Elizabeth R. Gula

Elizabeth “Buff” Gula Buff Gula was born in 1924 in Michigan to a lumbering family but she had roots in Ohio too from her grandmother’s farm. As a girl she witnessed her parents bitter divorce and resolved never to make the same mistakes in her life. She spent two years at University High School in Ann Arbor before her father encouraged her to attend a prep school in Vermont. There she encountered new people and new ideas establishing an openness she carried the rest of her life. She was in the library at the Putney school reading Brave New World when she heard the news of December 7, 1941. She followed her older sister to the University of Wisconsin for two years but remembering her father’s deepest regret, that he could not serve overseas in WWI, his daughter stepped up to serve in his place, dropped out, and joined the Navy. In those years, women in the Navy were known as WAVES. Throughout her life she felt insecure of her abilities but the Navy thought otherwise and assigned to one of its most demanding roles, teaching instrument flying to Navy pilots in Kansas. Her time in the military was relatively brief but she was forever proud of her time “in the service.” After the war she finished her degree at Ohio State and came to Toledo to take up a career in social work, a career to which she soon realized she was not suited, unable to accept the pain she saw in people’s lives. Fortunately, at that point, she met the love of her life, my father George Gula. And though they came from very different backgrounds, they found happiness and support in each other for more than 60 years. She had a kid and wished she could have had more but it was not to be. She went back to school to earn a teaching certificate but spent most of her life as a loving mother and wife. She had her faults: she worried too much and drank too much Pepsi. But what most people saw in my mother was her efforts, to a fault, to make happy the people around her. More than anyone I know, she made the effort to learn the names of the people she encountered: neighbors, people in restaurants, people in stores. She had a cheery word for everyone. My mother was not a religious woman. She lived her religious principals rather than speaking them on Sunday. She will live on in our memories of her son Jim, her daughter-in-law, Peggy, her grandchildren Becky and Matthew and everyone who knew her. We will hold a proper memorial for her after COVID, probably summer of 2021. Contact jlgula@papugh.com if you would like to be notified of this event.