Did you ever know that you’re my hero
And everything I would like to be?
I can fly higher than an eagle
For you are the wind beneath my wings
For all of his downtown business successes and civic leadership accolades, John Malzone told us in June when accepting a Downtown Visionary Award that his wife of 56 years was the wind beneath his wings.
“I couldn’t have done anything without Shirley,” he said just days after Shirley Malzone had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
She was his North Star.
Shirley Vnensak was the attractive New Jersey girl from the mountains of Montville with the classy way all her own; one look, and John Malzone was smitten. If you’ve come to know him, then you’ve come to know John Malzone can talk to anyone with his engaging personality. But that one look at Shirley Vnensak, and you might say John Malzone was tongued-tied for sure.
“I thought she was way out of my league,” he’ll tell you.
Cupid has a clever way of bringing two people together, and so it would be.
“We got married when we were 18 years old,” he says; the marriage later would bring a daughter into their lives.
John and Shirley Malzone would find their way to Fayetteville in the early 1970s, a result of his military service at Fort Liberty. John Malzone would immerse himself in the business and civic trappings of downtown, while Shirley Malzone became a successful and sought-after interior designer.
“It was a good life,” he says. “There was a lot of laughter in our home.”
John Malzone, now 75, found a passion for downtown real estate, and championing all that the downtown could be from the Fayetteville Christmas Parade to the International Folk Festival to the Fayetteville Dogwood Festival to A Dickens Holiday. She found happiness with her interior design talent and seeing to it that the draperies would hang just right in your home and the accent furnishings strategically placed, because that’s just how Shirley Malzone was when it came to interior design.
A wife, mother and grandmother remembered
Shirley Malzone was a fashionable dresser with her hair coiffed in place on an evening out for dining and dancing. She could keep a house pristine. She could serve a perfect Thanksgiving dinner. A Christmas and Easter dinners, too. And her sausage and peppers, John will tell you, was like none other. She could be the engaging hostess for a dinner party at their Pinehurst home, where the table was set with not a plate or fork, spoon and knife out of place.
“She was just the most elegant woman,” daughter Michael Ann Horne says. “She was an amazing judge of character. She helped me see my best friend would be my husband. She liked genuine people. She loved people; not things. She embodied her life through Christ, and that’s how she lived her life. She will continue to live on in me, and all of us. Thank you, Mom, and I will miss you for the rest of my life.”
Her granddaughter recalled fond memories, too.
“She always put others first,” China Marie Horne says. “She was always thinking about us. She carried herself with grace. She was poised and sophisticated. One could only hope to be like her. She made everyone around her feel loved. Thank you, Granny, we love you and will carry your memory with us always.”
Olivia Grace Horne also remembered her grandmother.
“She was always three steps ahead of everyone,” she says. “She knew people better than they knew themselves. Granny’s character is what we strive for every day.”
“She could make a house a home,” Jonathan Horne, her grandson, recalls. “And she had so much heart.”
Epilogue
For Shirley Malzone, the diagnosis of ovarian cancer came out of nowhere.
“It came as a shock,” John Malzone says, and the cancer was aggressive. “I’m an optimist. People pay me to fix problems. But I couldn’t fix this one.”
Shirley Vnensak Malzone died July 5.
She was 74.
Still, John Malzone feels her presence.
“It’s tough when I go to bed at night,” he says. “She was always there beside me. And tough when waking up in the mornings.”
There is a gaping hole in his heart.
“I’m going to miss her,” he says. “I couldn’t have done anything without Shirley.”
She was the love of a lifetime, John Malzone will tell you, and the wind beneath his wings.
Bill Kirby Jr. can be reached at billkirby49@gmail.com or 910-624-1961.
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A beautiful column about a very beautiful woman!