BY ALBERT AMATEAU | Leonard Cecere, whose mailbox-and-notions store, Something Special, has been a Greenwich Village institution for 36 years, died at his home above the MacDougal St. shop on Feb. 25. He was 91.
At his Feb. 27 funeral at Our Lady of Pompeii Church, where he was married 64 years ago, an Army honor guard performed a ceremony on the church steps in recognition of his military service during World War II, said his daughter, Francine Cecere O’Brien.
“Lenny was one of the people who held the fabric of our community together,” said Assemblymember Deobrah Click, who attended his funeral.
“His shop was a place for people to stop in to talk about the community. He was a quiet man, a warm and friendly man and we’ll miss him.”
The shop, where customers, including many Village-dwelling celebrities, rented boxes to receive mail and packages, will be phased out over the next four months, according to his son, Leonard Jr.
“My father continued going to the shop six days a week from 8 in the morning to 6 at night until the beginning of the year,” his son said. “For the last four or five years, he had help in the store from Laura Susana. We’ve decided to give mailbox customers until the end of June to close out their accounts. Laura will take care of that,” he added.
In an article in The Villager in 2007, Cecere, known as Lenny, was the subject of a profile, along with Something Special, where the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Patti Smith and Lucy Lawless received their mail.
“Celebrities come in, but I wouldn’t know who they are until they tell me,” Lenny told The Villager back then.
Born in Brooklyn to Italian immigrants Carmella and Frank Cecere, Lenny was drafted into the Army in 1943 after graduating from high school, his son said.
“He became a Villager when he married my mother in 1949. They met on a blind date,” he added.
Lenny’s wife, Lucy Cecere, born and raised in the Village, was a founder 40 years ago of the Caring Community, which serves elderly residents of Lower Manhattan. She was also part of the successful effort to rescue the imperiled Village Nursing Home, which was eventually taken over by VillageCare, a community-based, nonprofit healthcare organization for the elderly and frail and for people with AIDS. Lucy Cecere died at the age of 87 in 2011.
“My father was especially proud of his service during World War II,” his son said.
Lenny was in a unit attached to the First Army and was responsible for salvaging material from the battlefield.
“He landed in Normandy two weeks after D-Day, was involved in the Normandy hedgerow battles and in the Battle of Saint-Lô,” his son said. “The unit went through France and Belgium and was near Bastogne when the Battle of the Bulge began. My father told about his hour of glory during a freezing night when he defended a bridge with a bazooka against attacking tanks,” his son said.
Discharged from the Army at the end of 1945, Lenny worked for an American branch of a French company that sold machines that repaired nylon stockings. In the mid-1950s, he began a 23-year-long career at Kodak.
“Looking through his papers, we found that Dad held a patent on a microfilm process,” his son said.
From 1949 to 1962, Lenny and Lucy lived on Sullivan St., where they raised their family. In 1962 they bought 51 MacDougal St., the building at the southwest corner of MacDougal and Houston Sts., and moved into the top two floors.
The street-level store was occupied by Morrison’s Bakery as an office that also displayed some of the company’s pastry products under a sign that read, “Something Special.” When Kodak moved its regional operation first to Fairlawn, N.J., and then farther away in New Jersey, Leonard retired and took over the street-level store. At first, he sold doughnuts, bagels and candy, then greeting cards and, finally, hit on mailbox rentals and key copying, plus a few small items.
His son, who was his father’s primary caregiver in the final years, said that his dad’s health began to decline at the end of last year.
“People loved him because of his transparency, what you saw was what you got,” said his son. “He was a longtime member of the Fathers’ club at Our Lady of Pompeii School, where my sister and I went to school. He belonged to the Knights of Columbus and the American Legion post in the Village.”
In addition to his son and daughter, a granddaughter, Clare, survives.
Perazzo Funeral Home, at 199 Bleecker St., was in charge of arrangements. The wake was on Feb. 26 and the funeral Mass was Feb. 27 at Our Lady of Pompeii, at 25 Carmine St.
