Cover Story Gloria Uribe Brister: From Mob, to Miracles, to Ministry

On the surface, their offers had the appearance of making her dreams of showbiz fame and fortune come true, but Brister knew her life would no longer be her own. One look at the rich, but miserable and lonely, mob wives sitting alone at their tables while the husbands had dinner with their young girlfriends in the room next door showed Brister the extent of mob ownership.

“You don’t divorce the mob and live to tell about it,” she notes.

Deciding the “Big Time” was not all it promised, Brister passed on the mob’s offer. She immersed herself in the management of her band and expanded tour dates to include casino stages in Reno, Vegas and Tahoe and kicked her philandering and abusive husband out of the band and her life. Even so, he continued to threaten and stalk her for a year afterward.

Finally, the pressures of her abusive marriage, the domineering mob and managing the band took their toll. Brister began forgetting lyrics, slurring her words and could not muster the strength to move about the stages with legs and arms that felt like heavy blocks of wood. Her body was physically mirroring her emotional state, and she felt like she was literally falling apart.

Then Brister discovered she had multiple sclerosis (MS). A chronic autoimmune disease of the central nervous system, MS can cause muscular weakness, loss of coordination and speech, and visual disturbances. She realized the disease was probably brought on by her stressful lifestyle.

In a deep depression, she began sleeping under her bed because she believed her estranged husband’s threats of breaking into her home to kill her. She had frequent dreams of suicide just to end it all.

At her wit’s end, she called out to God one lonely night in a desperate prayer, asking, “Why me, God?”

 “I didn’t expect an answer, but God told me he had something special in mind for me,” Brister says. “From that point, my life changed. I could not wait to find out what that plan was for me.”

Telling her ex-husband that her door would be unlocked, she invited him to walk in and do his worst, she recalls. But after calling his bluff and meeting his threats head-to-head, he left her alone and she never heard from him again.

“God was looking out for me,” she smiles.

While singing at the Peppermill in Reno one night in October, she received a phone call from Gene Brister, inviting her to sing at the annual Imperial Valley Produce Ball. He asked if she remembered him and their two dates during their IVC days. She did.

During the intervening months, they courted through phone calls.

 “He had the most gorgeous voice,” Brister remembers. “I fell in love with his voice as we talked on the phone.”

They arranged a brief meeting on Christmas Eve when she came home to visit family, and then resumed the phone calls after she left. Ironically, their first official date was at the Produce Ball in February where he emceed and she was performing. By April, they knew they were in love.

In 1985, Brister made the momentous decision to quit show business altogether. Neither easy nor frivolous, her choice meant she gave up her lifelong goal of becoming a famous and wealthy singer and had to start a new life and career with Gene.

For the first time, she was entering into a relationship without the victim mentality that had governed her decisions with her other boyfriends and husbands.

“He was honestly, genuinely, a nice guy,” Brister admits. “Things were different this time. Gene had calmed down, stopped wearing paisley and become a successful businessman. And I had loosened up a bit, stopped singing opera and got a sense of humor” making them just right for each other.

They married soon afterward. They have one daughter together, Gina, and one daughter from Gene’s previous marriage, Keri.

In addition to helping Gene and partner Carroll Buckley at KXO radio station from time to time, Brister is active with Glory B Productions, a company she started in 1987. Her business is inclusive of many things including entertainment, public relations, marketing and motivational speaking. And it is this broad variety of things that makes it so unique, she says.

One project is the Valleywide Freedom Fest 4th of July celebration which the couple created together in 1991.