Anita Joyce Skocz

MARCH 12, 1952 – APRIL 27, 2025

Anita Joyce Skocz was born to Edward Theodore Skocz and Elizabeth Victoria (Stys) Skocz on March 12, 1952. Her preschool years were spent on Locust Street just a walk down hill to her dad’s grocery store on Carothers Avenue, itself only a mile to Main Street Carnegie where her mother was a teller at Mellon Bank. Her father “Eddie” was a World War II purple-heart veteran and her mother “Libbie” a volunteer trained to do relief work in war ravaged Poland in a program that was cancelled before Elizabeth and her cohort could deploy. By the time the family moved to nearby Heidelberg, they came to include four siblings, in order of seniority, Dennis, Anita, Kathleen [Caggiano], and Nancy [Elgart].

Anita’s formative childhood experiences were being shaped by the alley behind her home, on Locust Street, St. Ignatius Church and Grade School, and Grandma Skocz’s kitchen across from “daddy’s” store. The alley, for one thing, was the scene of unorganized outdoor play time with neighborhood kids: pick-up ball games, friendly feuds, competing puppet theater presentations, and a moon launch in a produce-crate equipped with a rusty-pipe “rocket engine,” and rear-view make-up mirror to give Anita, the astronaut, a view of planet earth when she got to the moon. The much-touted flight was cancelled for lack of matches to light the newspaper fuel in the pipe. Many years later Anita would come to write two highly regarded children’s books that fire the imagination (Chrystal Star Angel) and speak to the beauty of human diversity and collaboration in works of imagination that reach for the sky (Kite Tale).

Anita went on to Canevin High School, a brand new Catholic High School drawing students from all over the diocese and embued, as an institution and community, with the highest political ideals of the time and staffed with both religious and lay teachers animated by an opening in the Catholic Church to new thinking and a global perspective. Anita shined on the basketball court, was a sharp-presenting member of the Crussettes drill team, and brought the house down in the Canevin auditorium with a Christmas impromptu sketch of a little child retelling the story of the birth of Jesus to his Mother Mary. Oh, sweet mysteries of life! It was arguably the high point of Anita’s popularity in high school, but came after many lasting, life-long friendships were formed at Canevin.

A few years after high school Anita was in the travel business, not just booking trips to wherever people fly from the Greater Pittsburgh Airport but leading group tours to beach destinations in Florida. She moved to Orland in the 70s and then purchased a lake-front A-Frame where she took a dive that changed her life. She found herself a quadriplegic, a disability that lasted to the Sunday morning, April 27, this year when she passed from our company, her death caused by an unexpected heart attack following an infection.

For all of the challenges her condition presented, her life was an eventful, productive, loved-filled life. She wrote two books, was an advocate for disabled folks of all kinds on a state-wide citizen advisory board. She made trips across the United States that included the Grand Canyon and joined a small group tour to Europe whose fellow travelers personally ensured that there was no place she could not go because she moved in a wheel chair. Over the years she elicited loving and exceptional care from many individuals who will attest to how much Anita gave to them, freely and from the heart and in so many different ways. She was joyful, deeply spiritual, a quiet individual with a calm demeanor who gave peaceful counsel. She could host a high-spirited party with laughter, singing, and dancing abounding and by way of her careful listening made herself a trusted confidant to so many in their life journeys.