Orlando Zeppieri, ready-mix concrete entrepreneur, dies at 92

Orlando Zeppieri, who with his wife ran ready-mix concrete companies that literally laid the foundation for much of Long Island’s boom-era growth, died on June 14 in his Upper Brookville home. He was 92.

The cause was a stroke, said his daughter, Claire Zeppieri.

In the early 1950s, Orlando Zeppieri, denied a nickel-per-hour raise at the construction company where he worked as a supervisor, struck out on his own, winning a contract to build foundations for some of the 17,400 homes of Levittown, the nation’s first great suburban development.

When that work finished, there was more — much more.

Long Island’s population grew from less than 1 million to 2.5 million between 1950 and 1970, and concrete — cement, water and rocks — was used not just in the foundations of Long Island’s homes but in sidewalks, roads and commercial buildings.

Zeppieri bought a truck for the foundation work, then more trucks, then a Garden City concrete plant to supply the trucks with material. With his wife, the former Armanda Gianelli, whose background was in accounting, he ran Hicksville Ready Mix, which poured concrete; Garden City Trans Mix, which sold concrete; and Air Ready Mix, in the Bronx.

In the 1970s and ’80s, their enterprise was one of the largest ready-made concrete suppliers on Long Island, with a fleet of more than 100 red, yellow and battleship-gray mixer trucks, said a son, Frank Zeppieri.

Their projects included the Garden City Hotel, the Bay Park Sewage Treatment Plant, Jericho Plaza and Uniondale’s 1.1 million-square-foot EAB Plaza, now RXR Plaza, along with the sidewalks in Hicksville.

In winter, when it was too cold to pour concrete, Orlando Zeppieri attached plows to his company payloaders and cleared runways at Kennedy Airport under a state contract. To the displeasure of his wife, he refused to delegate this work, Claire and Frank Zeppieri recalled in a phone interview.

“If I’m not doing it, [my employees] aren’t going to want to do it,” Claire Zeppieri recalled him saying.

In years when the snow was bad, Frank Zeppieri said, “He could be there seven to 10 days."

Orlando Zeppieri was born on Oct. 12, 1929, in the central Italian town of Frosinone. His father, Archangelo, was a farmer; his mother, Marie, was a housewife.

The family farm was devastated during World War II, Claire Zeppieri wrote in remarks she delivered at a memorial service for her father. Her father sold cigars to help pay for the ocean voyage to the United States, she wrote, a sign of the “entrepreneurial spirit” that bloomed in his adopted country.

Later in life he grew tomato plants, as well as lemon and fig trees, at the family’s Long Island home and hunted on several hundred acres of wooded land near upstate Windham. He gave that land to the state and it has been preserved, his daughter said.

Orlando Zeppieri is survived by his wife, Armanda, of Upper Brookville, and children Claire, of Amagansett and Manhattan; Frank, of Quogue; and Louis, of Garden City. He also is survived by a brother, Luigi, who lived in Garden City before a recent move to North Carolina.

A funeral Mass was celebrated at Brookville Church on June 17, followed by burial at Cemetery of the Holy Rood in Westbury.