Ange Cole, of Southampton, who made military equipment during WWII and raised 5 children, dies at 100

One might think centenarian Ange Cole would be down on life after spending her 14th birthday struggling home in thigh-high water during the great hurricane of 1938, working to make fuses for World War II explosives, fighting the Veterans Administration for her disabled husband and taking on the breadwinner role for five children.

But she was always the uncomplaining optimist, shushing those with grumbles by saying, “Honey, it is what it is” or noting others have it worse, relatives recalled.

When COVID came, she had experienced enough major events to be a pillar of support, said daughter Deborah J. DeJesus, of Walden, in Orange County.

“She compared the feeling of the pandemic with what she felt growing up in the Great Depression,” DeJesus recounted. “You dealt with death frequently. You dealt with the unknown. You dealt with limited supplies. She used the fact that she had survived it and had a good life after … She was able to give hope amidst a lot of tragedy.”

Cole, of Southampton, died Nov. 4. She was 100 years and six weeks old.

She joked she was almost born in a barn, the daughter of two Italian immigrants who owned Cove Side Dairy, later named Cilli Farm, in Sag Harbor, relatives said.

As a child, Angelina Cilli woke up at 5 a.m. to get milk bottles ready to be filled, then went to school and had to return right after to wash the bottles, on top of caring for the farm’s 30 cows.

“She admits ‘there were times I didn’t come home after school,’ ” grandson Brennen Cole said in recounting recorded interviews with his grandmother. “I could tell that it was not the easiest childhood.”

World War II changed her life when she got a job making military equipment at the Bulova watch factory in Sag Harbor. A fellow worker convinced Ange to write to her brother, Clayton Cole, a Marine serving in the Pacific during World War II.

Ange and Clayton bonded by mail, and she later compared their correspondence to online dating, as Clayton met her in person for the first time in February 1946. They married in June.

Her husband, a landscaper and florist, filled their Southampton yard for years with flowers of just blue, her favorite color.

She considered him the kindest man ever. But he was eventually unable to hold a job due to what is now considered post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder, her family said.

She began cleaning mansions to support the family, making enough to buy a station wagon, her children said. She even won a fight against the Veterans Administration to give her husband a disability pension, they said.

“She was a very strong woman who lived through adversity,” said son Dennis Cole, of Manorville. “She always wanted the best for her children. When I was growing up, there was no thought that I wasn’t going to college.”

DeJesus said her mother was also adept at turning a negative into a positive: “If we were working, we were singing and laughing. She just made it fun."

In her later years, Cole emphasized the importance of preserving heritage and history.

Eight years ago, she suddenly ordered her grandson to stop the car — they were in front of the old farmhouse and she practically invited herself in for a tour, recalled Brennen Cole, of Laurence Harbor, New Jersey. When she opened a hallway door, he said, time rippled back to the days when she might have been 9 or younger, because the room was still a bathroom, the place where her father hid his homemade wine during Prohibition and shared it with local police to keep them on his side.

“To be able to go into her home and put her hand on the wall that her father built and touch it and see it — all those memories were coming back into her brain,” said the grandson, who recorded the event with his cellphone. “She was all happy butterflies inside.”

In a Q&A book for grandmothers, on the page titled “World Events I Remember,” Cole listed the Hindenburg airship explosion in 1937, the hurricane that flooded her home the following year, the World’s Fair in 1940, Adolf Hitler’s rise and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Cole, who called herself “a blessed woman,” summed up the secret of her longevity when she told her grandson, “It was a simple life, and I didn’t let things stress me out.”

Besides her son, daughter and grandson, Cole is survived by sons Robert, of Prescott, Arizona; and Michael, of Southampton. She was predeceased by her husband and her son John.

A funeral service was held Nov. 11 at Our Lady of Poland Roman Catholic Church in Southampton, followed by burial at St. Andrews Cemetery in Sag Harbor.