Sad news- Minella Sgrelli
FHCA Board
We are sad to report the passing of our mother, Minella Sgrelli, aged 97, in Milan last October.
Minella fell in love with Fire Island the moment she saw it. 1961 in Atlantique was the first of a lifetime of summers, with a few years in Water Island and then, starting in 1965, in Fair Harbor.
Minella and her then-husband – our dad, Howard Aaron - purchased two empty lots on the bay side on Spruce Walk in 1962 for about $2000. The land sat empty for a couple of years until a plan to extend the Long Island Expressway produced an auction of houses in Lake Ronkonkoma. This permitted the Aarons to purchase a two-bedroom cottage with a winning bid of $750. Curt Davis sailed the house across the bay for them and raised it on high stilts. When we first moved in, we would jump through the home’s original “cellar door” onto the sand below.
To the end of her days, our mom was furious that Howard’s name went on the property deed, because the whole project was her idea.
Minella was born outside of Milan, Italy, to a family of seven children. Her mother, the Countess Gabriella Vinassa de Regny, married Angelo Belloni, a nautical engineer who invented the first frogman equipment. At 19, Minella married a U.S. navy captain, who had worked with her father after the war, and came to Manhattan. The marriage ended quickly, but her love of New York endured. She spent years traveling back and forth while she lived a career as a fashion model and then met Howard at a party in Greenwich Village in the late 50s. She shopped at Zito’s and Balducci’s in the Village, she sold dresses, and she made an ocean of friends who all spent Christmas at our house. In the 70s, she returned to Italy to marry our stepfather, architect Ezio Sgrelli, whose passing in 2009 broke her heart.
But she always found joy, and she always returned to the island. In her very late years our mom acquiesced to Rita Schwartz’s invite to join the ladies at the Dunewood bay beach (before they all had matching T-shirts), and she loved the discovery of all that wit and wisdom every afternoon. She was also grateful for the excellent care she received from the Fair Harbor Fire Department when she suffered a fall.
Minella described her beloved house as a “shack” and cringedwhen we added bourgeois elements to it like a clothes dryer and a dishwasher. Nonetheless, it was she and Ezio who upgraded the house when they passed it down to her kids. This has allowed us to all pile in each summer and to keep Fire Island as a special place for the five grandchildren, the eldest of whom – Sam – chose it as the spot for his marriage proposal to Leah last year. We have all inherited Minella’s love of this spit of sand.
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