Eileen Pelkofsky, lifelong Long Islander, dead at 82

Eileen Pelkofsky, who raised eight children as the fields around her family's Commack farmhouse gave way to roads and suburban development, died Friday following a series of medical setbacks. She was 82 years old.

After decades of child rearing and contributing to family businesses, Pelkofsky remained vigorous in her later years, her family said, sharing a seemingly limitless capacity for giving with her 18 grandchildren.

"She never missed a birthday, a christening, any event. She was very involved in their lives," said one of Pelkofsky's daughters, Eileen Walsh, 49, of Kings Park.

Eileen Klein was born in 1927 in a farming family of German heritage and grew up in East Northport. After graduating from St. Dominic High School in Oyster Bay in 1945, she worked for a time as a secretary at American Telephone & Telegraph Co. in Manhattan.

She married Louis Pelkofsky, one of nine children of an East Northport potato farming family, at St. Phillip Neri Church in Northport in 1947. The farmhouse they built in 1949 in Commack, once surrounded by farmland, remained home for the rest of her life.

The modest, one-and-a-half bath house on Burr Road remained largely unchanged as her family grew to include four sons and four daughters. A homemaker with a traditional sensibility, Eileen Pelkofsky made dinners heavy on potatoes grown on the family farm, hand-stitched clothes for her children, and for many years taught neighborhood girls to cook and sew as a 4-H leader.

The family sold the Commack farm in the 1950s but continued to live in the farmhouse as they farmed at various locations in Suffolk, including near the present site of the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove. For many years, Eileen Pelkofsky ran the farm stand of the family's "pick your own" farm in Dix Hills and managed rental properties.

A lifelong churchgoer, Eileen Pelkofsky gave freely to various charities throughout her life and was proud her children were all educated in Catholic schools, her family said.

"They thought having that faith through those formative years was very important," said her eldest child, Gerard Pelkofsky, a lieutenant detective with the Suffolk County Police Department and head of its homicide squad.

Louis Pelkofsky died in 1999. The couple's fourth child, Gary, passed away in 2008.

After her husband's death, Eileen Pelkofsky formed a deep friendship with Frank Macedonio of East Northport, whom she'd known as a schoolgirl. They married in 2004.

In addition to Macedonio and her son Gerard of Kings Park, Pelkofsky is also survived by children Karen Grimm of Shelburne, Vt., Mary Ellen Ingrao of Nesconset, Richard Pelkofsky of Poughkeepsie, Eileen Walsh of Kings Park, Rosemary Scaravaglione of Dix Hills, and Ronald Pelkofsky of Greenlawn; and 18 grandchildren. Her brother, Hank Klein of East Northport, a retired sergeant with the Suffolk police department, died in 2001.

A funeral Mass will be said Tuesday at 9:45 a.m. at St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church in East Northport. A burial will follow at St. Philip Neri Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to be used to fund a chapel in her name be sent to Salesian Missions in New Rochelle.