How one Butler family was affected by COVID-19 in its earliest days
Wilhelmina “Willy” Peluso survived the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and breast cancer, but like millions of Americans, the coronavirus was too much for her.
Peluso, who died at 96 in April 2020, was only the fourth Butler County resident to die as a result of the virus that had just made its way to the county. COVID-19 had been officially been declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization the previous month.
By most accounts, the onset of COVID-19 was the only factor that stopped “Willy” from reaching the triple-digit age milestone.
“She wanted to live to be 100,” said Pauline Peluso, one of Peluso’s five children. “By all accounts, she probably would have if it hadn't have been for COVID, and that’s a fact.”
The only people by her bedside were the staff at the Concordia at the Orchard senior facility where she breathed her last breath. The facility had stopped accepting visitors in late March after a staff member tested positive for the virus.
“I wasn’t allowed to be there,” Peluso said. “There was no funeral. You couldn’t have a funeral.”
“We were not permitted to have visitation initially within our communities,” said Stacy Mathers, corporate compliance officer for Concordia Lutheran Ministries. “We were trying to be proactive in ensuring they could still see their loved ones, doing video visits, because we knew the human connection is important to the people that we serve.”
The reality of the situation dawned on Pauline when she made the difficult trip to pick up her mother’s belongings the next day.
“I had to make a phone call, and we had to arrange a time where they put them in a double hazmat bag and put them out on the curb. They couldn't exchange them person to person,” Pauline said. “And I don’t blame them. That’s just how they had to do it.”
In the wake of a devastating tragedy which led to the loss of millions of lives around the world, it’s easy to reduce all of those lives to numbers and statistics instead of people who were once living and breathing among us. Wilhelmina Peluso, who was nicknamed “Willy,” was one such person.
Willy (nee Wetzler) was born in Waubach, the Netherlands, in 1923, and lived through Nazi Germany’s occupation of the country. She emigrated to the United States in 1946, shortly after World War II, settling in Pittsburgh. Shortly before then, she married her husband, Frank. The marriage would last until Frank’s death in 1991.
“She was a ‘war bride’,” Pauline said. “She married my father in Holland during the war, or soon after the war, and then they came to the United States. She left her big family behind.”
“Willy” served as the president of the Emsworth Fireman’s Auxiliary, Emsworth judge of elections, and as a preschool teacher, among other careers she held. Frank and Wilhelmina had five children, including Pauline. She moved to the Concordia at the Orchard facility in 2018, and according to Pauline, she still had plenty of life in her mid-90s.
“The staff there really loved her. She had a good sense of humor,” Pauline said. “When she was sick, they'd say, ‘Do you need anything, Willy?’ And she'd say, ‘Yeah, a tall, dark and handsome.’”
Her family was spread across the globe, with relatives both living and departed who hailed from the United States, the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands.
Willy wasn’t the only member of the Peluso family affected by the virus. According to Pauline, everyone in her immediate family came down with the virus at least once, and Pauline tested positive multiple times. In addition, multiple members of the family, including two sons and her daughter-in-law, lost their jobs as a direct result of the pandemic.
“My daughter-in-law worked at the Pittsburgh Musical Theater, and they let their people go because they couldn't do productions anymore,” Peluso said. “Another son lost his job because they closed the office and got rid of a lot of their workers and another was in the restaurant business. For a while pretty much all my family's lives were affected, as were everybody else's.”
So uncertain were the times in which Peluso died that her obituary, which was published in the Eagle, contained the sentence, “A memorial service will be held in a safer future.”
Although the pandemic cut off any chance of her mother reaching the grand old age of 100, Pauline is somewhat thankful that COVID-19 claimed Willy at the very beginning of the pandemic rather than months later. By then, newer and more contagious offshoots of COVID, such as the omicron variant, had caught on and prolonged the pandemic.
“I'm thankful that she died in the very, very, very beginning,” Pauline said. “She would have been isolated in her room for over a year.”
That said, Concordia Lutheran Ministries facilities did make efforts to connect their residents to the outside world, even when family members were unable to visit during the peak of the pandemic. One such instance was a drive-by parade which allowed residents to see their loved ones in-person safely.
“We had driving parades where the families could come in their car and hold out signs so they could see their grandkids,” Mathers said. “We had wheelchair parades where we would take the residents out to see their loved ones who would be lined up waiting for them.”
This article was updated March 25, 2025 to adjust a sentence that incorrectly listed the health status of Pauline Peluso.
