Caterina Bruno; at 92; made uniforms for US soldiers

“She used to go the convent and learn to embroider,’’ said her daughter, Eleanor Wright of Medford. “That was one of her favorite hobbies.’’

As a mother of four in the 1960s, she stitched uniforms in a North End factory for US soldiers in Vietnam.

Mrs. Bruno, the matriarch of her family of 35, died of congestive heart failure in her Medford home on Aug. 2. She was 92.

“She was wonderful and caring; it was always about us,’’ said her youngest daughter, Columbia Pace of Medford.

Mrs. Bruno grew up in Mirabella Eclano, a small inland village in southern Italy. The oldest of seven children in a farming family, she learned responsibility quickly, her family said.

“Her father traveled back and forth from Italy to America,’’ Wright said. “He’d work and bring back money. My aunt says my mother raised her.’’

Mrs. Bruno was well educated for her village. Teachers pushed her past the fourth grade, and she graduated from high school in 1934.

With her father, Augostino Guarino, working construction, and her mother, Colomba (Morelli) Guarino, raising the children, much of the farm labor fell to Mrs. Bruno and her siblings.

Mrs. Bruno tended to the farm’s wheat fields, vegetable gardens, and fig and apple trees.

At 21, Mrs. Bruno attended a party in a nearby village. There she met Michele Bruno.

“Once she met my father, that was the end of it, because he was so handsome,’’ Wright said. “She fell in love with him.’’

A year later in 1939, the two wed in a small private ceremony in her village.

While Mrs. Bruno was pregnant a few months later, her husband was pulled away to war. Serving in the Italian Army during World War II, Mr. Bruno was held prisoner in South Africa for six years. When he returned in 1945, he met his daughter Antonietta for the first time. She was 5.

Over the next six years, the couple had three more girls.

In 1955, Mrs. Bruno and her four daughters boarded a ship to America, joining her parents and a sibling in Boston.

For three years, she worked on the assembly line at a produce factory in the North End, supporting her daughters in their Commercial Street apartment. Meanwhile, her husband awaited his emigration opportunity in Italy.

The family was reunited in 1958 and moved to a larger North End apartment on Greenough Lane.

Mr. Bruno began work making cheese, a skill he learned in Italy, at G. Savarese & Son on Commercial Street. Mrs. Bruno moved to a sewing firm on Summer Street in Boston, where she made uniforms for US soldiers in the Vietnam War. She worked there for 10 years.

In 1969, Mrs. Bruno shifted to garments, sewing for Grieco Bros., outside Boston.

An injury forced her out of work four years later. Fluid buildup in her knee made standing difficult, her family said. Her daughters believed it stemmed from years of running pedal-operated sewing machines.

In 1974, Mr. and Mrs. Bruno moved to Medford, into their oldest daughter’s duplex on Hancock Street, where Mrs. Bruno would live for the next 35 years.

“It was awesome, she was always there,’’ said her oldest grandchild, Rosa Tgettis, who was 12 when her grandmother moved in. “I was so close with her I used to call her Ma, never Nonna or Grandma.’’

In between cooking the family’s large Sunday meals, tending to her garden, and mending her family’s clothes, she always put aside time for her grandchildren, and later great-grandchildren.

“She used to play Ziga-Ziga (an Italian game) with every single one of us,’’ Tgettis said. “She’d rock us on her lap, and we’d laugh and laugh.’’

In 1998, her husband died of heart disease, but Mrs. Bruno remained independent for the next 11 years.

In addition to her daughters Eleanor and Columbia, Mrs. Bruno leaves two other daughters, Antonietta Fiore and Alba Ranzino of Medford; four siblings; Elena Iovanna, Joe Guarino, and Guido Guarino of East Boston, and Delfina Federico of Syracuse, N.Y.; eight grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.

A funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. today at St. Joseph Church in Medford. Burial will follow at St. Michael Cemetery in Boston.