PORT ANGELES — A memorial service for the late Dan Di Guilio, former Port Angeles mayor and retired Clallam County Transit System general manager, is planned at 1 p.m. Saturday.
The service will be at the Vern Burton Community Center, 308 E. Fourth St. All are welcome to attend.
Di Guilio died of a sudden heart attack in Florida on Jan. 30. He was 68.
All are invited to attend.
He and his wife Carol, who have two grown sons, moved in summer 2016 to Sebastian, Fla., a town of 22,000 on the east coast of Florida near where Carol, a retired Olympic Medical Center operating room surgical technologist, has family.
The Di Guilios would have celebrated their 48th anniversary in September.
“He was my best friend from the get-go,” Carol said in a Peninsula Daily News story after her husband’s death.
The Di Guilios moved to Port Angeles in 1995, where he headed Clallam Transit System.
During his tenure, he served two terms as president of the Washington State Transit Association and was on the feasibility committee that created the Washington State Insurance Pool, established during the insurance crisis of the 1980s.
The transit pool’s Dan Di Guilio Service Award, based on merit, not annual accomplishments, is given to a transit insurance pool governing board member or alternate who contributes to both a transit agency and the insurance pool’s operations.
Di Guilio retired in 2005.
He won two terms on the Port Angeles City Council, in 2007 and 2011. He was selected by other council members as mayor in 2010.
Former Mayor Karen Rogers, who served on the City Council with Di Guilio during his first term and on the Clallam Transit board when Di Guilio was the transit system’s general manager, described Di Guilio as “one of those quiet leaders.”
Former Public Works Director Glenn Cutler, a family friend, said, “I always found him to be a fair individual, balanced, very thoughtful.”
“Most of all, he was a special part of our community,” said City Manager Dan McKee.
Until moving to Florida, Di Guilio was a lifelong Western Washingtonian. After graduating from Aberdeen High School, he served for three years in the Army as a military policeman. He attended Western Washington University on the GI Bill and was close to completing his master’s degree thesis in sociology when he was hired as a planner with the Grays Harbor County regional planning commission.
The nearby Pacific [County] Transit System hired him as its first general manager and he began his 27-year career in public transportation.
