Everyone's life has a story. In "Lives," we tell some of those stories about North Shore people who have died recently. "Lives" runs Mondays in The Salem News.
PEABODY — In the midst of a kamikaze attack on the aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill, a young seaman named Daniel Mello saw death beckon in a storm of fire and blood.
He would decline the invitation. Instead, he would return to his wife, Angelina, and see a finish to his life that was in its own way just as spectacular and more inspiring than the fate prepared for him by suicidal Japanese airmen in May 1945.
Bombs and planes had slammed into his ship, setting it ablaze. Mello, a kid from Danvers, could scarcely breathe. Fires and explosions were shattering the Quincy-built vessel from one end to the other.
One 550-pound bomb actually went right through the carrier, exploding beneath it.
Men began dropping into the ocean to save themselves. That wasn't an option for Mello, who never learned to swim. But he had no intention of giving up.
He used his clothes to fashion a filter against the thick, black smoke, allowing him to breathe.
"A lot of men did dive overboard," recalls his daughter Christine Dinis. "And they lost their lives."
In a crew of 2,600, there were roughly 700 casualties, nearly 400 of them killed or missing. The ship suffered as much damage as any American vessel in the Pacific war. But on May 11, 1945, the Bunker Hill managed to stay afloat and survive.
So did Daniel Mello. He had a reason for surviving, including his young wife and a baby daughter named Caroline.
Both of the Mellos had grown up on farms — Angelina Vieira in Peabody, Daniel in Danvers. They were the children of Portuguese-speaking immigrants from the Azores. Daughter Christine Dinis recalls that her grandmother's marriage in the old country was arranged with the delivery of a cow.
Her own parents became thoroughly American. Angelina graduated from Peabody High School. Daniel, forced by the adversities of the Depression to go to work, never finished high school.
"They were very poor," Dinis said. Christmas in the Depression consisted of exchanging gifts of fruit.
A friend introduced the couple at a dance, and Dinis describes it as love at first sight.
"My dad always said my mom had beautiful eyes." From that time on, "they were always together."
The two had in common that she had been raised by a single mother, while he had lost his father as a teen. They took walks, and Angelina refused to let Daniel kiss her because "she was afraid her mother would catch her," Dinis said.
They married at St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Salem prior to the war and honeymooned in New York City. She was 19, and he was 20.
After he was mustered out of the Navy, Daniel joined the Portuguese-American War Veterans and was enormously proud of his service.
He worked in the leather industry in Peabody before landing a job at General Electric in Lynn. Angelina did a stint at Filene's and then offered day care for hard-pressed parents in conjunction with Catholic Charities.
The couple had a difficult time conceiving until, remarkably, came a second daughter, Christine, 27 years later.
"It was my father's birthday, and he had a boilermaker, and that's how I got here," Dinis said with a laugh.
She remains impressed by the bond between her parents. Angelina grew anxious whenever her husband was apart from her — even for a few hours. They trekked across the country in a trailer, always side by side, even enduring the rugged Alcan Highway on a journey to Alaska, where they panned for gold.
The Mellos seemed to suffer in tandem, too. Both had strokes. She had breast cancer; he had prostate cancer.
As they aged, Christine was determined to keep them together in the Peabody home they had enjoyed for more than half a century. As their health failed, she set up two hospital beds where family members cared for them.
The couple sometimes lay in their respective beds, reaching out, holding hands, Dinis recalls.
In January, his condition worsened. On the 18th, Angelina awoke and looked over to an empty bed. Daniel was no longer there beside her.
"Everybody has a time," she told her daughter.
Just 20 hours later, on Jan. 19, as if she had someplace to be, Angelina was gone, too.
Daniel was 89, and Angelina was 88; they had been married for 69 years.
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