Mary Ann Jankins, 86, loved food and laughter

AMONG MARY Ann Jankins' favorite things were eating and laughing.

She loved Italian food and was skilled at making it, and she loved to laugh and get everyone around her laughing with her.

Her favorite stories were of growing up in Swampoodle, in the shadow of Shibe Park, of what it was like in those carefree days, and of the mischief she and her six siblings got into.

They were stories of a neighborhood from another time, with little traffic on the streets and warm camaraderie among neighbors.

She described how the adults would sit out on a summer night with the kids playing safely in the street and cheers erupting periodically from the ballpark as somebody smacked a home run.

There was no air conditioning and the neighbors would stay outside into the wee hours to escape the heat.

It was a time of neighborliness and harmless fun, lost forever in the mists of history, and Mary was always there in memory, and loved to regale the newer generations with her descriptions of it.

The former Mary Ann Spinuzza died yesterday. She was 86 and lived in Mayfair. She worked a number of jobs over the years, including making cakes for Tastykake, operating an elevator in a downtown office building and housekeeping at Nazareth Hospital.

Mary was born in Philadelphia, one of the seven children of Phil Spinuzza and the former Mary Ryan. She attended St. Columba Parochial School and spent a couple of years at a high school.

She grew up on Seltzer Street near Lehigh Avenue in Swampoodle with three beautiful sisters and three handsome brothers.

Trolleys rumbled by on Lehigh Avenue and she and the other girls of her generation dressed up in bonnets and gloves for festive occasions.

Mary told about the time she wanted to go on a date with her future husband, Arnold Jankins, but didn't have high-heeled shoes.

She borrowed the shoes of one of her sisters without bothering to ask, thinking she could get away with it. But it rained, the shoes got wet and curled up when she put them on a radiator to dry. She tried hiding them in a closet, but her sister found them and was predictably irate.

All of her stories were told with her special wit, like the time her brother James bought the first family car and took everybody up Roosevelt Boulevard to a new restaurant called Howard Johnson's, which featured 28 flavors of ice-cream.

Of course, everybody ordered vanilla and chocolate, much to brother James' chagrin.

She told about decorating the Christmas tree - and how it would be redecorated several times as each person had a different idea of what it should look like, and running the model train over tinsel to watch the sparks fly.

"She had a great sense of humor," said her daughter, Maryann Kaczmarek. "She would get a whole room laughing, no matter what was going on in her life. She always told her stories with a twist.

"She loved to eat. She would cook Italian gravy from scratch, and we would have big pasta meals on Sundays."

Mary also enjoyed visiting Wildwood with the family. Unfortunately, being a redhead, she had to sit under the boardwalk out of the sun while the rest of the family cavorted on the beach and in the surf.

She was a big fan of '40s and '50s music, and would go around the house singing Sinatra songs.

Mary was 10 when the family moved to the Northeast, leaving Swampoodle, with all its treasured memories, behind.

Besides her daughter and brother James, who is now 91, she is survived by three sisters, Jeannie Deutsch, Mildred Cameron and Josephine Boccuto; another brother, Phillip Spinuzza; and a grandson, Joseph Kaczmarek, a freelance photographer whose work appears in the Daily News. She was predeceased by another brother, Joseph Spinuzza.

Services: No services were planned.