Hometown Hero: Clementine Bianco of Bethpage

For Clementine Bianco, community service has been a way of life for more than three decades.

Bianco, 88, of Bethpage, has pitched in everywhere from local hospitals and senior centers to Girl Scout troops. She was recently recognized for her extensive volunteer service as Nassau County Ambassador of the Year, an award issued as part of the New York State Office for the Aging’s Older New Yorkers’ Day in November.

Bianco said her most meaningful volunteer work has been serving as auxiliary president of the Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow, where her efforts have included coordinating fundraising events like dinner dances and golf tournaments. She was motivated to volunteer there, she said, as a result of being one of the first babies born at the facility in 1935 when it was still called Meadowbrook Hospital.

“We were very, very poor and my mother told me the story that they allowed her to have me there (without paying); I was her sixth child,” Bianco said. “Because of that, I always told myself that when I retired I would go back there and volunteer — and that was 33 years ago.”

Bianco co-owned and operated a deli in Douglaston, Queens, for about 12 years and then purchased and owned the entire eight-store building where the deli was located.

Since retiring, Bianco’s laundry list of community service efforts has included serving as president of the Homemaker’s Council of Nassau County, director and president of a senior citizens group in Bethpage, and as a Sunday school teacher at St. Luke’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Farmingdale.

She also regularly donates to the food pantry at the Parish of St. Martin of Tours in Bethpage and has been a troop leader for the Girl Scouts of Nassau County.

“You have to give back,” Bianco said. “You have to be thankful for what you’ve got and give back all the time.”

Bianco’s generosity was praised by Greg Olsen, the acting director of the New York State Office for the Aging, who credited her with helping to make the state “a better place to live.”

“Her contributions to the community of Bethpage exemplify healthy aging at its finest, working to help many generations and causes, from her support of the local food pantry to her years of volunteering at her community’s medical center,” Olsen said. “We congratulate Clementine and thank her for the example she sets.”

By Michael R. Ebert

michael.ebert@newsday.com

Michael R. Ebert is an education researcher and has worked for Newsday in various capacities since 2003. He was part of an 11-person team named as 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalists for investigative coverage of the LIRR's platform safety issues.