Josephine "Jo" Donnelly

Jo Donnelly was barely out of high school in the early 1950s when she discovered Latin music. She and her Brooklyn cohorts danced at the Hollywood Terrace, the Roseland and Palladium in Manhattan, and the great Catskills resorts, Kutsher's, the Concord, and the Nevele. She followed the orchestras of Perez Prado, Joe Cuba, Mongo Santamaria, and the two Titos - Tito Rodriguez and Tito Puente. So good was her dancing, that Puente sometimes jumped from the stage to join her.

Jo Donnelly was born in Brooklyn, New York in the depths of the Great Depression in 1934. Her father, "Rocco," was an ace carpenter, working for the WPA. Her mother, Susie, was a seamstress and factory hand. Despite the crushing times, and five siblings to feed, food was never scarce. After all, as Mario Puzo observed, they were Italian.

"Depression" was a key feature of Jo's life as she was bipolar. Her working class parents weren't equipped to understand the trappings of her illness, which would later disrupt her marriages. Worse still were the drugs prescribed to manage the symptoms, which left her unable to work, zombie-like, and prone to obesity. Even so, Jo was a high-spirited woman with an iron will to live and zest for culture; she was a movie buff, a fan of truth-telling comics like Woody Allen and George Carlin, and a lover of the "race music" she knew as a teen.

Jo's handicap didn't prevent her from helping those worse off - today she'd be known as an empath. While living in an SRO in Brooklyn, she befriended a woman with severe mental illness, bringing her back to the fold. Jo did this many times over, in a number of locales; New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Georgia, and most recently, Maine. She had a knack for adapting to new environments, but not without drawbacks. Picture an attractive New York woman in Durham, North Carolina, at the height of racial strife in the 1960s, telling locals to "stop fighting the Civil War."

Jo's attitude though, was anything but dismissive. She was fascinated by Southern stories. She read - and could expound on - William Faulkner, her favorite author. His novels, and the black friends she made in the projects, set the stage for the work of James Baldwin. She strove mightily to understand the struggles around her, reflecting her own, a quality she passed to her son Jim.

She was a remnant of the old stalwart New York, before Brooklyn became an extortionate art colony, before the streets teemed with the homeless (a condition she'd known firsthand), and "Billionaire Row" would've been heresy. It was a New York of milkmen and longshoremen, elevator ops and Woolworth clerks, shoeshine boys and keypunch girls, soda jerks and Pullman Porters. It was the New York of pushcarts and shopkeepers, "the German who owned the bakery, the Jew who owned the candy store, the Italian who owned the deli."
She was a bank teller.
She made dresses from patterns in McCall's Magazine.
She had a sharp, streetwise sense of humor.
She spent time in institutions.
She loved only those relations that were worthy.

Jo is survived by her sister Marie, her daughter Kymberly, her son Jim and his partner Anna, numerous nieces and nephews, among them Susan, Janet, and Anthony (Palmisano), Donna and Lori (Gilberti), and godson Robert (Severino). She was predeceased by her father Russell and mother Susie, and her siblings, Georgina, Salvatore, and Robert, and her beloved niece Gina. In honor of her late feline friends Lena and Moondoc, donations can be made to the Animal Refuge League of Greater Portland, or your local Humane Society. And equally, in her memory, please agitate for the disadvantaged, for those left behind.