W.H. woman Mary Sesso celebrates 105th birthday

The year 1907 saw the births of many famous figures, including John Wayne, Gene Autry and Katharine Hepburn. That year also saw the birth of a local notable figure — Mary Sesso, a West Hempstead resident who celebrated her 105th birthday with family and friends last week.

Members of the Catholic Charities Franklin Square Senior Center gathered at the Wesley Methodist Church on the Franklin Square-West Hempstead border on Feb. 8 to join Sesso in celebration of the momentous milestone of 10 and a half decades of life. “What’s your secret?” is a question everyone asks Sesso, who looks and acts like an octogenarian.

“The Lord’s been good,” she often replies.

Sesso’s 67-year-old son Mario said there’s a little more to the secret than that. “She believes very truly in … family, one man, no drinking and no smoking,” he told the crowd.

“Party pooper,” shot back Terese Russo Santoro, Sesso’s neighbor and friend.

Sesso and her three younger siblings — Connie and Marion, who have died, and Vincent, who’s now 98 — grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where her parents, Sicilian immigrants who came to the U.S. separately in the early 1900s and met and married shortly thereafter, settled down. In 1915, when Mary was 8, her mother died at the age of 32. Overtaken 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.