Mario J. Orsi

After a brief illness, Mario Orsi passed away quietly in his sleep early Sunday morning. He was born on March 3, 1927, to Giulia Andrucetti Orsi and Egidio Orsi in the town of Maggiano, near Lucca, in Tuscany. He came to the United States with his mother when he was 10 months old to rejoin his father, a chef in Boston's famous Loch Ober restaurant. When his father died suddenly in 1937, Mario's mother brought him and his younger brother, Robert, back to Italy, where they experienced the horrors of the Second World War. Mario was one of the few survivors of the massacre by the SS of the monks and the civilians sheltering with them in the Carthusian monastery at Farneta, on September 2, 1944.
A US citizen since his infancy, Mario joined the US Army in Italy near the war's end and following his honorable discharge moved to New York City, where he met Ann Cavallaro. They were married for more than fifty years, living first in the Bronx and then Yonkers. Ann died in 2003. At the time of her death, Ann (also known as Anna) was a secretary at Fordham University. Mario was a master machinist at Magnatrol Valve Corporation in Hawthorne, New Jersey, for more than forty years. He is survived by his older son, Robert, a professor at Northwestern University, Robert's wife, Christine Helmer, and grandchildren, Clarence and Anthony; and by his younger son, Francis, who recently retired from Magnatrol, his wife, Cathy Orsi, and their daughter, Jessica. Mario's brother, a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War, died in 2021. In the last four years of his life, Mario found a caring and loving home with Frank, Cathy and Jessica in Hawthorne. Mario was a gentle and loving man who touched everyone he met with his warmth, generosity, and good spirit. His family-his sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren-all loved, admired and cherished him. We will miss him deeply.
Funeral procession will depart at 9:00am on Friday, July 1, 2022 from the Browning-Forshay Funeral Home, 557 Lafayette Ave., Hawthorne, for a 9:30am funeral mass at St. Anthony R.C. Church in Hawthorne. Entombment will follow at St. Raymond's Cemetery, Bronx, NY. Friends may visit with the family at the funeral home on Thursday from 2-4 and 7-9pm.