TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Helping Tampa Was Always On His Agenda

ADVERTISEMENT

By STEVE OTTO, The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 9, 2008

It's about this time of year I could always count on a call from Vic DiMaio. He would want to have lunch and make sure I had my MetLife calendar. At least that was the excuse.

He always wanted something else of course. That was understood. Being an insurance man and first-class schmoozer, he would set his trap. He would wait until we were well into lunch and had gone through the niceties of the family and how he was sure I was on the verge of winning a Pulitzer Prize before he would spring whatever project it was he was working on.

Sometimes it had something to do with his beloved Ybor City, but more often it was helping people, which could run from writing about a home for retired nuns to working to aid blind children through his Ybor Lions Club. DiMaio was always the go-to man for the project, the guy who took on the task of raising money and getting a little publicity for the cause, the guy who would do most of the work and get little credit.

There won't be a lunch this year. Vic DiMaio passed away last week. Instead, I found myself standing at a reception in a school cafeteria before his funeral at St. Joseph's Church in West Tampa.

The family had laid out two long tables, each running the length of one wall, loaded with the pictures, plaques and memorabilia of DiMaio's life. There was so much stuff it looked like the Webster flea market on Monday mornings.

You can't really tell a person's life through photo albums and all those little odds and ends we gather in a lifetime, but in DiMaio's case they gave it a Herculean effort.

The Greatest

DiMaio was 83 when he died and a full-fledged member of The Greatest Generation. One of eight children, his family had known the tough times of the Great Depression, and he went into the Navy during World War II. One of his brothers would die at the Battle of the Bulge.

Judge E.J. Salcines, who, along with Mayor Pam Iorio, gave remarks after the Mass, said of those times, "They had nothing but they had everything." He spoke of the strength of the families of those days and a way of life that has slipped almost into oblivion.

Now here it was laid out on those tables. There were pictures, the glossy ones signed by politicians - DiMaio knew them all. There also were the smaller, faded ones of family trips and gatherings through the years. They even had some outfits on hangers - his Knights of Columbus regalia and his vests from the Ybor City Lions Club. There were stacks of proclamations and plaques thanking him for his work for this or that fundraiser, from the 500th anniversary of Columbus to the city's ill-fated Bamboleo parade, when they canceled Gasparilla.

Tiger Talk

There were hints of the things that would guide his life. His 1942 "Tiger" yearbook from Jesuit was opened to his picture, next to the saying he had included: "A ton of talk weighs less than nothing if it isn't backed by action."

That was DiMaio, whether it was as a founding member of the Tampa Sertoma or as co-chairman of the effort to build the Immigrant statue in Centennial Park, he was there, usually with Mercedes "Mercy" DiMaio, his wife of 56 years.

I suppose there are still people out there who feel that sense of community that Victor Emmanuele DiMaio felt, but man they are few and far between.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT