Thinking of what Gloria Noah is doing in heaven brings smiles to friends and family

While Gloria Noah’s friends and family mourn her death a few weeks ago, they can’t help but smile when asked to imagine what she might be doing in her new heavenly home. “She’s got ‘em all lined up and ready to go,” her longtime friend H.K. Silvey mused.

Gloria, who died Feb. 2 at age 94, was a go-getter of the highest order, a force of nature, a natural organizer who loved to dance and have fun surrounded by fellow fun-lovers. It’s sad to know such a bright light has left this life behind – but fun to imagine her rounding up angels and loved ones for an uplifting heavenly activity, or maybe teaching Jesus to line dance.

A celebration of her life will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, April 18, at the Theodosia Methodist Church. It’s the congregation she joined soon after moving to Ozark County 44 years ago, the same church she enthusiastically served as youth leader and Sunday school teacher and where she helped organize annual fundraisers, including musical revues, fashion shows and other women’s programs, and youth celebrations, even a Halloween haunted house.  

‘She loved the spotlight’

A search of the Ozark County Times archives for Gloria’s name turns up dozens of mentions reporting her latest endeavor, beginning in 1983, not long after she and her husband Don bought a home and acreage on NN Highway southwest of Theodosia. At various times through the years, Gloria was an active member of the VFW and amateur radio club auxiliaries, the Theodosia and Ozark County chambers of commerce, Beta Sigma Phi sorority, the Ozark Garden Club and Gainesville Lions Club. She helped organize or was active in Theodosia’s Red Hat, Mad Hatters and Ladies of the Lake chapters. In 1991 she helped organize a re-dedication celebration at the Theodosia Corps of Engineers campground after a community clean-up effort. 

Once a year for 18 years, she donned her Mother Goose costume and read to the youngest students in the Lutie, Gainesville and Mark Twain school districts. 

She creatively promoted whatever group she was in, often asking the Times to publish photos and announcements about her group’s latest activity. As her close friend Janet Smith said, “Gloria loved the spotlight.” 

From 1990 until 2001, Gloria directed the Hootin an Hollarin queen contest and then drove the Hootin an Hollarin queen and her court (and their old-timey, hoop-skirted hard-to-travel-with dresses) to promotional appearances, including Branson music shows and area TV stations, publicizing the festival.

She opened a dance studio in Theodosia and taught tap, ballet, acrobatics, clogging and line dancing to students young and old. In her last couple of decades, Gloria may have been best known for her line-dancing classes and the fun-loving troupe of “50-something and older” dancers she took on the road, performing for community groups and area gatherings. One of their biggest hits came the year Gloria led them in performing, to the song “Pretty Woman,” a creatively choreographed routine using umbrellas and lawnchairs; that act brought down the house everywhere they went, including the Hootin an Hollarin parade. 

A busy life marred by tragedy

Gloria’s busy, productive life in Ozark County was a continuation of the rewarding life she had lived before moving here. The difference was that here, she focused on her community. In Illinois, where she grew up and spent her early adult years, she was busily focused on being a remarkably successful, boundary-pushing career woman as well as a devoted wife and mother.

“She was a generation too soon,” her daughter Cheryl said in a recent phone call from South Carolina, where she lives with her husband, Erick Burseth. “In another generation, with that energy she had, she could have been a business executive.”

Gloria was born during the Great Depression, on Dec. 16, 1931, in Chicago. In the life story she wrote for her family in 2021, she said she grew up poor in a family of three children raised by a homemaker mother and a banker father. During World War II, she sold lemonade at the Chicago train station “to make a little money for war bonds,” she wrote.

Her conservative father “didn’t believe girls should go to college except to find a man to marry,” Gloria wrote. “But I had different ideas.”

After high school, she worked as a secretary for Westinghouse Electric Co. and was thrilled to be promoted into sales “in the Micarta division at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago,” she wrote. After the NBC television affiliate came to her office to do a story “because it was so modern,” the broadcaster offered her a job, she said. She produced news reports, editing and splicing film shot by news crews. Her network TV job took her to the 1952 Democratic and Republican conventions, which were both held in Chicago that year. 

After NBC did a story about airline stewardesses (today’s flight attendants), Gloria left the news business and took to the skies, going to work for American Airlines. A friend introduced her to Don Noah, a corporate pilot. They were married Nov. 6, 1954, in Elmhurst, Illinois. Back then, airlines required stewardesses to resign when they married. 

She and Don wanted children, and that desire resulted in the most joyful, and also the most heart-wrenching, experiences of their lives. The joy came when their daughter Cheryl was born in 1957. But later pregnancies ended in miscarriages. Then, in the eighth month of pregnancy, Gloria learned, at a routine medical appointment, the devastating news that the baby she was carrying had died. “But the doctor said I would have to carry it full term,” she wrote. “I couldn’t be around people. I couldn’t tell them that I was carrying a dead baby.” 

To take her mind off the tragedy, Gloria stayed busy working for a builder and then a school district; she also served as women’s club president, “started civil defense during the Cuban/Russian crisis,” she wrote, and organized a 500-girl cheerleader program alongside her church’s community basketball program. 

In 1966, Gloria and Don adopted two-week-old Danny. “I was in 7th heaven,” she wrote. “Our family was complete.”

Later, Gloria had a successful career with Chicago-area travel agencies. But their lives changed again when Don sustained severe head injuries in an accident on the Fox River while Gloria was at work. Don and the two kids, then about 18 and 9, were enjoying an afternoon of water-skiing when a high-speed boat struck their boat and didn’t stop. The two kids escaped injury, but “Dad was drowning,” Cheryl said. “I knew first aid from being a lifeguard, and I got him up and breathing. . . . It looked like the prop hit his head.” 

Their boat was disabled, so Cheryl sent Dan swimming to shore for help. Don spent three months in a hospital ICU. The impact of his injuries left him disqualified to be a pilot, and he was given a desk job instead. “He hated that,” Gloria wrote.

To bring in more money for the family, Gloria applied for a sales position with the Motorola Corporation; instead, the company offered her a secretarial job – because women didn’t work in sales. She left in a huff. But her prospects changed one day when she was having lunch with a friend and they struck up a conversation with two men at the next table. The women asked where the men worked. “They said Motorola, and I said boooo on Motorola,” Gloria wrote. 

The men asked why. Gloria told them she had wanted to work in sales, but Motorola wanted her to be a secretary. It turned out the men were Motorola executives. “Within a week I had a job in sales,” she wrote.

‘My gosh, where did he put me?’ 

As time passed, Gloria and Don began to think about a place to retire. They visited Don’s niece, who lived in Mountain Home, Arkansas, and liked that area but didn’t find anything to buy. Then, driving up Highway 5 on their way home, they spotted a sign advertising a real estate office in Theodosia and decided to check it out. The rest, as they say, is history.

Cheryl was grown and living away from home by then, and Don still needed to work another year before retiring, so, in 1982, he remained at their home in Hoffman Estates, a Chicago suburb, while Gloria and Dan, then 16, moved to Theodosia. It wasn’t the smoothest of beginnings. In her life story, Gloria said she saw pack rats, snakes, squirrels “that chewed up everything” plus and ticks and chiggers. I thought, ‘My gosh, where did he put me?’” 

Despite growing up in the city, Dan had always wanted to be a farmer, like his paternal grandparents, and he had saved enough money from mowing lawns and lifeguarding jobs in Chicago to buy a few head of cattle here. The family’s Clipped Wing Ranch was born, and Gloria’s attitude quickly changed. In her 2021 story, she wrote, “Theodosia and the Ozarks is absolutely heaven to me, so I thank God that we found the beautiful town of Theodosia in Ozark County.”

Dan attended Gainesville High School, where he met Joyce Draper. They celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary last year. Dan continues to be a farmer; Joyce teaches kindergarten at Mark Twain School.  

Gloria and Don filled their lives here with friends and activities they enjoyed. They had been married 58 years when he died unexpectedly in 2012. Despite her grief, Gloria continued on with her activities, dancing and organizing activities for her friends and fellow residents. In 2014, she and Ozark County native and renowned fiddler player H.K. Silvey, both in their 80s then, began a close, decade-long friendship, enjoying “countless hours together,” Gloria wrote. 

‘She kept going’

Gloria’s strong determination powered her through her final years. Even as macular degeneration destroyed most of her vision, she kept going to the Springfield Little Theater performances with Janet, and she rarely missed the Wednesday morning line-dancing sessions she had started at Theodosia Methodist Church years earlier. Family and friends provided transportation to the activities she continued to attend.

Then, last May, she fell and broke her leg, and after a long hospital-and-rehab-facility stay, she reluctantly moved into the Gainesville Health Care Center – the same nursing home where she and her dance team had performed two years earlier. 

Even there, “she was still the same Gloria,” Janet Smith said. “She didn’t get depressed. She kept going.”

Despite being legally blind by that point, she still enjoyed being in the spotlight. Gloria was front and center when GHCC staffers started creating online TikTok videos to show the activities that kept their residents busy and happy. One video, set to the music “Pretty Girl Walk,” featured Gloria, using a walker, and two other wheelchair-riding residents coming smartly down the hall. The TikTok promptly got millions of views and “likes.” 

Gloria’s strong faith, positive attitude and love of life overpowered challenges and setbacks in her 94 years. “It’s been a good life God has given me,” she wrote. “And I thank him every day.”

She died at Baxter Health in Mountain Home on Feb. 2 after suffering an apparent heart attack. 

Now, like H.K., Janet Smith smiles when she imagines what Gloria might be doing in heaven. “She’s line dancing,” Janet said, “and organizing everybody.”