Before COVID-19 death, Uncasville couple met in retirement, traveled world.

Santo ‘Sam’ Sperazza, 88, a Navy veteran and former Norwich Tech teacher, died Dec. 27, 2020

The 20 years Annamay and Santo “Sam” Sperazza shared were spent entirely in retirement, when the couple traveled the world, cruising the Mediterranean for a month, walking the Great Wall of China and celebrating New Year’s Eve with a pig roast and luau in Hawaii.

“He was a lot of fun,” Annamay said of her late husband. “He was always ready to go and investigate something. He’d want to do something, and before you knew it, you’d have all kinds of pamphlets in front of you.”

They lived in Florida but returned to Connecticut a few years ago, after Sam was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. They lived together in Uncasville until Sam was hospitalized, diagnosed with COVID-19 and put in hospice; he died Dec. 27 at age 88.

“I was quarantined, I couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see me ever again,” Annamay said. “That’s a real bad thing to happen to married couples, when you’re together for years, around the clock.”

She said she doesn’t know how he contracted COVID-19 but said she got it, too. It wasn’t as bad, though she had some symptoms. She couldn’t eat. Nothing tasted good. Hospice staff told Annamay that Sam kept looking for her, so they asked her to bring in a picture of the two of them.

“It’s a terrible way to die, alone like that,” she said.

On top of this “true horror,” she has been frustrated as she has been unable to schedule a vaccine appointment over the past week — what she called her civic duty, so she doesn’t infect others or herself.

Navy service, teaching and traveling

Annamay and Sam met through their jobs as state employees: She was a nurse while he taught air conditioning and heating at Norwich Technical High School. They had both been widowed.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1932, Sam moved to Connecticut and graduated from New Britain High School. He joined the Navy and served on the USS Dixie AD 14 in the Korean War, before getting an engineering degree at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and working at Norwich Tech. He had three kids with his first wife.

“He just wanted to do his civic duty,” Annamay said of his military service. “He and a lot of his friends were of the same mind; they wanted America to be free.”

This patriotism also came through in their attitude toward traveling: “We are the greatest country in the world,” Annamay said, and while they thought it was wonderful to see how other people live, they were pleased to be Americans.

She said they also traveled to England, Greece and Dubai, and that Sam liked camping but that wasn’t so much her style. He didn’t care for fancy food, Annamay said: Even in other countries, they were looking for McDonald’s.

“We had a wonderful life,” she said. “We saw a lot of things, learned a lot, and it was just great.”