By Mary Cristy

Mother’s Day, this coming Sunday, is an especially meaningful time for Carmela Saviano. The Los Altos Hills resident has nine children and 46 grand- and great-grandchildren as beautiful fruit on the family tree, with nary a bad apple among them.

A self-styled “Cradle Catholic,” Saviano, 83, graduated from high school with honors and a gold medal in athletics, then “married young.”

With her husband Domenic, a self-made builder, they ran a construction business and reared their children, Donald, Gloria, Patricia, Joyce, Carol, Thomas, Nick, Ralph and John.

“I … wanted the best for them. I felt (New) Jersey wasn’t the place for them. I’d heard California offered the best educational opportunities and started my research.”

When this persuaded her to make the move, “I brainwashed my husband.”

Her college-aged daughter Patricia interrupted her studies to tend 9-month-old baby John while Carmela and Domenic went West to find a place where they could fulfill their dreams. Patricia later received a scholarship to the University of San Francisco and made educational history in San Bernardino when she secured a $5 million grant to hire 75 teachers.

“While Domenic stayed on to build the house I designed, I went back to pack. We made the move in a rented trailer.”

Saviano, now widowed, still lives in one wing of the home while her son John, president of Saviano Construction Company, his wife Monique and their two sons, occupy another.

Domenic worked to level their hill for a tennis court for 16-year-old Nick, who already hinted at the talent to become an internationally known tennis coach.

No matter where he travels, Nick phones Saviano. A gift pillow from him bears the legend “Mothers make memories.”

Eldest son Donald, a Merrill-Lynch broker, and eldest daughter Gloria remained on the East Coast. John, Ralph and Thomas followed in Domenic’s footsteps and own construction companies.

As a new arrival in the Hills, she involved herself in community service. The Savianos spearheaded the drive for a permanent home for the Little League. She joined the Historical Society, spent five years on the Pathways committee and worked with the Planning Commission and Town council.

The experience proved invaluable when, at 55, she enrolled at Foothill College to earn a real estate license.

“I was in fear and trembling knowing the kids would have their eyes on me to see what kind of student I’d be,” she said.

She managed “straight As” and worked until l986 when she met Father Jack Rocca, a street-smart priest from Brooklyn, at St. Nicholas Church.

Her daughter Joyce had just lost her son Kevin, a 13-month-old baby boy, and Saviano was in need of direction. Father Jack worked with incarcerated 11- to l8-year-old felons at the juvenile jail in San Jose, and with younger, lesser offenders, at The Ranches.

Saviano met the children.

“They expected nothing in the way of compassion since they had never known it,” she said. “They accepted Father Jack because they recognized a kindred soul; and they accepted me because I was, unlike a parent, a grandma.”

For 13 years, priest and “Grandma” brought gifts, scriptures and loving counsel to these children. Saviano, who learned love at her mother’s knee, felt a deeper spirituality than she had ever known before and was healed.

Osteoporosis and two hip replacements limit her activities a bit today. But her daughter Carol Ross of Los Altos bought a wheelchair during Saviano’s convalescence, and gave no credence to the possibility of not having “fun” with her mother again. “We’ll go shopping,” she promised, and they have.

Saviano lives in a story-book house, a perfect setting for a doting grandma with a doting family. Children and grandchildren vie with one another over “who gets grandma at holidays,” and end by sharing their beloved matriarch.

“I’ve been blessed with God’s love, a rich, full life and good children,” she said.

And Saviano knows “it doesn’t get any better than this.”