Women Pioneers of Buffalo

In the fall of 1942, two little Sicilian American girls first met, as fellow kindergartners at Buffalo’s brand-new Public School Number 18, on West Avenue and Hampshire.  They were my future wife Angela Yvonne Bongiovanni, daughter of Sicilians from Montalbano di Elicona and Mussomeli; and JoAnn Giambelluca, the child of parents descended from the towns of Serradifalco and Vallelunga Pratameno.
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Angie and JoAnn grew to be fast friends through their nine years at School 18, where their future successes were foreshadowed by their youthful accomplishments, Angie as an essayist and Vice-President of the 1951 graduating class, and JoAnn as its Valedictorian and Jesse Ketchum Medal winner. 

Their friendship was interrupted when the Giambelluca’s moved to Cheektowaga, where JoAnn’s father Ludi (Loreto), a pharmacist, opened Larry’s Pharmacy on Dick Road, while Angie enrolled at Lafayette High School, from which her favorite cousin Tom Lo Presti had prepared himself to attend pharmacy school at Union College.

Not surprisingly, both Angie and JoAnn chose pharmacy for their careers, and they were reunited as freshmen  at the University of Buffalo Pharmacy School in the fall of 1956.   At the time, women pharmacists were a rarity in Buffalo, but Angie and JoAnn comprised a group of pioneering women at UB in the late 1950’s, including the freshman pharmacy class of 1956, which welcomed the largest enrollment of women in the department’s history. 

They included Angie and JoAnn; Maria Tomaselli; Jean Manta, Rose Marie Mastrantonio; Mary Ferruzza; Rose Quagliana; and Margaret Crimaldi, whose sister Rose Marie had started there in 1955.  Margaret Crimaldi Quinn completed her pharmacy baccalaureate and went on to finish law school.  Rose Marie Crimaldi Madejski became a community pharmacist and later was a Clinical Assistant Professor at UB.

Rose married Dr. Jan Madejski and they raised two children who became physicians.   Marge and Rose are descendants of the town of San Pier Niceto, Sicily.

Angie Bongiovanni Coniglio and JoAnn Giambelluca Skaros became pharmacists: Angie at Miller Drugs on the West Side, and JoAnn at Larry’s Pharmacy in Cheektowaga. 

As Community Pharmacists, they carried out their duties in an era in which pharmacists considered their patrons not as ‘customers’, but as patients and human beings.  Together, along with the other UB women pioneers, they served generations of Western New Yorkers with competence and caring.  Angie and JoAnn, and their families, are still dear friends to this day.