ELVIRA TOMARCHIO
Elvira Tomarchio was the faithful wife of a faithful husband, a devoted mother to her four children, a loving sister to five sisters and a brother, and a generous friend to many friends. She was baptized in 1936 Elvira Santina Delphina Tramontano, in the ancient parish church of San Silvestro Papa, of her mother’s native Sacco, in the Italian province of Campania, by her mother Angelina, of the DiMango family, and her father Enrico Tramontano, of neighboring Piaggine.
Although she grew up in Sacco and loved its people dearly, as a teenager she moved to Piaggine to work in her entrepreneurial father’s new bar, in the lower level of a beautiful home built by her mother’s parents. She learned to make gelato from a master her father brought from Salerno to train her, and she was renowned for the creaminess of her gelato—although some native Chiainari invidiously alleged that it was rather her beauty that was the attraction to the bar. She managed this bar for two years with her sister Marianne before her father decided to take her with him to America, where her sister Rose had paved the way with her husband Tony. She worked as a seamstress by day in a factory, in the care of her solicitous aunt Fannie, and she went to school at night to learn English. At night school she met her husband Lenny, who had disembarked in New York alone, a long way from his family in Catania, Sicily.
Before long, her ambitious husband convinced her father to buy a house together, and the house on 60th Street grew into the hub of a sprawling family of aunts and uncles and cousins and friends and friends of friends. My mother loved to feed people, and that love rendered her famously delicious cooking into nurture of soul as much as of body. She tried to be kind to all, to do good to all, to help everyone she could. She gave much and received much in return, giving generously and receiving gratefully. ‘Vera’ was well liked by all, and she liked to be. She lived with her mother Angelina upstairs on 60th Street for 24 years, mothering her mother’s family with her mother, and her daughter's family with her daughter. Fourteen years after her mother's death in 1986, in the first year of a new millennium, she left Brooklyn to follow her youngest son’s family to Hightstown, New Jersey.
In a Spanish style ranch house on an acre of land she became the wife of the agrarian ambitions of a husband planting a paradise, and she became a second mother to her son's wife and sons. In a word, family is what she lived for. All she had to give, she gave to them, sparing nothing for herself. She raised her children’s children; she was a second mother to other mothers’ children; she made space at her table for any orphaned guest or hungry soul. After the death of Lenny in 2014, her lifelong partner in these labors of love, the house on Hankins Rd. had to be sold and she returned to Brooklyn, to an apartment on Shore Rd., upstairs from her son Henry and next door to her sister Alba. Dementia overcame her 10 years later, in September of 2024, at the age of 88.
She leaves behind her daughter JoAnn and her son John; her son Henry and his wife Maria; her son David and his wife Cindy; her sisters Marianne, Alba, and Antonetta, and her brother Joe; her cousins Gloria and Cosmo; her grandchildren Ryan and Briana, Michael and Jason, Frankie and Francesca. She goes to join her her husband Lenny, her beloved sisters Rose and Marina, her aunts Fannie and Rosina and zi' Antonio, and her brothers-in-law Benny and Tony.
