillon Street in Canton.

“She was a deep well of stories I like to tell of old working-class Baltimore,” said a son, Rafael “Ralph” Alvarez, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who lives in Greektown. “She wasn’t an inspiration, but rather a fountain, and I loved listening to my parents tell stories of the old city.”

Mrs. Alvarez was a graduate of St. Casimir Catholic School and in 1952 from Patterson High School where a quote under her yearbook picture said: “She collects photos of Robert Mitchum [the late film actor]. Wants to be a housewife.”

While at Patterson, she met and fell in love with a fellow student, Manuel Rafael “Manny” Alvarez, a Highlandtown paperboy, who after graduation, joined the Coast Guard and later in life went to sea sailing aboard Bethlehem Steel tankers out of Sparrows Point.

“They were 16 or 17 and students at Patterson. One Saturday, he went along with her to go roller skating — something she really liked to do — but he really didn’t like it and told her,” her son said. “So, she quit, because she wanted to be with him and he meant more to her than roller skating.”

They married in 1953.

“Often told not to rush into marriage, their song was ‘Too Young’ by Nat King Cole,” her son wrote in an email “He was the love of her life and they were married for 67 years at the time of Manuel’s death in 2021.”

The couple purchased their first home on Daisy Avenue in Lansdowne where they lived until 1966 when they moved to a brick ranch in Linthicum, where they raised three sons.

“Dad was away at sea a lot and Mom was the major force in raising us,” said another son, Daniel J. Alvarez, of Linthicum. “He was the fun guy who took us crabbing.”

Her husband eventually became a chief engineer aboard harbor tugs which meant he was a little closer to home.

“It was a true love affair,” Rafael Alvarez said. “It was a compromise. He gave up the sea to be at home with me and my brothers. There were bumps in the road but me and my brothers were better off for it.”

“When they were married, she couldn’t boil an egg,” Daniel Alvarez said. “Our Italian grandmother taught her how to cook and she became a world-class baker and she did both very well.

“When I was a kid, she bought a Betty Crocker cookbook that came with a cutter kit of 10 different-shaped animals and she’d make me an animal cake, and when I was in elementary school, she’d put notes in my lunch every day that said, ‘Be a good boy,’ “Listen to your teacher,’ things like that.”

During the 1960s, Mrs. Alvarez worked in the shoe department of a Sears store in Glen Burnie, and from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, she worked as an executive secretary to those who served as chief of operations at Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport.

“A woman with a big heart and somewhat of a melodramatic flair, she organized the unused sick leave of her fellow airport colleagues to be donated to co-workers diagnosed with terminal cancer,” Rafael Alvarez wrote in a biographical profile of his mother.

“She needed to stay busy at home and in the world,” he wrote. “She cooked everything from Polish meals she grew up with — golumpki are Polish cabbage rolls — to food she learned from her husband’s Italian mother — braciole, ravioli and from her Spanish father-in-law, a cod stew called bacalao.”

Mrs. Alvarez and her husband shared a passion for cooking together and she made pierogi with homemade kielbasa just as she observed her mother preparing it when she was a child.

Other culinary specialties included homemade French bread, rockfish stuffed with crabmeat and Portuguese steak.

And then there was crabs and spaghetti, a dish redolent with tomatoes, garlic, onions, oregano, red pepper and bay leaves that was named for her husband — “Manny’s Baltimore Crabs and Spaghetti” — where Chesapeake Bay blue crab, broken in half, is added to the sauce which then is served over pasta and dusted with Parmesan cheese.

“Crabs and spaghetti was a Friday treat when Catholics don’t eat meat,” her husband told The Sun in a 2013 article about the dish.

Indefatigable when it came to cooking and baking, Mrs. Alvarez was known for saying, “If I can see a picture of the meal, I can make it.”

Through the years she made hundreds of birthday cakes for family, friends and various charity events, family members said.

“Our parents were very frugal because their parents had been poor,” Daniel Alvarez said. “They taught us how to be careful with money. She had a tremendous strength and will, and was intelligent and she lived the life she wished.”

Mrs. Alvarez enjoyed crocheting Afghans for her family, was a devoted lifelong Orioles fan and “especially liked former manager Buck Showalter,” family members said.

A memorial Mass will be offered at noon April 20 at her childhood parish, St. Casimir Roman Catholic Church in Canton.

In addition to her two sons, she is survived by another son, Victor Paul Alvarez, of Bristol, Rhode Island; a sister, Sylvia Datillo Carozza, of Essex; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.