100 YEARS AGO Volunteer hours celebrated

No interest in child’s death

When four-year-old Dominick Orizini died after a short bout of diphtheria, his mother, Mrs. Dominick Orizini Sr. of South Ferry Street, failed to attend the funeral. When asked why, she said, “I thought it was the baby girl.” Orizini, mother also to Edith, 3, and 18-month-old Ruth, had ignored pleas from authorities to visit her son in the Albany Hospital, and after when told he had died and would be buried in Graceland Cemetery, she displayed no interest. She later said she thought the dead child was one of her daughters, neither of whom she cared for, because their father was someone other than her husband, and that she would have come to the funeral if she had known it was her son.

The Orizinis had been arrested in November, charged with neglect, after a police officer passing by their house noticed smoke coming through a window and broke down a door, finding the inside engulfed in flames and the three children trapped, alone and huddled together. An investigation uncovered a history of abuse and neglect, with their mother often leaving them alone in the house at all hours, with no heat or food. On one occasion, neighbors recalled hearing the children crying from fright at 3 a.m. On another, Ruth was sleeping on the sidewalk outside the home in the rain.

—Times Union, Dec. 9, 1920

50 YEARS AGO

Volunteering keeps her young, said Margaret T. Gabriel, 78, as she spoke of her 53 years doing volunteer work with Red Cross. During the holidays, she was helping with Operation Goodwill, which sent holiday greetings to servicemen and women. She and husband Otto, a World War I veteran; her son-in-law Harland Lawton, a World War II veteran; and her daughter Mary Ann, were recording their own greetings to send to her grandson Peter J. Lawton, serving in Vietnam. She had received Red Cross awards for her volunteer service at the Stratton V.A. Medical Center.