Irene Attinello
Irene Attinello discovered that a lot had changed in the years since she left her job as a switchboard operator in the 1950s to raise her four children with her husband, Joe Attinello, then returned to the work force in the mid-1980s.
At Bell Telephone, the original place she worked, it was just the start of the telecommunications age, and the switchboard Mrs. Attinello operated had retractable cables she had to plug in and out to get callers to the right extension. Back then, her supervisors traveled around the call center on roller skates.
“She loved telling those old stories,” said Mrs. Attinello’s son Ron Attinello, who used to return his mother’s attempts to entertain him by playing songs for her on his guitar, or listening to the opera with her on Saturdays on local radio.
“Whenever I picked up the guitar and played for her, she’d melt back into her chair and close her eyes, because her cousin played the piano and she’d have all these memories that just would transport her. She was pretty partial to music of her era — the American Songbook. Frank Sinatra.”
At a remembrance of Mrs. Attinello’s life on Friday night, her son said, her family gathered and sang another of her favorites, “Bye Bye Blackbird,” to honor her.
Mrs. Attinello was living in Montauk with her son and his wife, Margaret Attinello, when she died on April 3 of complications of a stroke she’d had in January. She was 89. She was cremated.
Mrs. Attinello was born on April 21, 1929, in Easton, Pa., to Charles Painz and Esther Roseberry Painz.
She and Joe Attinello were married on Oct. 1, 1950, and lived in Milford, N.J., until his death in 2013, whereupon Mrs. Attinello moved to Montauk. Once there, she enjoyed the new friends she made at the Montauk Senior Nutrition Center and evenings with her family.
In addition to her son, Mrs. Attinello is survived by three other children, Ann Snope of Savannah, Ga., Robert Attinello of Frenchtown, N.J., and Charles Attinello of Montauk, as well as five grandchildren. She also leaves a sister, Marion Baumgartner of Fort Collins, Colo.
When Mrs. Attinello — feeling restless once her children were grown — decided to return to the work force in the 1980s, she found that being a switchboard operator required operating computers. Instead she got a job at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, N.J., where she worked for another 23 years.
At both jobs, her family said, Mrs. Attinello formed friendships that lasted a lifetime. During the last five years of her life, she also cherished the company of her aide, Maria Davis, who “cared for my mother like it was her own mother,” Ron Attinello said. “She was phenomenal.”