lit a candle 4h ago99 years is a long life, but to carry that kind of loss since 1958 and still push for safer schools takes something else entirely. Read about Joseph and the Our Lady of Angels fire years ago and it never left me. Thinking of Linda and Ann Marie today.
Their story
Della "Udella" Maffiola, born Lovisetto, was an Italian-born Chicago mother whose grief after the 1958 Our Lady of the Angels school fire became a quiet, lasting force for school fire safety. She died on 8 August 2026 at Resurrection Medical Center from natural causes. She was 99. She was born…
Della "Udella" Maffiola, born Lovisetto, was an Italian-born Chicago mother whose grief after the 1958 Our Lady of the Angels school fire became a quiet, lasting force for school fire safety. She died on 8 August 2026 at Resurrection Medical Center from natural causes. She was 99.
She was born on 5 February 1927 in Onara, near Padua in northern Italy, and came to the United States at about age three. She grew up among Italian immigrant families near Grand and Western Avenues in Chicago's Holy Rosary parish. During World War II a neighborhood friend took her to Savanna, Illinois, to visit Italian prisoners of war. There she met Mario Anthony Maffiola, a soldier who had been glad to be captured by American forces. He told her she would be his wife; she called him crazy. After the war they married and settled in a two-flat near Our Lady of the Angels parish. Mario worked as a punch press operator at Radio Steel. Della worked as an inspector for Motorola. They raised three children: Joseph, Linda and Ann Marie.
On 1 December 1958, fire swept through Our Lady of the Angels School in Humboldt Park and killed 92 children and three nuns. Joseph, then ten, was among the dead. A few days earlier he had found a red-and-white Schwinn bicycle his parents had tried to hide for Christmas. Della let him ride it once on the condition that he not tell his father. At a 50th anniversary memorial Mass in 2008 she told the Chicago Sun-Times she was always grateful he had ridden that bike. Ten days after the fire she spoke before television cameras at an inquest, saying she did not want the tragedy to happen again and hoped her son had not lost his life for nothing. She and other mothers pressed lawmakers for stronger school fire codes. The disaster helped drive a national overhaul of school fire safety laws, inspections and evacuation drills.
After the fire she suffered a breakdown at a time when therapy was scarce. Mario, who died in 1998 after 51 years of marriage, held the family together. In later years Della lived with her daughter Linda on Chicago's Northwest Side and in La Grange. She chafed at pandemic-era restrictions, joking that the Great Depression and World War II had not gotten her. She was predeceased by Joseph and by her daughter Ann Marie Nabor. She is survived by Linda Maffiola-Piatkiewicz, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Her caretaker, Virginia Patano, was with her when she died and later told the family she smelled smoke in the room; Linda said they took it as a sign that Joseph had come to escort his mother.
Mitch Dudek of the Chicago Sun-Times reported her death on 2 October 2026, describing a mother who turned private grief into public resolve so other children would be safer in school.
Biography adapted from Chicago Sun-Times (Mitch Dudek, 2 October 2026); Legacy.com / Ligda funeral notice.
Photos
1Della Maffiola with her son Joseph, who died in the Our Lady of the Angels school fire
by People Forever
didn't know the age until now, that's a lot of years to carry that grief