Well into her 90s Dorothy Spadafore of Rotary Villa got her daily exercise climbing 20 stairs to her upstairs apartment downtown above Curves several times a day.

Saturday evening after Mass her church family filled the basement of Holy Maternity of Mary Catholic Church and celebrated the century mark she reaches March 30.

Dorothy donned a special tiara and conversed with everyone while they waited for a slice of cake frosted with her photo.

In 2006, when her cousins opened up Caruso’s on a Sunday afternoon for her 95th birthday that cake featured a 1944 photograph of a dressed-up, dark-haired woman in the yard at the corner of Spruce and Orchard streets.

“I’d forgotten all about that picture,” she said.

“I was raised in Dowagiac,” Mrs. Spadafore said, and has lived here most recently for more than 50 years.

In between 1934 and 1952 she and her husband left Dowagiac for Paw Paw, where they operated a candy store known as the Sweet Shop patronized by future County Commissioner Jim Sayer.

Her husband was also well-known in Dowagiac for driving school buses.

Joe was born in Italy and immigrated to Howell with his parents in 1913. He passed away at 95 on March 13, 2005.

Joe wed Dorothy Belsito on Jan. 2, 1932, so they were married an amazing 73 years.
In 1955 they shipped a car across the ocean to spend three months touring Italy.

Caruso’s was founded Sept. 22, 1922.

Mrs. Spadafore worked there in the 1920s and ’30s.

After a fire damaged one of Dowagiac’s landmark businesses on Nov. 23, 2002, it reopened in January 2003 with Jane Wright and Julie Sparks, the daughters of Theresa Caruso-Stephenson, joining Mary “Butch” Myers.

The Belsito family — Dorothy’s folks came to Dowagiac in 1912 from Three Rivers, where she was born — owned a soda shop at the opposite end of Front Street carried on by her sister, Lena.

“They handled a lot of fruit,” Mrs. Spadafore said. “Trucks delivered bananas and grapes. Grapes were delivered in big barrels with sawdust. You don’t see that anymore.”