‘SHE WAS A FORCE OF NATURE’
Connecticut woman dies at 105 from COVID-19
On Sept. 16, a woman whose lifetime contained two pandemics and two world wars died from the coronavirus at 105.
Her daughter, Dorene Giacopini, 61, said shouldn’t have died; Primetta Giacopini may have had a few years left.
“I can’t believe I have to say my 105-year-old mother died a needless death,” Dorene said. “Because this should not still be happening.”
Primetta’s COVID-19 test results came back positive, and she was admitted to the emergency room Sept. 11. She died five days later at around 10 p.m.
When the coronavirus pandemic started, Dorene recalled her mom mentioning how weird it was that there was another pandemic happening in her lifetime. Primetta also couldn’t help but talk about her own mother dying from the last pandemic 103 years prior.
“People don’t believe in science anymore,” she said. In her mother’s generation, “science is what solved problems,” the reason people lived longer and “the reason I lived more than a few days,” Darlene said.
In June, Dorene celebrated her mother’s 105th birthday. Primetta was a card shark, regularly beating people half her age in Shanghai Rummy.
Primetta was born in Torrington on June 9, 1916. She knew first-hand the effects of a pandemic, as the flu killed about 675,000 Americans, including her mother, Pasquina Feia, when Primetta was just 2 years old.
After her mother’s death, Primetta’s father didn’t want to raise her nor her younger sister. Primetta was given to a couple in Torrington while her sister lived in Italy. At age 13, Primetta and the couple moved to a small village called Marchirolo in Italy near the Switzerland border.
She was a seamstress, sewing clothes for mainly wealthier people. Once Italy entered into World War II, the government wanted American citizens out of the country. She didn’t want to leave, though. Her boyfriend was an Italian fighter pilot, she couldn’t speak much English and leaving would prove to be a logistical nightmare.
“My mother was not a shrinking violet,” Dorene said.
But her town wasn’t doing too well; people were mixing saw dust with flour to stretch out the bread supply. In early 1941, state police told her to get out of the country if she knew what was good for her, or she’d end up in a concentration camp, Dorene said.
At the age of 25, Primetta traveled in a small boat with
a group of strangers, carrying a suitcase full of Swiss francs, and moved back to Torrington. She had various jobs because she was “not easily satisfied,” Dorene said, before nabbing a good paying job at a General Motors factory in Bristol working on Norden bombsights.
In Torrington, Primetta bought a 1940 Chevrolet sedan for just $500, according to the Associated Press. Primetta believed she was the first woman in the town to buy her own car, Dorene said.
Primetta drove her Chevrolet to work, serving as a carpool for others who shared her shifts. One day a blizzard canceled an upcoming shift, leading her co-worker and later husband, Umbert “Bert” Giacopini, to ask her out for the first time.
Primetta was a strong woman with strong female role models, Dorene said. Primetta didn’t want to get married for the support; she wanted to support herself. Primetta married him in May 1945. Using her seamstress skills she learned in Italy, she made her own wedding dress for just $11.
While at General Motors, Dorene said the two also went on strike quite a bit, but growing up during the Great Depression, Primetta knew how to save money.
When Dorene was born in 1960, Primetta quit her job to be a stay at home mother. The family of three lived on Sunny Lane in Torrington.
Dorene said it was the first street that got swept every spring.
“She would call the city and raise holy hell until they got up there,” Dorene laughed.
Dorene was on crutches for most of her life as she was born with spina bifida, a birth defect in which the spinal cord doesn’t fully develop, the Associated Press said. Primetta was a headstrong activist for her daughter before people with disabilities were protected by law.
Dorene, who later went to Harvard University, remembers being in junior high in Torrington. The school asked the adolescent to take a lower-level class since they were on the first floor, instead of the accelerated class.
Through Primetta’s persuasion, though, the principal moved the accelerated class to the first floor on the first day of school so Dorene could attend.
“She was a force of nature,” Dorene said.