Joanne P. DeNinno, 74 – known as “Jo” to her four siblings, “Ma” to her son, Matt, “Mimi” to her beloved grandchildren, Lucy and James, and “A.J.” to her nine nephews and nieces and three grand-nephews and grand-nieces -- died peacefully at 2:32 pm on Thursday March 13, at Hackensack (NJ) University Medical Center.
Thank you to the doctors and nurses there for their loving care.
Mimi was a top-of-the-liner when it came to a good life well-lived: granddaughter of Italian immigrants and great-granddaughter of Irish immigrants (a splendid blend of the best traits of both), she was for 50 years a speech pathologist and co-author of 16 workbooks/board games for pre-school through middle school students (with her close friend of 45 years, Kim Gill), and a renowned cook, gardener and musicophile.
“If it wasn’t for AJ, none of us would have learned to read,” said her nephew, Patrick, perhaps exaggerating a bit, but merely making it clear who was the true educator in the family.
Joanne was a difference-maker.
Long before teaching sign language to babies became a thing, she was incorporating it in her teachings to pre-school children and, of course, using it with Lu and Jamesie.
“She taught James the name of all the dinosaurs just because he liked them,” remember niece, Kath. “He was naming dinosaurs I've never even heard of.”
“Mimi was everything one would ever want in a grandmother,” said Lu’s and Jamesie’s dad, Matt.
“Most mother-in-laws get a bad rap,” said Lu and Jamesie’s mom, Jenna. “I hit the mother-in-law lottery!”
“Can we still make Mimi’s Rice Krispies treats?” nine-year-old Lu asked her mom after Mimi’s passing.
“I don’t think they’ll ever be as tasty, but we can try!” her mother said.
Eldest sibling of five, Jo was boss. “Listen to her, not to us,” we told the doctors and nurses in the last week of her life. “She knows what she’s talking about, we don’t. She’s been taking care of us since Johnny was born.”
Jo laughed at that one -- no doubt in part because she knew it was true.
“In case you want to know why we’re acting the way we are, it’s the birth order,” one of us explained to the night nurse. “Do you have any siblings?”
“Yes, I’m the middle of three,” said the nurse. “I know just what you’re talking about.”
Losing Jo felt like losing a sibling and a parent at the same time. She was one of us, but towered above us in the best of ways.
Nephew Chris captured it when he was about four. Jo had been to Kentucky to visit. After a few days, she left, but her memory lingered. Chris was out at the mall with his mom. He happened by a mannequin, long, lithe, brunette, beautifully dressed. Chris, looking upward from near ground level, and said, “Aunt Joanne?”
AJ laughed when she was told.
One of Jo’s incontrovertible responses whenever youngest sister, Nancy, would quote her two older brothers, Johnny and Greg: “Why are you listening to them? They don’t know anything!”
Impeccable logic, impossible to refute… and true.
That was Joanne.
“Cool and cool-headed, smart as they come,” said niece, Gina. “She had impeccable taste and style. And no matter your age, she’d hang out with you. Get right down on the floor and play with you. Classic, and classy, someone you wanted to be like.”
Best Scrabble player in the family, nobody close.
AJ loved words in every form – spoken, written and sung.
And she’s still delivering.
“The day she passed there was an episode of ‘Seinfeld’ on in a place I walked into,” said nephew Patrick. “When I was teaching English to little kids in South Korea, I remember telling AJ how I taught them the word ‘sausage’ by pronouncing it like a Long Islander: ‘Sawwwsages.’ She liked that story. And where was Seinfeld in that TV moment as I walked into the place? In a sausage shop, with sawwwsages hanging all over the place.”
So good was Jo with words -- she excelled in speech and debate forensics at St. John the Baptist -- and worked so hard on her lines that Mom sometimes called her “Sarah,” as in the legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Jo got the music gene early. Came by it honestly. Mom played “Old Rugged Cross” on her lap-steel guitar on the Edward’s Amateur Hour on WSYR-AM at nine years old, and three years later, Mom’s sister, seven-year-old Aunt Pat (Jo proudly carried the middle name, Patricia) sang “Creeking Old Mill On The Creek' with Fats Waller on the same show.
Jo cut her first rug to Elvis Presley and the Bill Black Combo, came of age with the Beatles, loved Laura Nyro, Janis Joplin, and Bonnie Raitt, totally got vocalese (Lambert Hendricks and Ross, Manhattan Transfer and Rare Silk, among them), and eventually graduated to opera.
“When most kids were listening to Guns and Roses, we were at Jazz Fest at Saratoga listening to Natalie Cole and Miles Davis,” said son Matt.
By age eight, Jo was riding the bus from Galeville to Allegro Music Co. on Bear Street to take accordion lessons from Gustav Rautenberg, who opened his shop only one year earlier, in 1957. (Gus died two months ago at 94). She then transferred to the Near West Side to stay overnight with her Grandma Gannon who would ply her with Black Jack gum and nonpareils, read her stories and call her Peaches.
Nobody in the family grew up the way Joanne did.
Before the days of car seats, she rode around in a laundry basket in the family’s Black DeSoto with our father, the cigar-chomping “Big Daddy,” watched Friday Night Fights (boxing) with him on the black-and-white, and learned how to shine shoes from him, thinking about but never trying the Kiwi black on her patent leathers. She learned to dry dishes from Aunt Babe on the Italian side, kindness from Gramma Gannon and compassion from older cousin, Lucia, who lived in the same house as Babe.
Hipper than hip, Joanne’s accordion virtuosity took her to the New York World’s Fair in 1964, and she and Mom (and later, sister Nancy) saw Broadway plays almost annually (among them, Purlie, Oliver, Man of LaMancha and Funny Girl).
She got the light touch in cooking from the Italian side via Pops who got it from his mother. Joanne outdid them both in the kitchen and at least equaled Big Daddy in the garden, which is saying something. Her roses outdid his. Her front-yard azaleas were off-the-charts.
She knew the value of sweetness… and inclusiveness.
“(My sister) Nancy is pies, I am cookies” is the way she described it to her friends. Her grandson, Jamesie couldn’t get enough of her delicious ultra-thin sugar cutout cookies that Mimi proudly made for him every chance she got.
Her Easter dinners and surrounding events were legend.
Allow Patrick, a chef, to describe:
“Lamb roast with goat cheese and rosemary, roasted baby red potatoes, spinach and strawberry salad with poppy vinaigrette, brown butter carrots. There was quiche, bagels, pizza the first night, and obligatory Neverending Story viewing. Cloud (special cheesecake recipe) was there too, as it was at other events. Pasta fagioli, too.”
From niece, Kath:
“The quiche was more specifically Italian Easter pie. Stoup (stew-soup), ADK (Adirondack) bean salad, rice and cranberry salad. She'd always get me a mini of smoked salmon cream cheese with the bagels because I was the only one who liked it. Oh, and rugelach pastry and cutout cookies at Christmas. And sweet potatoes and apples. And fanny pack candy skiing at Gore Mountain.”
And speaking of non-pareils, AJ was nonpareil as a speech pathologist.
Said her niece, Molly, also a speech pathologist:
“All of the speech therapy materials that I use with kids were given to me by AJ. She perfectly categorized all of them by season, holiday, area of need, age, etc. I used them today and could feel her with me giving me patience when students started acting up.”
Said Joanne’s friend of 45 years, Kim Gill, a speech pathologist who worked side-by-side with her:
“Joanne was gifted. She had a manner of conducting therapy that was very engaging and the execution of her lessons was flawless. She was a natural! The children loved her. I always enjoyed team-teaching with her and loved watching her in action. She planned every lesson to the last detail and stayed up very late preparing for the following day.
“Over the years, Joanne mentored and trained many student teachers. Several of Joanne’s student teachers were subsequently employed by Massapequa and became colleagues and friends.”
Joanne was a graduate of SUNY Fredonia and earned double Master’s degrees in special education and speech pathology from Brooklyn College.
A fine educational story is attributed to nephew, Joe.
A family friend – a schoolteacher -- was visiting the O’Connor family home in Dexter, NY, when Joe was about six years old. The teacher noticed Joe’s collection of Box Car Children’s books.
“I don’t know if those would be considered age-appropriate,” the teacher said to Joe’s mom.
“Oh yes they are,” Joe piped up. “They’re from my Aunt Joanne!”
Responded the teacher, “Oh, that’s right. Your aunt’s a schoolteacher, right?”
“No,” said Joe, “Aunt Joanne’s not a schoolteacher. Aunt Joanne’s a speech pathologist!”
It all started early. “I remember Joanne – just home from college – at a family picnic at Marcellus Park using flash cards that she’d made up for (cousin) Eddie and (brother) Frank,” recalled Jo’s maternal Petrivelli cousin, Marianne Davis. “Both of them were only five. Eddie had a lisp.”
Joanne was the rock to her brothers and sisters, and can never be replaced. It took Mrs. Gill to put it into words, though:
“Joanne’s most outstanding characteristics were her compassion and service to others. She was selfless and lived to make sure everyone else was okay. She was private, yet so deeply emotional. She was trustworthy, the epitome of integrity and honesty, and she loved God. I was so blessed to have her in my life. I will treasure our memories and miss her terribly.”
Jo’s other many friends, including Julie, Fern and Fran are going to miss her like the dickens.
“My dearest friend for 40 years,” Julie wrote. “Always at my side.”
Our memories of Jo – the brothers’ and sister memories – are basic and yet ethereal. She was an unabashed lover of nature, something she showed in the excitement of springtime texts and photos of flowering trees in the spring, and daily wonders in the sky.
Frank summoned it on the night of her passing.
“We would sometimes converse about what we were seeing in the sky at dusk, night or dawn. Coincidentally, or not, there is a total lunar eclipse beginning at 1:26 a.m. I'll be watching? Who is with me?”
Jo for sure.
We’d roar with her watching Martin Short do wacky Ed Grimley on Saturday Night Live.
She was forever giving people what they needed.
She liked cross-country skiing and snowshoeing with her sister Nancy and sister-in-law, Tina, and downhill skiing with her nieces and nephews at Gore Mountain. It undoubtedly occurred to Jo that the Erardis never had the money to outfit themselves for that lifestyle when we were growing up. The gentlest of souls always feel the deepest and appreciate the most.
The Syracusan would lead her Long Island friends into Manhattan to see Broadway plays, even though it should have been the other way around.
She was also an avid hiker, a pastime sprung from her youth in the Adirondacks. There were adventures with bears, not all of them on the trail.
Recalls niece, Molly:
“We went to dinner at Potter’s restaurant (at Blue Mountain Lake) and saw a flyer on their bulletin board saying there had been multiple sightings around Blue of a mama bear with her two cubs and to be very cautious.
“When we arrived back to Uncle Greg’s camp, ‘Second Base,’ we were walking down the steps, and saw the mama bear and two cubs walking alongside the steps! I was about seven. All the way down the rest of the steps to the house, I just kept repeating very quietly, ‘Bear and two cubs, bear and two cubs…’ I mean, it wasn’t like AJ needed to be reminded of it! She was the one responsible for us kids, the one frantically trying to get us kids down the stairs to safety. Whenever somebody re-told the story, I feel like AJ got the biggest laugh out of it, because she was right in the middle of it!”
It’s all right there in Aunt Tina’s “Book of Memorable One-Liners” at Second Base over the years. (AJ leads in the memorable-lines category, too.)
Joanne knew what she liked… and didn’t like. The following quote may bother some of her friends, but our guess is they’ve heard it before. We give her her truth. It’s a comment of roads and congestion and air, not of work or clients or friends and family, whom during her lifetime she clearly expressed and showed she dearly loved.
“I don’t like Long Island, and I like Jersey even less. I want to be cremated and buried in Syracuse.”
And so, she will be. At a graveside memorial this summer in St. Mary’s Cemetery off East Genesee Street.
Next to Mom and Dad.
At the time of Joanne’s passing, she was finishing up her work on a book about the Westside and Near Westside of the 13204, the neighborhoods where mom and dad grew up, fell in love and got married. The book will be published this fall.
Mary Gannon and John P. were proud of their three sons, but it was their two daughters who always got the most face time in Dad's slide shows.
"Pops knew who was the heart and soul of the family after Mom," Johnny said.
John P. was a World War II veteran, and a Last of the Mohicans tie to Syracuse's pre-war West End of the 1920s, '30s and '40s. He was a proud GI who served in the Persian Corridor at Camp Amirabad, a sprawling U.S. Army base two miles outside Tehran, Iran, that built trucks and other vehicles for the Soviets on the Eastern Front.
His wife, a former Curtis-Wright Cadette at Purdue University, was one of 900 women trained as aeronautical engineers during World War II. Like all her classmates, Mary Jane studied 40 hours a week for ten months, covering a compressed curriculum, equivalent to two-and-a-half years of standard engineering discipline.
Big Daddy loved baseball – Mary, of course, let him know that his boys’ abilities sprang not from him but could be genetically traced to her Irish uncle, a good pitcher -- and ultimately introduced his children to the game. Jo’s lines and numbers in the scorebook put the rest ours to shame.
She was a lifelong fan, converting to the New York Mets when she moved to Long Island in 1977, and attended the 1973 World Series in Queens. She loved listening to Mets games on the radio, appreciating the pastime’s picture-painters, in part because she didn’t have to be glued to the boob tube to follow it.
“I’d already seen all the plays, anyway, watching you two wannabes,” she once told Johnny and Greg, who pitched in the major leagues.
In her final days, when Joanne overheard a doctor say -- Jo’s hearing was oh so good, right to the very end -- that her case was hopeless, she didn’t flinch.
“I have hope,” she told him crisply. “My hope is in God.”
A day later, when her nephew Chris in Australia heard that story, he summed it all up, perfectly.
“Joanne was Joanne right to the very end,” he said.
Radiant, dignified, in charge.
Until she handed it over.
Free at last.
“I always wondered what amazing grace looked like,” said sole and soul sister Nancy. “Now I know.”
Joanne is survived by her son, Matt (wife Jenna), and grandchildren Lucy and James, of Rutherford, NJ; her brothers John (wife Barb), Crescent Springs, KY, Greg (wife Tina), Pinehurst, NC, and Frank (wife Amy), Baltimore, MD and sister Nancy O’Connor (husband John, “O.C.”), Alexandria Bay, NY. Also surviving: nephews Joseph O’Connor (wife Jeweliet), St. Petersburg, FL, and Patrick “Jack” O’Connor, Denver, CO; Chris Erardi (Jen Fang), Echuca, Australia; nieces Katherine Ridder (husband August), Hudson WI; Molly O’Connor, Philadelphia, PA and Gina Bauereis (husband Brett), Fort Wright, KY. Also surviving, grand-niece Jocelyn O’Connor and grand-nephew John O'Connor. Also surviving: sister-in-law Donna DeNinno and niece Abby DeNinno, both of Fort Myers, FL, and niece Bella Gigante (husband Joe) of Venice, FL, and grand-nephew Anthony Gigante, Venice, FL. Also surviving: aunt Patricia (Tee Tee) Petrivelli, and numerous cousins on the Erardi, Gannon and Petrivelli sides.
Joanne was predeceased by her parents, John and Mary Erardi (nee Gannon), former spouse Dominick and fellow rocks of Gibraltar, nephew, Nick, and brother-in-law, Joseph DeNinno.
Takes one to know one, Jo.
Visitation will be 6-8 p.m. Sunday, March 30 at Beney Funeral Home, 79 Berry Hill Road, Syosset, NY. Mass of Christian Burial will be 10:45 a.m. Monday, March 31 at Our Lady of Lourdes, 855 Carmans Road, Massapequa, NY.
Memorials may be made to St. Lucy’s Outreach Ministries, 432 Gifford Street, Syracuse, NY, 13204.
One last Van Morrison lyric, Jo, from the lovely and meaningful song, “Not Supposed to Break Down”:
“Fifteen families starving, all around the corner block. Here we’re standing all alone, just like Gibraltar rock.”
Jo got Van.
Jo believed dearly in the work of St. Lucy’s and its ministries, and the former school that taught her mother and aunt and uncle (Edward) their civic awareness, and sustained her maternal grandparents, Lily and Edward J. Gannon Sr.
Jo found strength, solace and peace in the 10 a.m. Sunday Mass at St. Lucy’s (which she Zoomed), and in the message and Gospel of Good News delivered by its parishioners and weekly guest homilists and pastor, the Rev. Jim Matthews. “Father Jim” got his start at Jo’s childhood parish, Immaculate Heart of Mary, just up the road from Galeville Grocery, where Joanne caught the bus and made the transfer to 306 Kellogg Street on Syracuse’s Near Westside.
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