Local woman celebrates 105th birthday with family, friends

Mary Sesso of West Hempstead turned 105 on Feb. 8.

Jina Papadoniou/Herald

Sesso at age 19, in 1926.

Courtesy Valerie Sesso

Mary Sesso, center, 105, with her grandchildren, Valerie, left, and Mario II; son, Mario, and daughter-in-law, Aileen.

Jina Papadoniou/Herald

• 
• 
• 

Mary Sesso of West Hempstead joined family, friends and other residents at the Catholic Charities’ Franklin Square Senior Center last week to celebrate her birthday. It wasn’t just any old birthday, but, rather, one for the record books. On Feb. 8 Sesso turned 105.

The daughter of Sicilian immigrants who came to the U.S. separately in the early 1900s and met and married a few years later, Sesso was one of four children, along with Connie and Marion, who have died, and Vincent, 98, known as “Jimmy” to the Sesso family. Mary grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where, in 1915, when she was 8, her mother died at age 32.

Overwhelmed by grief and the responsibility of caring for three children, Sesso’s father moved the family into his mother’s home in Queens. As a teenager, Mary began working as a seamstress at shops in Queens and Manhattan — a career she maintained, on and off, for nearly 40 years. Through her teen years she rarely dated, but then, in her mid-20s, she ran into a striking young man named Domenick one night while on a cruise on the Hudson River.

Bothered incessantly by her sisters, Connie and Marion, who both desperately wanted to marry their then boyfriends but were forbidden to do so by their father until their older sister settled down, Mary agreed to go on the cruise, up the Hudson to Bear Mountain, with a date — and her sisters and their boyfriends. It was an awkward evening, until Domenick approached Mary and her date and was more direct than she could have imagined.

“He said, ‘I’m going to take the girl you’re with, and you can get lost,’” remembers Mario Sesso, one of Mary’s sons. “He thought she was beautiful, and she was. And that was it.”

In 1937, Mary and Domenick were married. They moved into a small apartment in the Bronx, and then to a home in Little Neck, Queens, and began a family. They had three children, Richard, now 74, Marion, 70, and Mario, 67. Mary worked as a tailor for a local bridal shop and Domenick was an architectural draftsman.

In 1973, when their children were grown and had moved out of the house, the Sessos moved to Whiting, N.J., where Mary continued working as a seamstress from her home.