Fame P. Dileo

Fame P. Dileo

Fame Dileo, lover of the arts and beauty, passed away peacefully in her Columbus, New Jersey home on July 30, 2025. Born on April 25, 1930, Fame was 95.

Born to Antonio and Erminia (née Forlini) Poliziani of the Umita region of northern Italy, Fame felt deep passion for the beauty and suffering of her ancestral land as well as the sufferings and strengths of its people. Determined to create a better life for herself, Fame found art as a teenager which became a reason for being and relied on the courage of female authors like the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen to help formulate ideals that would sustain her throughout a long and sometimes challenging life.

Fame often told stories of her coal-miner father and the hills of South Fork, Pennsylvania where she and two siblings, Joseph Poliziana and Frances Kelly, were born. Her older sister Jean Belardo, born in Ascoli Piceno, stayed in Italy with their mother for 10 years while their father found work and housing in the United States. After the family reunited, Fame’s mother died in 1933, six months after giving birth to her the youngest child. The children were sent to Saint Mary’s orphanage system in Cresson, Pennsylvania, where Fame, as she told it, was wanted for adoption. Her father, however, paid a dollar a week to keep the children from being taken away, and brought them home to live with him and his new wife, Marie McDermott when Fame was six.

The family moved to Johnstown, Pennsylvania and Fame and her siblings lost their stepmother suddenly when Fame was in the eighth grade. She moved in with relatives in Bristol, Pennsylvania and graduated from Bristol High School from where she next moved to Trenton, New Jersey to live with her older sister Jean and her husband, Dominic Belardo. It was in the Chambersburg area of Trenton that Fame met Matthias Dileo who became her husband and the love of her life.

Fame loved to tell the story of how, as a teenager, she sang with the USO for our returning WWII veterans at Camp Kilmer in Piscataway, NJ.

The couple married and moved to Lawrenceville, New Jersey to raise a family of three: Lisa, David, and Mark. Fame became a gourmet chef for the family and spent many hours cultivating a life of fine dining, table arrangement, and décor, all stamped with her love of beauty and quality.

Always seeking cultural enrichment, Fame found deep and meaningful plays, movies, art exhibits, and music from around the world meant to uplift humanity and cause self-reflection, always with the hope of making this world a better place. She was early to find the first Beatles’ 45’s, Ridley Scott movies, and The Buena Vista Social Club, to name a few. Her favorite book and movie from girlhood to death was Gone With the Wind, a story of a survivor, which Fame certainly became. Although bedridden from the effects of a stroke 18 months ago, she still would speak the words: “I want to survive” to the very end.

Fame graduated Trenton State College in her fifties with a degree in art and served as the college’s curator of art shows for a number of years, leaving the position only to accompany her husband on many trips across the country and world to fulfill his duties as a New Jersey State Bar president. She then became a professional photographer, developing signature black and white portraits of mothers and children, always seeking and perhaps finding that connection she had lost with her own mother so many years ago. She worked for a time at the Loveladies Arts Foundation, a few streets from where she and her husband owned a vacation home in Loveladies Harbor. She also gave time selflessly to babysit her grandchildren, sometimes traveling hours to give them the kind of love that only a grandparent knows. Both of Fame’s homes became places of wonderful foods and decorative, themed parties for many family members and friends, which Fame loved putting together over the many years of her marriage, until 2008, at her husband’s passing.

During those latter years, Fame volunteered for the People and Stories program at the Bo Robinson Treatment Center in Trenton, a privatized correctional facility that valued the goal of helping inmates become functioning, feeling members of society. Fame left this position, which she loved, to move to Columbus, New Jersey, where she continued to hold family dinners for her children and their families as well as become a communicant of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church, which held greater meaning for her as the years passed.

Fame will be remembered with love for all her thoughtful works of art in whichever capacity she endeavored by her daughter Lisa and children Emma Fretz, Matthias Fretz (wife Rachael and great-grandchildren Noah Twist and Delilah Fretz), son David (wife Jennifer and granddaughter Sofia), and son Mark (wife Lisa and granddaughters Madeline and Lauren).

Our famiy would like to give special thanks to her wonderful caregivers, Judy Williams, and Allison Bob, as well as the staff of Serenity Hospice, who provided the best of care to keep her comfortable over the last 16 months.

A Mass at Mary, Mother of the Church - 45 Crosswicks Street , Bordentown NJ 08505, will be held on September 19th at 11am.