Mario Daniel Abondolo, born March 3, 1919, in Waterbury, died August 6 in Southbury.

A father figure to many, Mario Abondolo will be remembered for his patience, generosity, and realistic optimism, and for his ability to channel his long and varied experience of life to help others.

Mario was born in Waterbury to Carmine and Pasqualina Abondolo (Abbondandolo) on March 3, 1919; he was the third of six children. He attended Crosby High School, graduating as salutatorian during the Great Depression, and he worked in various ways to support the family: picking wild blueberries to sell, making home deliveries for the store, helping his father to erect scaffolding and install siding. But he soon contracted tuberculosis, an illness which he overcame at the Gaylord Farm Sanatorium in Wallingford, where he met and made friends with people from all walks of life, including a fellow patient, Betty Barker, whom he later married.

Mario turned the years of enforced physical inactivity at Gaylord to account by reading widely; key among the authors he read at this time were Eugene O’Neill, Thomas Mann, and James Thurber. After his discharge, he took advantage of training in accounting at Post College, Waterbury, funded by the State of Connecticut, and he secured a job in an accounting firm that prepared income tax returns. Always an “A” student in math, Mario excelled at this, and was quickly assigned some of their most important clients. He was proud of this work, something he continued full-time until his strength returned and he could concentrate on building. In the 1950s and 1960s, he went on to build close to one hundred houses, several in collaboration with his father-in-law, the Hartford architect Russell F. Barker.

Mario was justly proud of his knowledge of carpentry, which he used to make improvements to his home and to those of loved ones. He loved to prepare and serve food to friends and family, for preference incorporating produce from his own garden. And he continued to be a keen student of all the relevant codes, regulations, and guidance he needed to prepare tax returns (for a select circle) well into his eighties.

In 1945, he married Betty Barker (deceased 1964); together they raised one son, Daniel Abondolo, now of Letchworth, England. In 1973, Mario married Gloria Varvayanis, and together they raised her two children in Newtown: Jean (Belchou) of Irvington, N.Y., and Charles Varvayanis of Long Barn, Calif.

Mario was predeceased by four brothers, Joseph, Gennaro, Carmine, and Dante; and by a sister, Florence. In addition to his wife and children, he is survived by a granddaughter, Serena Sophia Belchou; by four grandsons, Jacob Russell Abondolo, Alexander Paul Belchou, and Chase Charles and Carmine Patrick Varvayanis; and by many loving nieces and nephews, to whom he was both mentor and joy.