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We called her Sue because when she came to Sea Cliff in the freshman year, people kept tripping over Angelica. She soon said, all right, just say Sue, which was her middle name. (Yes, the yearbook also tripped up and listed her as Sue A. Izzo.) Nevertheless she was happy at Sea Cliff as she had been at St. Patrick’s in Glen Cove and in 7th and 8th grades in Glen Head after her father, a builder, finished their home on Frost Pond Rd. in Brookville. She was the oldest of four children, the last being sister Debbie born in Sue’s first year at Sea Cliff. Living in sparsely populated Brookville had limited her socializing with other kids, and once Debbie came, “As soon as I would walk up the front walk my mother would say here’s your little sister, take her for her walk.”
Nevertheless that same year her new friendship with Janice Painter bore interesting fruit. Janice had been talking about Angelica at home. Into Mrs. O’Knefski’s art class one day walked senior Bill Painter (’54), walked right over to Angelica and started talking. He was a well built gymnast with intense eyes under waves of blond hair and a talented French horn player. “I was overwhelmed,” Angelica recalls.
The next year Bill and several buddies enlisted in the Air Force, and after basic he was assigned to band duty in Hawaii. “When he was going to leave for Hawaii,” Angelica says, “my mom and dad were arguing. My mom didn’t want me to go steady. My father said, ‘Leave her alone.’” She knew he was sure Bill’s three year absence would conquer her attachment and that going steady might keep other boys at bay. Religion may also have played a part since Bill’s family was Episcopals and the Izzos Catholics. “Religion was a big divider” for parents she says. “’You marry your own kind’ I used to hear. I understood as I got older what that meant, that the culture and the ways are the same and it’s easier to get along. That was way too late.”
Her father may have been proven correct if she had not been very naïve. She remembers a school performance of some kind where before the performance a debonair Dickie Robson in a white sports coat pulled her aside before he mounted the stage. He told her he was going to sing a song especially for her, and he did—“A White Sports Coat And A Pink Carnation.” Did it mean more than she could imagine? She would never know, but she would remember clearly.
Despite being in Hawaii’s luxury, Bill “wrote every single day and I wrote back every single day.” Unfortunately, five or six years after they were married, her mother, “a cleaning nut,” decided to throw out boxes from the attic and the letters were lost forever. She was working in Helena Rubinstein’s when Billy returned from Hawaii and they married in April ’59. Their daughter Elizabeth was born in 1960 and 19 months later William Britton. Angelica would be a full time mother until the kids entered junior high. When the kids were growing they moved from their first apartment in Glen Cove to a new house on Leonard Place in Sea Cliff, then to Clearwater, Florida for a year, back to Long Island and three years later back to Florida for another year before finally the family rented part of a big farm house in Matinecock, NY. The kids finished school in Locust Valley. “Bill was extremely intelligent and he always liked to keep moving.” In 1978 her father built a house for them in Bayville and that remains her part time residence.
When the kids were in junior high Angelica had started working as a secretary again. Looking back on her life, she says, “I’ve been very blessed all my life. There were really no hardships.” When her son Britton started school he called her from the cafeteria pay phone at lunch time. Why? Because when he had been at home he knew that his dad called his mom every day at noon from work and he would do the same. However, when Angelica and a friend took their daughters to school for the first day, her friend’s daughter cried, but Elizabeth turned to Angelica and said, “You can leave now.” Neither ever had trouble in school or gave their parents trouble at home. Elizabeth now does marketing for a LI radiology office and Britton runs his own commercial fishing boat out of Oyster Bay.
Angelica and Bill divorced in 1992 but have remained close and get together gladly at family events and holidays. She continued to live in Bayville and work with Canon USA until 2005. She also spends a lot of time in her Boca Raton, Florida home. Her best friend there is Judy Graziosi, a 93 year old former Roslyn school piano teacher. Angelic used to be compulsively busy like her mother. With her friends in Florida, the never-ending activities in her living complex she says, “I’ve learned finally how to relax. I thank god every day.”
