Gina Pellettiere, a keeper of Farmingdale High band camp tradition

For years, band camp with Ms. P was a Daler tradition.

One weekend every fall, the Farmingdale High School band director, Gina Pellettiere, gathered 300 members of the marching band, color guard and Dalerettes dance team, plus chaperones, teachers and coaches. They drove west for hours in chartered buses to a speck of a town in Pennsylvania, where the work began. 

In Greeley, surrounded by miles of state forest and not too far from the New York State border, “there are no distractions, nobody’s getting picked up for SAT class or bar mitzvah lessons: Everyone there is focused on the band, and [Pellettiere] was a big part of the reason why the kids had such an amazing time,” said Molly Tittler-Ingoglia, a camp coach year-after-year, and band director at W.T. Clarke High School in East Meadow.

Band camp veterans stretching back for decades will gather again Thursday, joined by friends and family of the beloved Pellettiere for her funeral Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Massapequa Park. Farmingdale High will close for the occasion.

School closed for funeral

"We have an overwhelming number of staff members and students who are looking to attend the funeral arrangements for Gina on Thursday," wrote Farmingdale schools Superintendent Paul Defendini, in a letter sent to the district community Monday announcing the school's closure.

Pellettiere, 43, of Massapequa, was aboard a bus last Thursday afternoon carrying 40 Farmingdale marching band members and three other adults to the camp. She was killed when the bus veered off a highway in Orange County and down a 50-foot embankment. Retired history teacher and longtime band chaperone Beatrice Ferrari, 77, also died in the crash, which injured dozens of students. Authorities said this week they were investigating the possible causes, including a faulty left tire, mechanical issues and driver error.

A funeral Mass was celebrated Wednesday for Ferrari at St. Kilian Catholic Church in Farmingdale.

If band was a major element of Pellettiere’s life — she excelled as a high-level trumpeter and drum major at Hicksville High School before studying music education at Hofstra University — so was motherhood.

“She had this amazing career as a band teacher, but she always talked about being a mother,” said Tittler-Ingoglia, who knew Pellettiere from Hofstra. “She made it her mission and she made it happen … Once she had this baby, she had a new focus. She loved him so much.”

Pelletiere, a single mother, wore her two and a half-year-old son Joseph’s name tattooed on her right wrist. She was “super-organized” with seemingly superhuman stores of energy, Greco said, which is why Pelletiere could make her busy life work.

“She made it possible," Greco added, "balancing work and having a little guy.”

Tittler-Ingoglia said her friend treated nighttime feedings and other challenges of parenthood as experiences to savor. “She wanted to soak it all in.”

A new circle of friends

As Joseph grew, mother and son joined a circle of friends — many also new mothers and musicians or band leaders — for Mommy and Me music classes in Massapequa, Tittler-Ingoglia said. Jessica Shenker, chairperson of Music at Woodland Middle School in East Meadow who also took part in the classes, said the sessions involved singalongs, with shakers and scarves for the children. Afterward, everybody usually went out for a meal together, sometimes pizza at Umberto’s in Massapequa Park.

Pellettiere had worked hard for this life, starting as early as high school. Diana DePalma, Hicksville band parent president when Pelletiere played there in the 1990s, recalled a girl whose drum major duties meant she served as something like a team captain off-field and conducted on field.

That girl was five feet tall and petite and wore her long hair tied in a braid so it wouldn’t fly into her face. “She climbed a six-foot-ladder at competition and conducted from there,” DePalma said of Pelletiere. “She would turn around to the judges, salute them to let them know the band was ready, then turn around, lift up her arms and conduct.”

At Hicksville’s weeklong August band camp, some children wilted in the heat.  But “Gina could not have been happier." DePalma said.

 “ ‘Come on, guys, this is great!,’ ” DePalma recalled her saying.

As a high schooler in 1994, Pellettiere joined the first band organized by Nassau-Suffolk Performing Arts, an audition-only Freeport nonprofit created to give additional rehearsal and performance opportunities to high-level student musicians on Long Island, said executive director Abby Behr.

Pellettiere played principal trumpet at Hofstra, earning a bachelor's of music degree in music education and a masters of music in wind conducting, according to friends and a professional biography on Nassau-Suffolk’s website. Until her death, she served as the organization’s alumni band manager, a role that entailed wrangling musicians who were sometimes busy with nonmusical responsibilities.

The role suited Pelletiere, said Joel Levy, Nassau-Suffolk’s wind symphony and alumni band conductor.

“You just wanted to be around her …," Levy said. "She took the positive side to everything.” Her determination, and her rallying cry, seemed unchanged since high school.

 “I remember some years where I’d say, ‘Gina, maybe we don’t have enough kids to make a go this year,’” he said. “She’d say, ‘Come on, Joel, it’ll be great!’”

Accomplished musician

By the early 2000s, when Pellettiere was looking for a job on Long Island in music education, she played close to 20 musical instruments, a Prince-like feat but expected of most band teachers.

“She could play jazz, do brass quintet, wind ensemble," Tittler-Ingoglia said. "She was a great sight-reader, she could play on the fly."

Pellettiere joined the music department at a Huntington middle school but wanted to work at the more technically demanding high school level, friends said. So she he took a job at Farmingdale High more than a decade ago.

In what friends said was a male-dominated field, “there weren’t a lot of female band directors for us to look up to,” said Shenker, adding that she and Pellettiere had planned to start a group of female Long Island band directors. The inaugural meeting had been planned for October. 

This week, some of Pellettiere’s colleagues said they’d talked with their own students about the friend they too had lost.

“It’s hard to dissociate emotion from the activity — it’s inherent in what we do,” said Anthony Santanastaso, band teacher at George W. Hewlett High School in Hewlett-Woodmere. Santanastaso said he also played for Nassau-Suffolk Performing Arts and attended Hofstra with Pellettiere. Talking about loss, he said, meant his students would “walk through these halls now with an increased sense of empathy."

In interviews, Pellettiere’s friends and former students recalled their growing panic as phones started to buzz with calls and texts about last Thursday's crash. In Chicago, Brian Entwistle, a professional trombonist who played for Pellettiere four years before graduating from Farmingdale High in 2012, said a friend had sent him a link to a news story last Thursday afternoon. He spent the next hours refreshing news pages on his computer. The first news stories about the crash didn’t give Pellettiere’s name, only the bus. 

Memories, good and sad

Later, when police released Pellettiere’s name, he remembered only a horrifying “blur.” 

In the days since, some good memories have joined the terrible ones. Freshman year band camp: eight-hour days, after-dinner practices, an experience so bonding, according to Entwistle, “I came back from band camp and I already had a couple dozen friends. I felt like I had settled into high school for a year already.”

He'll never forget how Pellettiere called everyone “dude.”

Or the time the pair performed a duet, Ewazen’s “Pastorale,” in a chamber concert at school.

"One of the greatest musical experiences I had in high school," he said

“The culture of that band — it didn’t matter whether you were a freshman … if you were in the band, those were your friends, those were your people,” Entwistle said.

Along with her son Joseph, Pellettiere is survived by her parents and brothers, friends said this week. An online fundraiser established by Joseph’s godmother, Josephine Greco, a music teacher in Huntington schools, said Pellettiere had been Joseph’s sole provider. By Wednesday, it had raised more than $70,000 for his care. Pellettiere’s family could not be reached.