Teresa M. Schiavoni

Graveside Service:  Saturday, Sept. 9th. 11:00 a.m. at St. Agnes Cemetery, with Fr. Richard Hoerning officiating.

Mrs. Schiavoni lived continuously in Greenport from the 1950s until weeks before she passed on August 29th, having been well cared for at San Simeon by the Sound in her final weeks. Teresa arrived 3rd Class on the ship “Saturnia” as a 19 year old Italian war bride with her 27 year old husband Dominick J. Schiavoni and his father Julius on December 10, 1948. After an arranged meeting and marriage in Piedilama, Ascoli Piceno; Teresa left the village where she was born on July 21, 1929. With her new husband and father-in-law, she saw much of Italy for the first time before the ship left Naples for America. 

Back in Greenport, they lived with the senior Schiavoni’s at the family bowling alley, now a dentist’s office. At some point they moved into a tiny cottage in Greenport. Teresa started working on circuit boards at Hazeltine Corp. in Riverhead while Dominick continued to work at the bowling alley and after some years she had earned enough for them to replace the cottage with their own new house in 1960. She continued to live there after Dominick passed in 1998. She also enjoyed keeping the radio that had alerted Dominick to emergencies where he would assist the Fire Department in crowd control and traffic. She knew what the alarms meant and enjoyed being first with the news.

Teresa was a dynamo. She worked at Hazeltine through its sale to Emerson Electric. She was very proud of her meticulous work on the E2C Hawkeye, the airborne early warning and command and control aircraft operated by the military since 1973. She focused on the radar system, using a step ladder to reach the higher sections for days-on-end and at one point or another built all of its parts.

An Italian cook, Teresa would make her own pasta, can her tomatoes, and give lacy pizzelle cookies at Christmas. She was an expert gardener, mulching her left-overs and raising her own food. She insisted on mowing her own lawn until recently when a generous neighbor took over. Teresa loved her independence and self-sufficiency but she was also a generous friend and neighbor. She would warn of coming storms and offer to close windows and turn forgotten lights off if a neighbor was away. 

She leaves behind an extended Schiavoni family who had become her American family, her brother-in-law Americo, nephew Jimmy Pirillo and his wife Cynthia,their sons Jimmy, wife Sylvia, and Peter, wife Jaime, plus many other nieces and nephews. Her Italian family will miss her as well. Her last sibling, Adriana still lives in Ascoli Piceno not far from the hillside village homestead of Piedilama that was devastated by an earthquake on 8/24/16. Her neighborhood will not be the same without her.

Teresa was a member of St. Agnes Church. Father Richard Hoerning will perform the graveside service on Saturday, September 8th at 11 AM at St. Agnes Cemetery Greenport.

To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Teresa M. Schiavoni, please visit our floral store.