Five years ago, Marguerite Sciuto, along with her husband and another couple, learned how to play bocce at the Sons of Italy lodge in Methuen. Sciuto later got involved in lodge activities, joined its board of directors, and eventually became the lodge’s vice president. And then on Jan. 1 of this year, she achieved a major feather in her cap — she became president of the lodge, the first woman to hold the post in the organization’s near 100-year history.

Sciuto, 54, a North Andover resident who was elected president without opposition during a special election by the lodge’s members, acknowledges she shed tears when the regalia was placed on her. The memory of Pasquale DeMonaco, her late Italian father, was on her mind. “I thought about — my dad’s been gone nine years — wouldn’t he be proud, his daughter becoming the first woman president of the Sons of Italy,” she recalled.