June Gelmi Villarreal

She attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls, an academy known for strict scholarship, before she was chosen as Miss New Jersey in the Miss America Pageant. In 1952 she attended the University of Madrid. transferring to Washington, D.C. to enter Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service’s Institute of Linguistics. She graduated summa cum laudae in French, Italian and Spanish.

She remained in Washington, serving briefly in the Italian consular service in Milan, before returning stateside to marry Italian national Ottavio Gelmi, M.D., a Fulbright Scholar who originally came to the U.S. as a WW2 P.O.W. (a tank commander captured by the British in Tunisia and traded to the Americans before being shipped to Mississippi, where he learned English via a torn copy of Webster’s dictionary). Ottavio Gelmi was invited to the University of Virginia, as a fellow in surgery, ultimately serving America as a urologist, teaching at Georgetown Medical School, later pioneering a kidney transplant technology used today in hospitals worldwide.

In 1955, June served as press attaché for the Embassy of Egypt (under Nasser’s regime). She collaborated with Egyptian Foreign Minister Fawzi in his address before the Washington Press Club condemning tripartite aggression during the Suez crisis. (Fawzi became Prime Minister of Egypt.)

From 1957 to 1958 June Ricchezza Gelmi Villarreal worked as a translator and interpreter for the lobbying firm of Franklin Roosevelt Jr, representing the Dominican Republic and Spain.

After a tenure as Social Secretary to the Ambassador of Finland, June served Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, later matriculating as a partner for the G.M. Perry Company in the Nation’s Capital.

Extracurricularly, she facilitated sugar deals between the U.S. and Venezuela, under the auspices of His Excellency Ramon Escobar Salon, Venezuela’s Ambassador Designate to France, who lived in Paris. She is profiled in decades of “Who’s Who in American Women”.

Apart from her achievements, June was great fun, She was a bibliophile and a Francophile.

June loved diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, but preferred diamonds. A personal friend of France’s Royal Family, she was a summer guest of Princess Helene in Estoril, Portugal, and the Duke and Duchess of D’Orleans in Pertuis, France. In 1971, when she visited the latter, she later sadly recounted the story of the Queen of Italy, Maria de Savoy, coming to lunch at the castle “wearing only a shell around her neck for jewelry!”

June was a pianist who played Beethoven’s "Moonlight Sonata" perfectly. She was a specialist on the Spanish Civil War, and adored reciting poetry. She could, until her final days, recount passages/stanzas of Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Hemingway. (She didn’t understand why, when she recited Rudyard Kipling’s maxim “A woman is only a woman but a good cigar’s a smoke” her nurses looked puzzled or why, when she reminded her Westchester neighbors that “Mussolini made Italy’s trains run on time”, they appeared nonplussed.) She was singular and forgiving. If anyone ever apologized to June she would say, “You don’t have to apologize, We all do things like these upon occasion’.”

She married the Honorable Carlos Castaneda Villarreal in 2002. Carlos was a Naval Academy engineer responsible for designing the subway system in Singapore. He was a member of the Board of Directors for Catholic Charities and served as president of the Army Navy Club of Washington for two terms before he died in 2009. Carlos was a Presidential Appointee for the U.S. Department of Transportation.

June had a Vatican title, (a Dame Commander of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem) and was devoted to her parish, Annunciation Catholic Church in Northwest Washington, D.C. She was a benefactress to many. June was a member of the Army Navy Club, the John Carroll Society, the University Club, and enjoyed being president of her regional Spanish-Portuguese Study Group. She is survived by one daughter, Alessandra Gelmi of Washington, D.C. and Bergamo Italy, and a stepson, Timothy Villarreal, from Las Vegas.

Funeral Mass will be offered on Tuesday, June 21, at Annunciation Catholic Church on Massachusetts Avenue. Viewing is 9:30 am until time of Mass at 10:00 AM

In lieu of flowers or trees, since June loved animals, any gifts/donations should be made to the Animal Welfare Society of Jefferson County West Virginia https://www.awsjc.org/