GREENSBORO, N.C. — Joan Paltrineri, a member of the Socialist Workers Party for nearly 30 years, from the early 1970s to late ’90s, died Feb. 24, after battling the effects of severe strokes over the past several years. Some 55 co-workers, friends, family and members and supporters of the SWP gathered at the downtown YMCA here March 29 to celebrate Paltrineri — known by most everyone as L — her life and political contributions.
Among those present were L’s longtime companion Karen Kopperud; nieces and nephews from Florida, Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts; former pupils who learned water aerobics from L at the YMCA; and many who worked with her in political activity. Family and friends prepared a delicious spread of food and drink enjoyed by all, as well as attractive displays about L’s life.
Paltrineri was born in 1945 in Wellesley, Massachusetts, to immigrant parents: her father from Modena, Italy, and her mother, a French-speaking Canadian from the province of New Brunswick. After growing up in Wellesley, she moved to Boston as a young woman.
Saying good-bye to her plans to become a dental hygienist, L joined the Young Socialist Alliance and Socialist Workers Party in the early 1970s in Boston, one of a group of young women won to working-class and communist politics from the feminist group Female Liberation. “She was active in the fight for women’s emancipation, against Washington’s murderous but failed war to crush Vietnam’s national liberation struggle, in defense of Cuba’s socialist revolution, in fights against segregation and for Black freedom, and other battles in the interests of the working class,” SWP National Committee member Steve Clark said in a message to the meeting.
When the fight against racist segregation exploded in the Boston public schools, SWP members, including L, were on the front lines.
“All of us in the party and the YSA who went through the battle to desegregate the schools in Boston in 1974-75 are marked by that experience, and what we learned about how indispensable the party is to advance the struggles of our class — the working class — as it moves to the center stage of politics,” SWP National Committee member Paul Mailhot wrote in a message read by SWP supporter Diane Shur. Mailhot met L in 1974, as a youth newly recruited to the Boston YSA and SWP.
After leaving Boston, L helped build other branches of the party, including in Denver; Omaha, Nebraska; and Newark, New Jersey. SWP supporter Jane Roland, who also joined the SWP in Boston in the early 1970s, told the meeting that L was a union builder, part of the SWP’s turn to industry and the industrial unions that began in the mid-1970s as new possibilities to build the party were opening up.
Both Roland and Paltrineri moved to Greensboro in the late 1980s to help build an SWP branch here. They and other party members were active in a successful effort by 550 Kmart warehouse workers to join the UNITE union. The workers went on to win their first union contract in 1996.
“L was a cadre — a committed, active and disciplined party member for some three decades. And in the years after resigning from party membership in 1997, L continued actively supporting the party as long as she lived,” Mailhot wrote.
Many family members and friends who spoke at an open mic recalled their experiences being taught how to make homemade tortellini by L, an expert in Italian cuisine who loved teaching others how to cook “the real thing.” She put her culinary students through the rigors of making pasta from scratch, with the same patience, discipline and good humor she brought to all her political activity in support of the Socialist Workers Party.