The article is long but John was an interesting guy!!!!!
John DeStefano; brought artist's touch to stores
Email|Print|Single Page| Text size – + By Gloria Negri
Globe Staff / May 5, 2008
John M. DeStefano might have realized his dream of becoming an artist and sculptor had it not been for the Great Depression, his need to help his family - which included six siblings, and his desire to start a family of his own. Instead, in 1937, he launched a business that required a different artistic sensibility: restoring department store mannequins and eventually creating his own.
Mr. DeStefano, who went on to become "the dean of local mannequin makers," as described by the Globe in 1979, died of cancer April 8 at his home in Naples, Fla. He was 93 and had lived in Melrose and in North Andover before moving to Florida two decades ago.
He left not only a large number of relatives, but also a far-flung inanimate family he had sculpted in clay, cast in fiberglass, and fitted with glass eyes and faces he had painted, framed in fake hair, that still populate such places as Plimoth Plantation.
His work can be seen in a traveling exhibit of 29-inch-tall scale-model mannequins he made at the request of longtime friend John Burbidge of Danvers, retired senior designer of the bridal firm of Priscilla of Boston.
"John was a true artist," Burbidge said.
The 29-inch mannequins are in a traveling exhibit wearing the haute couture French clothing that epitomized the Gilded Age from the 1850s to around 1914, he said.
"John was a perfectionist," said his brother, Pasquale of Melrose, his "right-hand man" in the business. Mr. DeStefano had made a cast of his brother's hands that graces the arms of one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact in an exhibit at Plimoth Plantation.
"There was always the off-beat," said Mr. DeStefano's son, Richard of Lawrence. "Dad also made life-like mannequin figures like 10-foot Santas, Paul Revere astride his horse, and even a fiberglass replica of the Liberty Bell."
When Harvard's Peabody Museum was assembling an exhibit of the Tlingit society of Alaska, Richard said, Mr. DeStefano made the molds directly off the faces of several Tlingits sent to his studio by Harvard.
He kept in step with the times. In the 1979 Globe story, he talked about how World War II had affected the mannequin business.
"Until then, the female dummies wore dresses and were posed in a dignified upright position, or possibly sitting down with their legs crossed, knees close together," he said. "Once women started wearing slacks, things changed."
The unisex look also had an impact. "Not too long ago, we kept the female and male dummies separated" Mr. DeStefano said. "If men and women wore the same clothes, it was only logical to pose them together."
He was born in Avellino, in the Naples region of Italy, to Angelo and Marianna (Coppola) DeStefano. His father, a tailor, came to America first to get work to pay steerage passage here for his wife and their two sons. They settled in the North End. John was 6 when they came, and started working around the North End at an early age and while attending North Bennet Street Industrial School.
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When he graduated and was awarded a scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, he sold fruit from a pushcart to supplement it. After two years, however, he had to drop out of the museum school because of lack of funds.
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During the Depression, he taught art at the Burroughs Newsboys Foundation in Boston and worked on some projects for the Works Progress Administration, the federal plan to provide jobs during the Depression.
His artistic talent was recognized while he was at North Bennet, and it resounded all the way to the White House. At school, he had sculpted a plaque with the bronze head of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and, in 1934, dressed in his best, young John boarded a train to Washington to personally present it to Roosevelt.
The event would not have been possible without the help of four prominent Bostonians, newspaper reports said, because John did not have the $55 to buy the bronze until the Bostonians - two "Italian-American businessmen" and two former mayors, James Michael Curley and John F. Fitzgerald, provided the funds for the bronze and the train trip.
After meeting with Roosevelt at the White House, the Worcester Daily reported, the young artist described the president as "a real sport." Roosevelt was quoted saying, "Why, it really looks like me!"
The plaque in the Roosevelt Room is still pointed out during tours of the White House.
In 1937, Mr. DeStefano started his mannequin business at a repair shop on Elm Street in Boston.
He married Irene (Treanor), then joined the Navy in 1942. Serving in the South Pacific with the 58th Seabees Construction Battalion, he painted camouflage, aircraft insignias, and grave markers for his fallen comrades. His family said he took part in the Easter 1945 assault on Okinawa.
When he came home in 1945, he rebuilt and expanded DeStefano Studios House of Mannequins at another Boston site, then in Dorchester, finally relocating in Woburn in the 1970s. He retired in his 70s. Mrs. DeStefano died in 1983 after 41 years of marriage.
A handsome man with white hair who was always taken for years younger, Mr. DeStefano found a new cause in Florida with a charitable group that provides educational facilities for children in Guatemala. In January 2007, he went to Guatemala for the opening of a school he funded in the remote mountain village of Tierra Colorada in honor of his wife.
When doctors told him that his cancer was terminal and gave him less than a year to live, he took family members to Sicily. In February, he threw a party at a posh country club for his many friends. He also planned a cruise with his brother and friends, but was too sick to go.
He came to the end of his life, his brother said, with the same philosophy he expressed as a youth after his trip to meet Roosevelt. "We cannot be content unless we are making the best of ourselves," a newspaper quoted him at the time.
In addition to his son and his brother, Mr. DeStefano leaves another son, Paul of North Reading; a daughter, Irene Bonner of Andover; four sisters, Mary Ferrara of Medford, Chicki Cuzzupe of Woburn, Phyllis Barbuzzi of Lynn, and Sister Mary Leonora, serving in Turkey; and eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Services have been held.
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