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Oct 14, 2013 · Warren and Maria Wilhelm with, from rear, Steven, Donald and Bill, who is now Bill de Blasio, the Democratic nominee for mayor. When Mr. de Blasio was 18, his father killed himself.
- Overview
- Life and Death
- Children
Maria de Blasio (1917 - January 22, 2007) was the mother of Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of New York City (2014-present), and an author. She was the daughter of Italian immigrants. She was also the author of "The Other Italy: The Italian Resistance in World War II."
She was born in 1917 in New York City, the daughter of Giovanni De Blasio and Anna De Blasio. She graduated from Smith College in 1938. She joined the editorial staff at Time and met her husband, Warren Wilhelm. When World War II broke out in 1939, she edited Italian-language propaganda for the Office of War Information (OWI). After the war ended in September 1945, she married Warren Wilhelm and the two started a family in Washington, DC, where Wilhelm found a job as an economist in the Bureau of the Budget. In the era during the Red Scare, her subordinates at the OWI claimed her editing suggestions were Soviet-friendly. Most damaging, the editor of the Time in 1948 charged that Maria demonstrated communist sympathies. With assistance from distinguished law, the two of them rebutted allegations and kept their jobs.
Her husband, however, left government service in 1953 when another allegation about his Yale days surfaced. He found work in the private sector, but his integrity had been impugned and his career derailed. Angry and embittered, she watched her husband descend into alcoholism, even as their youngest son, Bill de Blasio, was born in May 1961. In 1968, her husband left the home on Brewster Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a year later, she divorced him.
•Steven Wilhelm (b. 1948), a journalist in Seattle, Washington
•Donald Wilhelm (b. 1953)
Bill de Blasio was born Warren Wilhelm Jr. on May 8, 1961. While he did not grow up in New York City, his parents drove from their home in Norwalk, Connecticut, to Manhattan's Doctors Hospital for his birth. He is the third son of Maria Angela (née de Blasio; 1917–2007) and Warren Wilhelm (1917–1979).
Between losing his leg in WWII and his tragic suicide in 1979, Bill de Blasio's father forged a career with think tanks and multinational corporations aimed at blocking the spread of ...
Oct 14, 2013 · When he returned to the U.S., Wilhelm married Maria Angela de Blasio, who he met when they both worked at Time magazine before the war, and took a job as a budget analyst for the federal ...
- Senior Editor, Intelligencer
Sep 30, 2013 · De Blasio’s closeness to his mother’s side eventually led him to change his birth name — Warren Wilhelm Jr. — first to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm, then to Bill de Blasio. His mom, Maria de ...
Sep 17, 1988 · Maria Wilhelm has written extensively for Time Inc. publications where she was Editor of New Media, and been published in a range of other outlets, among them the Los Angeles Times, Oakland Tribune, and Civilization Magazine.
- Maria Wilhelm
