The two of them met on the bus back in Astoria, Queens.
It was the 1940s and Rita Pancini had just moved there from the Bronx, Michelina Ressa from Long Island City — two of the newest students at William Cullen Bryant High School.
Rita lived on Ditmars Boulevard, across from Astoria Park. Michelina lived on 29th Street. “About two blocks from [singer] Tony Bennett,” she said. Together, the girls would hang out at Jacobi’s ice cream parlor, or the pool, maybe go roller-skating or to the movies or the beach, and when they got older they’d even catch the subway to Manhattan, sneak into a dance — hoping to meet boys just home from World War II.
The two remained friends into adulthood, long after Rita married Martin Burke and her friend had become Mickie Del Rosso — Rita with four boys and two girls, Mickie with four boys and a girl of her own.
Then, as so often happens, life got in the way and the two moved, Burke to East Islip, Del Rosso to Jackson Heights and Floral Park and then to Rahway, New Jersey
As years passed, visits became less frequent, though there were letters and phone calls.
Then came COVID-19.
In Jan. 2020, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a public health emergency of international concern. Global lockdowns and health protocols to mitigate the spread of the deadly virus was implemented, but not before the virus claimed more than 631,000 lives in the United States alone.
Now, after a long lockdown, the friends will reunite Thursday, when Mickie’s son, Peter Del Rosso, plans to fly his mom from Caldwell, New Jersey, to Long Island MacArthur Airport. It will be the first time the two, who’ve known each other almost 80 years now, will see each other since October 2018.
“I’m so excited,” Rita Burke, 93, said Tuesday, from the assisted living facility where she lives in Holbrook. “I can’t wait to see her.”
“It’s wonderful,” Mickie Del Rosso, 92, said. “I’m looking forward to it.”
The get-together, coordinated between Peter Del Rosso, his sister Paulette and Rita’s daughter, Liz Burke, will include lunch at a restaurant followed, weather permitting, by a sightseeing tour of eastern Long Island — Peter Del Rosso, who this week flew east with his wife from his home in Brentwood Park, California, planning to take the women for a flight in his twin-engine Beechcraft Baron.
“It’s a neat story of getting back together, being able to get a little normalcy back,” Peter Del Rosso said, adding: “I hope I have some friends for 80 years.”
Mickie attended Rita’s 90th birthday party in 2017 and the two got together in 2018, when Del Rosso flew his mom to Long Island and the widows visited the graves of their husbands, both World War II U.S. Army vets, at Calverton National Cemetery.
Like so many millions, both women were forced into isolation due to the pandemic. Mickie said she limited her outside exposure before being vaccinated, fearful of COVID. Rita got vaccinated in February, but developed pneumonia in the spring and was in a rehab center for 70 days, her daughter said. Following her release she couldn’t return home — and ended up in the assisted living facility.
“You adjust to things,” Rita Burke said. “Whatever is thrown at you, you take things as they come and you find a way. Having six kids gets you ready for anything. But, I would like to play golf again. My golf clubs are getting rusty.”
For now, seeing her old friend Mickie will be enough, Rita Burke said.
“I just want to hug her,” she said, “and give her a big kiss.”
- Rita and Mickie were part of a threesome known as “The Three Musketeers.” The third friend, Marcella, moved to Florida and died in her 60s. “It’s hard to believe she’s gone almost 30 years,” Mickie said.
- Rita took shorthand and typing at Bryant, and worked more than a decade for the Village of Saltaire on Fire Island.
- At 14, Mickie worked at the Five-and-Ten. “There was a very pretty girl working the candy counter and I remember Tony Bennett always stopping in to talk to her.” The then-16-year-old Bennett grew up on 32nd Street in Astoria.
- Of her bond with Rita, Mickie said: “We had the same values about life, about children, about marriage, about all of it . . . That goes a long way to having a lasting friendship.”
John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee’pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”
