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Roberta Anne Caglioti of Hampton Bays and, since 1998, the Westhampton Care Center, died on January 19 at the Care Center. A victim of early-onset Alzheimer’s, she struggled with the disease, supported by her family, for more than three decades before succumbing at age 80.
Born in Buffalo on June 2, 1934, to Howard Bieber and Victoria Armstrong Bieber, she was raised in western New York, where a youthful engagement with music nurtured her love for it. She and her sister, Helen, sang at numerous functions, including a choir performance of Handel’s “Messiah” at Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo.
She completed two years at Houghton College before she had to leave to seek employment. Early jobs included supervising title research at one of Wall Street’s oldest law firms and training workers at an aerospace engineering firm in the emerging electronics of the 1950s, transitioning from key punch to more sophisticated early computers.
She met her future husband, the artist Victor Caglioti, in the early 1950s when she and one of her sisters took a room at a boarding house in Buffalo that also provided housing for incoming college freshmen, including Mr. Caglioti.
In the early days of their relationship, they took on a number of different jobs, including working together in springs and summers at an upstate carnival.
The couple married in 1958, with Ms. Caglioti continuing to take her husband’s career in hand, serving as a vital partner, representative and advocate for his work as a painter and teacher.
Because of her efforts on his behalf, Mr. Caglioti said last week, “there were exhibitions and national competitions resulting in exposure in art magazines … She hauled artwork on the roof of the car to exhibits. She solved problems and assisted in making special stretchers and stretching curved canvas. She documented paintings, shows, press, and updated my biography.”
After a 1963 Christmas Eve fire destroyed their studio, along with the building in which it was located and 10 years of work, Ms. Caglioti took on all aspects of “public” exhibitions of his painting, which Mr. Caglioti “shunned,” he said.
It was also through his wife’s efforts, Mr. Caglioti said, that he was able to give up fishing for his meals while growing vegetables “on other people’s property” in Nassau County and take on teaching jobs in 1970 at the University of Minnesota in the winter and at Southampton College of Long Island University in the summer, as well as visiting artist posts at a number of other colleges and universities over the years.
In addition to raising the couple’s three children on the two campuses in Minneapolis and Southampton, Ms. Caglioti served as the unofficial “den mother” for a wide array of artists and students, as well as neighborhood residents young and old wherever she and her husband were living.
Every summer, Mr. Caglioti would bring 15 to 20 of his students from Minneapolis to continue their studies in Southampton, and Ms. Caglioti would feed them and give them a sense of home while helping her husband arrange visits to the studios of such East End luminaries as Willem de Kooning, Esteban Vicente, Alice Baber and Larry Rivers, among others.
According to her daughter, Carla Caglioti Hall, she loved cooking and excelled at a variety of cuisines, even serving briefly as a hostess and at times the head chef in an upscale Chinese restaurant in Minneapolis. She also had a lifelong connection to gardening, including in one of her many jobs.
In Minneapolis, she was active in volunteer work, teaching, among other things, oven-free “cooking” to latchkey kids in low-income neighborhoods so they could prepare meals for themselves and their siblings when they were at home by themselves. She also led craft workshops in tie-dying.
She volunteered at the Good Samaritan Society Nursing Home and worked with the Adopt-A-Grandparent program, matching children with senior citizens.
On Long Island, her daughter said, she enjoyed nature walks and collecting plants in Shinnecock Hills. She also enjoyed going to the beach with her family and her husband’s students and friends, playing beach bocce, and gathering mussels and clams for feasts that might be served mid-afternoon or in the middle of the night.
Because of their connection to the colony of contemporary artists that sprang up in East Hampton, she and her husband bought property in Springs. Though they never built on the property, they spent many days there enjoying picnics and bocce with their friends and even taking part in the earliest softball games between artists and writers, before those contests became an annual celebrity-studded benefit event.
She began to show signs of Alzheimer’s in the early 1980s. Her husband took care of her, reducing his responsibilities at the University of Minnesota and eventually quitting in 1996, before retirement, so the couple could move full time to Hampton Bays. Mr. Caglioti provided 24-hour care for his wife until 1998, when he moved her to the Westhampton Care Center so that he could have necessary heart bypass surgery.
As the disease steadily advanced in the 17 years she resided at the Care Center, Mr. Caglioti visited his wife twice a day without fail, every day of the year.
After her death, Mr. Caglioti shared this quote from his wife, noting that it spoke volumes about her feelings about family life: “You’ve missed its beauty if you think of ‘housewife,’ ‘homemaker’ or ‘mother’ as a job or chore—that’s like turning your career into just ‘a job.’”
In addition to her husband, Victor, Ms. Caglioti is survived by a daughter, Carla Caglioti Hall and husband John of Hampton Bays, and their son, Loomis; another daughter, Angela Caglioti-Lawson and husband Fred of Washington; and a son, Antonio Caglioti and wife Daphne Trakis of Southampton and their two children, Gemma and Paulo.
She is also survived by two sisters, Ruth Buchanan of Texas and Helen Zielinski of Java Center, and a brother, Fredrick Bieber of Little Valley. She was predeceased by a sister, Judy Lund.
Visitation and services conducted by the Reverend Linda Anderson, a Unitarian minister from Stony Brook, were held at J. Ronald Scott Funeral Home in Hampton Bays on January 21. A private cremation followed on January 22 at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Center Moriches.
on Feb 2, 2015