Gunnison County honors area’s oldest resident

At 106, Lena Costanzo still going strong

For more than a century, Lena Costanzo has embodied the American story, from her journey as a girl from Santa Nifa, Italy to Ellis Island, where her name can still be seen on the wall, to an emigration westward, where she built a life and a family and helped build the city of Gunnison.

Now, as she prepares to celebrate her 106th birthday on February 4, Lena’s bright eyes and smile tell the story of a woman content to see her heirs take over writing the family history, as she enjoys the fruits of a life well lived.
By the time she was five years old, Lena Fazzino had been orphaned and was being raised by her grandparents in a small town in Sicily. In 1912, when Lena was nine, they boarded a ship for the new world in search of a better life.

“The trip to America took them about 20 days,” says Margaret Hill-Hoffman, the oldest of Lena’s two daughters. “When they finally landed on Ellis Island, the authorities kept them there for a while until their paperwork cleared.”
Lena says the food on the ship was terrible but her grandfather had packed enough bread, big red onions and lemons to get them through.
After being released as citizens, the three Fazzinos set out for the west and settled in Rockvale, Colo., near present-day Florence, where Lena enrolled in school and began to learn English. It wasn’t long before her proficiency passed that of her English-speaking classmates and she began teaching them.
When Lena was in the seventh grade, Americans were being drafted into service for World War I. Her grandmother became concerned that the government might want to draft Lena, so she took her out of school.
“She was interested in sewing, so they took her to a seamstress to teach her how to sew. Then she had her own little business making dresses. There were no patterns at the time so she would cut patterns out of newspaper to fit to her clients and then cut it out of fabric,” Hill-Hoffman says. “She made about five dollars for sewing a dress.”
By the early 1920s, Lena had married Frank Costanzo, who rented part of a pool and dance hall. The two sponsored Jitney Dances, where patrons would pay a dime for a dance. It wasn’t long before the time came to move on.
“Finally my dad got restless and they started moving toward Salida. He sold fruit on the street corner for a short time and then moved on to Sargents. There was a store there that became available and they went into business,” says Hill-Hoffman.
Starting around 1923, they sold a variety of goods at their store, from produce to long johns, and there was a gas station outside. The railroad line provided them with a steady stream of goods and people and soon they decided to expand.
“There was a hotel and boarding house for sale, so dad bought it and moved mother over there to cook meals for railroad men living in Sargents. She would listen for the whistle of the train coming down the track so she would know how long she would have to get the food on the table,” says Hill-Hoffman.
Lena is not a large woman—she stood about five feet tall and weighed barely 100 pounds—but she was able to throw a side of beef over her shoulder, cut it, cook it and serve it all on her own. There was no running water, no electricity and the laundry was washed on a washboard, run through a wringer and dried on a line.
It was that industrious spirit that drove her to succeed through the darkest economic time in the nation’s history.
In the midst of the Great Depression, the family moved to Gunnison and started a motel east of town, near where the Quarter Circle Restaurant is now. It was the first of many business ventures the Costanzos would start and the beginning of a long life in the Gunnison Valley.
Hill-Hoffman remembers how the family would go on a picnic every Sunday, when her father would catch fish from the river and her mother would make spaghetti for meals she would always remember.
When the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners proclaimed February 4, 2009 as Lena Costanzo Day, to honor her life and contributions to the community, commission chairperson Paula Swenson said, “This is one of those days that we get to step back and remember that it really is about the wonderful people that make up our community. We’re here to honor a woman that touched so many lives in her more than 70 years of living in Gunnison.”
Swenson told the crowd, which overfilled the commissioner’s meeting room, that Lena had played an integral part in bringing stores like JC Penney and Safeway to Gunnison, as well as starting several other businesses that helped form the commercial foundation of the city.
The commissioners read letters of congratulations to Lena from senators, Governor Bill Ritter, the Italian ambassador to the United States and even the Pope.
Lena, surrounded by four generations of family members, dabbed her nose and smiled at the wishes for many more years in her already long life.