Former Bradford woman Pat Costa Viglucci, author of “Growing up
Italian in God’s Country: Stories From the Wilds of Pennsylvania,”
released another book in February titled “Don’t Kiss Me Goodbye!
I’m Going with You.”

A Penfield, N.Y., woman, who was born in Austin, went to college
at St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, N.Y., and was once a
reporter/women’s editor at The Bradford Era, Viglucci again proves
that everyday life is the best fodder for compelling, touching
narratives.

Viglucci told The Era Friday that from Austin, she and her
family moved to Roulette, and then on to Smethport in 1950. She
graduated from Smethport Area High School and then went to a
Catholic college in Erie.

She attended college in Erie only one year, however. “I couldn’t
stand it,” Viglucci said of the strict institution directed by
Catholic nuns. So, for her sophomore year, she transferred to St.
Bonaventure.

It was there that she started her career in journalism, although
she was technically an English literature major, she said, by
becoming the first woman editor of the college’s newspaper.

From there, she went to work at The Bradford Era in Bradford,
writing family columns and doing lifestyles editing, she said.
Viglucci’s signature column at The Era, Kaffeeklatch, is a term,
she said Friday, that means “a get-together to have coffee … a
cluster of people getting together for coffee.”

“Being a reporter and seeing the things I saw gave me a
different insight” into life and politics, she explained. While she
would have once considered herself a “bleeding-heart liberal,”
Viglucci said, she has obviously changed again and again over
nearly seven decades of life.

Viglucci plans to write a second book, she said, were put on
hold while she traveled to Italy. A short time after the trip,
Viglucci saw a book written by one of her favorite authors and
decided to take a page out of that author’s book, so to speak, and
come up with a compilation piece, too.

“Don’t Kiss Me Goodbye!” features opinion columns, non-fiction
and fiction prose, as well as old family photos and recipes.

Viglucci said she added the recipes because her columns about
food were always well-received.

“One of my most popular columns to date was one on how to find
good orange marmalade,” she said with a laugh.

After leaving The Era, Viglucci went on to report for the
Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., where, at one point, she
was one of only two female reporters in the city newsroom.

“For a while I did things, like they would send me to the zoo,”
she said, laughing at what was considered “hard news” for a woman
in those times. While there, however, another of her tasks was to
handle feature stories.

“That’s what I did best,” Viglucci said of the features.
Eventually she also became a television critic in Rochester before
retiring to raise her family in 1963. In 1965, her first child was
born, setting the course for Viglucci to write pages and pages of
tear-jerking, side-splitting real life.

She is currently a general interest columnist for the Rochester
Golden Times under her maiden name, Pat Costa. In addition to the
two books mentioned in this article, Viglucci has also written
“Cassandra Robbins, Esq.” and “Sun Dance at Turtle Rock,” both
young adult novels.

A mother of three and grandmother to seven, Viglucci resides in
Penfield with her husband, Carmen.