Pamela Mona Mazzocchi

Pamela Mona Mazzocchi (née Jay), of Arvada, Colo., and previously a longtime resident of Arlington, Va., passed away on October 2, 2024, at the age of 93. Pam was born on May 26, 1931, in Cape Town, South Africa, the second child of Agnes and Alfred (Alf) Jay. She was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church as an infant and remained an observant Catholic her whole life. Agnes died when Pam was only four years old, and Alf subsequently married Winifred (Winnie) Reeve, the daughter of an English military officer. Winnie became a loving mother to Pam and her older brother, Ted. The family eventually settled in the coastal town of Durban, where Alf was a practicing dermatologist and a scientific tinkerer. An invention he created for night vision took the family to London in 1938, but progress was halted when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and England immediately declared war on Germany. On many nights, Winnie and Alf left their apartment in St. John’s Wood with Pam and Ted and headed to the designated air-raid shelter nearby; Pam remembered being afraid but also feeling excited and proud to have her own gas mask.

While most of the children of London were sent to the country by the government out of concern for their safety, Winnie and Alf decided to keep the family together. Shortly afterward, they arranged to return to Durban. There, over the next few years, Pam’s half-siblings Bob and Jeanette were born. Pam attended a Catholic convent school and later Durban Girls High School, where she excelled as an athlete, particularly at tennis. During these years, she racked up several championships and was invited to participate in the Junior Wimbledon competitions. After graduating from high school and finishing two years of business school, Pam caught the “travel bug” and moved to Sydney, Australia. There, her community of friends included American actor/singer/comedian Danny Kaye, Australian film actor Rod Taylor, and a diverse group of other performers; one of her vivid memories from this period was the night she and a young Donald O’Connor put together some bathtub punch for a party.

Eventually, Pam and a friend took a steamship to the United States; she recalled entering San Francisco Bay in fog so thick they didn’t even realize they were passing under the Golden Gate Bridge. She soon went east by train all the way to Washington, D.C., where a job was waiting for her at the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia. After some time in that post, she contemplated returning to South Africa, where Alf had taken ill; then she met Philip Mazzocchi, Jr., a young dentist and officer in the Air Force. They fell in love and were married ten months later, in July 1956, and soon welcomed their first son, David (1957). Sons Jay (1959) and Peter (1964) followed. Meanwhile, Winnie, Alf, Bob, and Jeanette left South Africa for the United States and also settled in the D.C. area near Pam.

In 1966 Pam and Phil moved to the newly established New Dover neighborhood in Arlington, which was closer to Phil’s dental practice. At that time, they became parishioners of St. Agnes Catholic Church, their lifelong parish. Pam loved Northern Virginia and D.C. and was proud to have become a U.S. citizen early in her marriage. As a wife and mother, she was energetic, hard-working, and fun-loving. She taught herself to cook for her family by using the classic multivolume Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery. Pam was always quite stylish and donned the new and colorful fashions of the sixties and seventies with pleasure.

Pam was deeply involved in the lives of her sons and staunchly supportive of their education and extracurricular activities, particularly their participation in sports such as football, basketball, baseball, and tennis from little league through high school. She was also no-nonsense and, with Phil, raised the boys to be respectful and thoughtful members of the family (with occasional high-volume arguments) and the community. Pam played competitive tennis for Army-Navy Country Club women’s teams and was an assistant boys’ tennis coach at Washington-Lee High School. She was active in social and charitable organizations, including the Northern Virginia Dental Association Ladies’ Auxiliary, the Heart Association, and events and fundraisers for the Arlington Cubs youth sports program. In keeping with her love of travel, she became certified as a travel agent and worked at various Northern Virginia and D.C. agencies from the late 1970s through the 1990s, making trips to Europe, the Far East, and the Caribbean. She had a large group of friends over the years, to whom she was very devoted. In her later years, Pam was a warm, enthusiastic, and smartly dressed grandmother of seven.

Pam and Phil lived in their Arlington house for fifty years, eventually leaving for a retirement community in nearby Alexandria, Va. When Phil passed away in 2019 at the age of 90, Pam moved to another community in the Denver, Colo., area, where David and his family live. Even, or perhaps especially, in her silver years, Pam’s strong personality and convictions about how things should be done won her the affectionate and appropriate title of “Tenacious P” among her family and friends.

Pam is loved and will be missed by her sons, David (Lisa), Jay (Megan), and Peter (Tara); her grandchildren, Elizabeth Seton Raynor (Aaron), Mary Clare DeRuiter (Ryan), Michael Mazzocchi, Anna Mazzocchi, Lexi Tinker (Christopher), Christopher Mazzocchi (Olivia), and Lilly Mazzocchi; her sister, Jeanette Herndon; her sister-in-law, Nancy Mazzocchi; her great-grandchildren, Philip and James Raynor, Reese Mazzocchi, and Leo DeRuiter; and her many nieces and nephews.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated in memory of Pam on Thursday, October 17, at 10:00 a.m. at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church, 12735 W. 58th Avenue, Arvada, Colo., with a reception to follow in the church hall. A Rosary prayer service preceding the mass will begin at 9:30 a.m. An interment ceremony will take place on Monday, October 28, at 11:00 a.m. at Quantico National Cemetery in Triangle, Va., where Phil is laid to rest.