By Lauren FitzPatrick
Staff writer
“Amazing Grace” DeMato gave up her life in England to follow love across the Atlantic Ocean to Blue Island.
The loyalty and devotion of the British war bride extended to her work, too, at Blue Island’s once-famous Homestead Restaurant, where she waited tables for 43 years until it closed its doors about a decade ago.
“She served one generation, and then they had kids and came back, and she served them,” her daughter Diane Bradford said.
And she was full of stories from wartime.
“That was such a pivotal event for my parents,” Bradford said. “Every year we had a big Christmas party at the house, and those war stories came out.”
Grace Rosetta DeMato, who spent her adult life in Blue Island, died Jan. 2 of pneumonia. She was 93.
Born March 8, 1913, in Cambridge, England, Mrs. DeMato lost her biological father during World War I, and a sister, too. Her mother, a jam factory worker, remarried a head of butlers at Clare College, a school established under the aegis of Cambridge University; they raised the four surviving children.
“When I was a little girl, he wrote me a letter on the back of a seating chart for a big state dinner they had at Clare College which included Dwight D. Eisenhower,” Bradford said.
“At the time of World War II, I’ve heard my mom tell the story so many times, the Allies were pouring into England. Servicemen were everywhere.”
Cambridge, with all its colleges, was overrun with American GIs.
“If you had a spare bedroom, you had a serviceman,” Bradford said.
Army Air Corps airplane mechanic Michael DeMato, the son of a Rock Island Railroad worker in Blue Island, was assigned to his future in-laws’ home.
“He’d pick up destroyed planes — they’d have to salvage everything they could off those planes,” Bradford said.
He quickly fell for their middle daughter, Grace.
They married in England during the war, where their daughter Diane was born. None of his family — parents and eight siblings — could attend, Bradford said.
“It was wartime,” she said. “Nobody wanted to go over there.”
He returned first to the United States with the troops; his family followed him to his native Blue Island on June 7, 1946, Bradford said.
The DeMatos spent their entire marriage on 119th Place in Blue Island, raising their three children in three different houses, until Mr. DeMato died in 1998.
Mrs. DeMato, who had held some sort of job since she was 14, worked during the war as a mobile washerwoman for the Swiss Laundry, still in business in Cambridge. She’d travel to bombed-out areas to wash clothes for people, her daughter said. At one point, she even met Eleanor Roosevelt.
So it was only natural that once in Blue Island, Mrs. DeMato took a job at the old Homestead Restaurant at 121st and Vincennes, while her husband worked for the Budd Co. in Gary.
It took the restaurant’s closing to kick Mrs. DeMato out when she was 84 and in no hurry to retire.
“She had to be busy, even after the Homestead closed,” her daughter said. “She would wake up and say, ‘I don’t have a doggone thing to do.’ “
She would sing at weddings, and at the Homestead for birthdays.
“That was her job,” her daughter laughed.
And she also knitted fine Fair Isle sweaters with intricate multi-colored patterns she learned as a girl.
Mrs. DeMato, who also held tight to her English accent, only returned to her native soil three times after emigrating.
“She worked so hard and did so many things,” her daughter said. “She was dedicated to her family and was the kind of person you could always depend on.”
Aside from her daughter, Mrs. DeMato also is survived by two sons, Anthony and john; nine grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; and many nieces, nephews and friends.
Arrangements are by Hallowell & James Funeral Home, (708) 352-6500.
Visitation will be held from 4 to 9 p.m. Sunday at the funeral home, 1025 W. 55th St., Countryside. A funeral Mass will be celebrated 10 a.m. Monday at St. Cletus Church in LaGrange, followed by a private interment.
Memorial gifts may be made to the Alzheimer’s Association, 4709 Golf Road, Suite 1015, Skokie, IL 60076.
Lauren FitzPatrick may be reached at lfitzpatrick@dailysouthtown.com or (708) 633-5964.
