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Remembering
DAN IANNUZZI
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Dreaming Life, Facing Death
By Father Benito Framarin
In May 1970, when I shook his hand for
the first time and introduced myself, he must have been 36. “I’m Dan
lannuzzi” came his lively reply. I gave a good look to his slim
physique.
His was a story of immigration from
Italy that had begun with his parents in Quebec, years before World
War II. At the time, his story was a 16-page tri-weekly, a lot of
determination to get things done, and just as much entrepreneurial
risk.
Dan lannuzzi was nicknamed “dark and
handsome” for his reserved character, his introversion, his dry
expressions, and his apparent haughtiness that was just a front for
his sensitivity.
Certainly, the Almighty knew him well:
his empathy, his choleric temper, his intuitions coupled with his
silent, cold stare that tried and silenced the many questions and
recurring risks of life. Dan Iannuzzi was this: those intense eyes,
those questioning silences, that constant tackling of risks. That’s
how Dan Iannuzzi loved life; that’s how he adored his breathing,
loving and at the same time challenging every day of life, striving
to do something that could make existence worthwhile.
At the time (late Seventies, early
Eighties) Canada was a receptacle of immigrants from all over the
world, the Liberal kingdom of Pierre Trudeau, and a huge
construction site. Canada was saying goodbye from the status of
Dominion. In those frantic years, Dan Iannuzzi tried political life
and risked opening a TV station... I think that those were his
limits. He never had the spirit of the haranguer; a megaphone did
not become him. Moreover, he hadn’t realized that a TV station
required a background of many experts and much larger financial
power. Rather than his intuitions, what failed was his small-time
entourage and his lack of powerful sponsors.
Dan lannuzzi had few friends; he
entertained very few people at home. I don’t know whether my
priesthood was the reason for this, maybe what did the trick were
the weeks spent in Rome together attending meetings on emigration
and the press, but eventually our acquaintance turned into
friendship. He told me about his women, about the endless
adjustments with people who lived and worked with him, about refusal
of any other human being and compassion for them all. He used to
suggest that, if God is love, that love must include a lot of
compassion. I remember going to the movies with him once, in Rome.
The film itself was rather risqué, but our subsequent commentary
turned into a prolonged conversation on the unstable balance of
human beings, on the fragility of each of us, torn — as we are —
between reason and feelings. I recall that night quite well; we
discussed possible valid criteria of honesty and balance, taken as
we are among taxes, power, banks; beginning with what one feels
inside, what our parents taught us, which ends up becoming our
natural worldview.
After returning to Italy, in the
mid-Eighties, I never lost sight of Dan Iannuzzi. His wife Elena had
her hairstylist on the same street where my religious community had
its convent, and lannuzzi’s son Michael attended the faculty of
Architecture in Piazza Borghese, less than 300 metres from the same
convent. Our encounters were happy reunions, dinners where dishes
and memories succeeded one another, reminiscing on Toronto, the
journalists at Corriere Canadese, the new challenges Dan took up
with weeklies in several languages.
Dan Iannuzzi seemed to have a constant
concern those nights: he always began with the health of the Pope,
he remembered Cardinal Ambrozic, talked about the years when he was
publishing the religious weekly Il Samaritano, and then
delved into why God got interested in man, in sin as an ambush
against God (“there are no venial sins,” he used to say; “there are
only our limits, which we’d rather not have”); he repeatedly told me
his thoughts about people’s professions as prayers. It was at Rome’s
San Giacomo hospital, two weeks before leaving us, that Dan revealed
his boyish conscience and his grown-up stature. He wasn’t afraid of
death, and understood he was facing the Great Beyond. He said he had
attended to all his earthly matters, although of course a few
strands were left. He took his time with me to say a prayer, and to
tell me smiling that, to God, death is just an opening title in the
newspaper of eternal life.
***
Goodbye, Mr. President
By Nicola Sparano
In public I addressed him as “Mr.
Iannuzzi”, in private I called him “boss”. He replied by calling me,
who knows why, “doctor”.
I met him in 1968, when we both had a
lot fewer years, and a lot less weight. He wore his hair short and
his sideburns long, in accordance with the fashion of the time. He
liked to wear a black-and-white checkered jacket and
highly-polished, long-pointed shoes. I was a young man, good for
nothing much; he was in the middle of his life, and already a
reference for a fast growing community; he would eventually give it
a TV station and an important, respected place within the fabric of
Canadian society.
Television was his dream, but his life
was Corriere Canadese.
Mister Iannuzzi, my boss, died near the
end of the year that marked the newspaper’s 50th anniversary. It’s a
poignant, incredibly sad coincidence.
The journalists of Corriere Canadese
and all the staff and management of all the companies Dan Iannuzzi
created, now grouped under Multimedia Nova Corporation — Ciao Radio
Corriere 530am, Correo Canadiense, Town Crier, Tandem, Insieme,
NewsWeb, and Nove Ilhas — offer their condolences to the
Iannuzzi family.
Good bye Mister Iannuzzi. Farewell,
boss. We’ll miss you.
***
Understanding Before
Everyone Else
By Angelo Persichilli
He was an entrepreneur, a politician,
and an idealist. Talking about Dan Iannuzzi is not easy, as he tried
and reconciled these three — apparently irreconcilable —
characteristics.
He was a businessman who managed to
maintain for over 50 years an activity that is difficult even
for those who can rely on political and economic sponsors. At the
same time, through Corriere Canadese, he promoted other activities
and companies, making his contribution to the economic growth of
this country and of our community.
He was a politician: when one runs a
newspaper, politics becomes an integral part of one’s activity.
However, he never committed himself to a party line. He had contacts
with the Tories, but was close to the Liberals. Ministers from the
Trudeau, Turner and Chrétien cabinets felt at home at Corriere. He
was not far from the NDP, either. Corriere Canadese, usually
rigorously neutral during electoral campaigns, took an official
stance just once: during the Provincial campaign of 1987, when it
officially supported Bob Rae’s NDP.
Dan Iannuzzi’s positions weren’t based
on ideology, however, but on culture.
When world and national politics were
split along right and left positions, socialism vs. capitalism, Dan
Iannuzzi understood, before most other people, that the discussion
needed to focus on cultural differences instead. Not ideologies, but
religious and cultural differences would divide the world. “We
must,” said Iannuzzi in the seventies, “co-exist with people having
different traditions, different religions from us. Not only is this right,
but we have no choice.”
He understood that religious-cultural
fanaticism was far more dangerous than ideological-political
fanaticism. Just listening to the news or reading a newspaper today
is enough evidence of how right he was.
So, this was Dan Iannuzzi the idealist.
Another idealist, Pierre Trudeau,
believed in Iannuzzi’s idea of “broadcasting” multiculturalism by
creating a TV station, CFMT (now OMNI), which was to become the
symbol of multicultural Canada of future years.
Always attentive to novelties, Dan
followed the rapid development of new technologies and their impact
on publishing and broadcasting. With the Internet, he was even able
to beat Corriere della Sera to the punch, registering the
www.corriere.com domain name.
Lately, acutely aware of even newer
technological and cultural changes, he was working on another kind
of broadcasting, proposing a new Canadian TV station that, unlike
the first, would be not only multilingual but truly multicultural.
He’s gone, but his idea remains.
Iannuzzi’s policy was based on a simple
principle: putting ideas, people and cultures together, not by
assimilation but by integration. The motto of Corriere Canadese —
“Fiercely Canadian, Proudly Italian”, summarizes his cultural and
political philosophy and his worldview better than any speech.
A third-generation Canadian, he had kept
the culture of his ancestors to a remarkable degree. He considered
himself a French-Canadian because he was born in Montreal, and an
English-Canadian because he lived in Toronto. However, since Dan
Iannuzzi did not like to leave any business unfinished, we suspect
that he chose to die in Rome as a way to restate his Italian
character, something he felt deeply.
So, his last trip was a one-way Alitalia
flight to Toronto… like one of the many immigrants he had fought
for, giving the best of himself. Thanks, Dan.
***
A Pioneer Also in Sports
By Nicola Sparano
When he was upset, he whistled. When he
started to sing, it was time to grab the helmet and hope the storm
would soon be over. Dan Iannuzzi was rarely upset; it only happened
when someone said he “understood”, and then proceeded to demonstrate
how he hadn’t understood at all. Everybody says that my boss was a
man of vision, who grasped many things way before most of other
people; that he understood today where the world would be going
tomorrow. I fully concur, having at least two anecdotes that show
the farsightedness and intuition of this man, a pillar of the
community who really lived being Fiercely Canadian.
When he hired me full-time in 1986, the
sports section of what was then a biweekly only covered local
events, especially soccer that was in his moment of greatest
splendour, with teams such as Italia, Roma, Toronto City, Montreal
Concordia, Croatia, and so on. As far as Italian soccer was
concerned, Corriere Canadese relied on a Monday insert that
came on Tuesdays from Rome’s Il Tempo. For a series of
reasons, the flight was never on time to make the printing deadline.
Quite often, Corriere Canadese’s Wednesday edition did not
print a single line about Series A. I told him that something had to
be done about this. He looked at me with the kind of gaze he had
when he was dealing with a problem. Pretty soon, he came out with a
solution: a short-wave radio, enabling us to listen to RAI’s famous
broadcast, Tutto il calcio minuto per minuto. However, this system
was also imperfect, as atmospheric disturbances could drown the
commentary. The second — and final — solution also came from him.
My boss struck a deal with Il Tempo,
and a journalist relayed over the phone the games of the Series A, B
and C. That took at least an hour and a half. An intercontinental
phone call, at the time, cost more or less as much as a home
mortgage. I was afraid that the cost might be excessive, and said
so. “Go ahead,” said an unperturbed Mr. Iannuzzi. “That is money
well spent. Soccer will be the main asset of our sports section.”
In addition to soccer, he understood the
importance of live, closed-circuit TV broadcasts. On March 4, 1968,
Nino Benvenuti boxed against Emil Griffith for the World
Championship — Middleweight. The match was in New York. Nino
Benvenuti was the current embodiment of a winning Italy. Dan
Iannuzzi organized the live broadcast of that match, the first for
Toronto. Nobody else had had the idea of bringing in, via
closed-circuit TV, broadcasts of events that did not raise the
interest of local stations but were highly interesting for many new
Canadians.
That match was a qualified success, and
laid the foundations for a string of other profitable matches that a
Jewish impresario brought at Maple Leaf Gardens in the following
years. The Gardens, thanks to Iannuzzi’s intuition, became in the
Seventies the house of boxing and soccer. In 1978 the World Cup of
Argentina was broadcast there. The success was so huge that four
years later we were able to follow the World Cup of Spain in our
living rooms, broadcast by CBC, the “normal” station.
So, in my boss’s ideal showcase of
awards, there must be a small corner for his intuition of
closed-circuit TV and short-wave radio.
***
Hundreds of Condolences
By Francesco Riondino
Entering the offices of Corriere
Canadese this week was far from usual. Among colleagues, few
words and sad smiles were exchanged; little could be said. Every one
of us had his or her own personal relationship with “the President”
and everyone will miss him in a different way.
The same personal relationship was
reflected by the dozens and dozens of readers who have sent faxes
and emails, called in or dropped by. Under the name of readers, for
once, we put together famous VIPs and common folk, the regular
people who first supported Corriere Canadese as well as Dan
Iannuzzi’s other ideas.
Among the first visitors, there was
Vaughan Mayor Michael Di Biase, who brought the condolences of his
city, where so many Italians live.
Dan Iannuzzi’s his funeral will be held
on Saturday, November 27, at 10am, at the Holy Angels Church (61
Jutland Road - Etobicoke). Donations in lieu of flowers may be made
to The Hospital for Sick Children or to The Children's Wish
Foundation, because Dan always loved children.
Iannuzzi liked to be a public character
and have his opinion listened to, but quite often he preferred to
keep his actions in favour of the community very private.
He was often referred to as a media
industry figure; now we find out that he was also a sports figure;
however, we should always remember that, with friends, rivals,
colleagues and competitors, he was among those who created the
Italian Chamber of Commerce of Toronto, the Canadian Italian
Benevolent Corporation (today’s Villa Charities) and so on, always
on the front lines.
Dan Iannuzzi was remembered by both the
Federal Parliament and Queen’s Park, with speeches by several
ministers and Government and Opposition MPs, proof of the esteem he
had deserved from everybody.
***
The Great Storyteller
By
Paola Bernardini
(Originally published in Tandem, December 12, 2004)
He liked jokes about Berlusconi, but he especially
liked laughing. The day after his death, a reader left me a message
on my voicemail. In a broken, teary voice he said, “I met Dan at a
bakery where he was having an espresso. He was a great man who
always had a good word for everybody. During our brief chat, he told
me a joke, and it was as if we had been lifelong friends.”
This was Dan Iannuzzi, a man who gave a smile to
everybody, a fascinating storyteller who stopped to chat with his
readers and always worked hard to give in to their requests.
Subscribers who visited our office always got a glimpse of Dan
whether it was a handshake or a simple gesture of hello. His
readers were very precious to him.
When he organized the contest for the 50th
anniversary of Corriere Canadese, he went on air personally
on Ciao RadioCorriere, announcing the names of his winning readers,
congratulating them, but especially thanking them. “We are their
voice,” he would often say, when handing me yet another piece of
community news at deadline as the pages were being closed.
There was no news more
important than that of “his” community.
The Italian community knew this, despite the fact
that many people tried, and continue, to try to hamper him. Even
when there were obstacles, Dan always looked straight at his
opponents, and then disarmed them with a glint in his eye and a
captivating smile. His warmth and great sense of humour, which he
never lost even in his darkest moments, were his weapons of choice.
The Dan I knew and whom I like to remember was
passionate: in order to achieve his goals, he sometimes took some
unconventional steps, but he always rolled up his sleeves. He often
told me of his early years in publishing, when he tried and
contained the debts of the newspaper he had founded by composing
articles himself, using lead type. “I improvised as a typographer
and publisher.” With growing confidence, he won the gamble and
turned his dream into a reality that endures 50 years later.
Like Peter Pan, he was adventurous and madly in love
with life; he took every risk to keep his goal in sight: giving
voice to the Italian community. Corriere Canadese is his
living dream. The dream, then, inspired him to embrace and make real
the vision of Canadian multiculturalism; with that, new ventures
began: Channel 47 (now OMNI 1), the world’s first multilingual
television station, Tandem Weekly, the Spanish tri-weekly
Correo Canadiense, the nine monthly Town Crier papers,
the Portuguese weekly Nove Ilhas, the Montreal weekly Italian
language Insieme, and last, but not least, the pending World/Télemonde,
Canada’s first bi-lingual, multicultural television service for all
Canadians.
Dan didn’t sit on the sidelines, but he never went
overboard to impose himself either, even though he had in his hands
a multicultural publishing group that was unprecedented in Canada.
His metaphor for life was his memories, which resurfaced every time
he addressed the staff during the Christmas dinners. To his
employees and his readers, he often spoke of himself, of his parents
in Montréal, of his children, combining everything together in a
beautiful mosaic.
Dan Iannuzzi deeply cared about people, “I know
that, right now, you feel underwater, and you’d like to go back,” he
told me one winter day a few years ago, at a moment when my will to
stay in Canada was vacillating. As he put a picture of a sad-looking
dog on my desk, I realized it was the first time he had stopped by
my office. Although at the time he knew nothing about me, he had
understood me on the fly. If I’m still here, he’s also part of the
reason.
***
Smiling and Surreal
by Antonio Maglio
(Originally published in Tandem,
December 12, 2004)
During the
negotiations with La Repubblica, Dan gave me the broad lines for
framing the discussions, which concerned the diffusion of that
newspaper in Canada with Corriere Canadese. “Proceed as far as you
can get,” he told me. “Should problems arise, I’ll step in.”
The phone line
between Toronto and Rome was red hot for a month, and eventually I
had to fly to Italy. “Here, at La Repubblica, they say we need to
‘file’ our costs,” I phoned him from Rome. “We shall ‘file’ them,
then: there’s plenty of files in Canada,” he replied, and he was
smiling because he was already imagining a coup-de-théatre. He
staged it when the deputy general manager of La Repubblica,
Giancarlo Turrini, came to Toronto for the official signing
ceremony. When everything was said and done, and after the
liturgical handshake, Dan produced an elegant package and gave it to
Turrini. “Oh, thank you,” said Turrini. “That’s very kind you, you
shouldn’t have.” And he opened the package. Inside, he found a big
blacksmith’s file.
Turrini, who got
the joke, smiled. “I will use it,” he fired back, “for my manicure.”
And Dan, unflinching: “Well, if it’s too small, I can find you a
bigger one.”
A nice friendship
between Dan, Turrini, and myself was born. The three of us then went
to the U.S. and South America in order to duplicate the experiment
that was so successful in Toronto. Ours were business trips, of
course, but they were also get-togethers, where Dan was the showman.
He was not only the most knowledgeable about the problems of Italian
publications abroad, but also a natural protagonist.
That happened also
in Caracas, where Gaetano Bafile had some difficulties in assessing
the costs of this operation because his Voce d’Italia was still a
weekly (it would go daily within a few months), and Dan made a few
calculations on a scrap of paper, estimating revenues and expenses
for a daily newspaper. He got them right, despite being in Venezuela
and not in Canada. “How did you do it?” asked him Turrini. “I’ll
tell you a secret,” Dan replied with his smile. “While I was
writing, I wasn’t holding my pen, but my magic wand.”
Bafile offered us a
sumptuous dinner in an Italian restaurant. There were some 15 people
at our table, and many among them wanted to keep discussing
work-related matters. Dan, however, promptly dismissed the idea. “No
talking of work at the table,” and he monopolized everybody’s
attention with some light-hearted tales. He told us of a bar in
Viterbo where he had been mistaken for Federico Fellini (the
resemblance was indeed impressive) and asked for ‘his’ autograph.
Unfazed, he signed dozens of times “F. Fellini”.
Turrini sat beside
him at that table. “Tell me,” he asked Dan with his characteristic
Emilian accent, “how do you manage to tell these fascinating tales
and at the same time eat so heartily?” Dan looked at him with a
disarming smile. “Giancarlo,” said Dan, “if you don’t put in a coin,
the juke-box will play no music. If I want to tell good tales, I
need to fill up.”
He enjoyed playing
tricks on me during an endless trip that led us from Toronto to
Melbourne via Vancouver, on behalf of Consorzio dei Giornali
Italiani Transoceanici which Dan chaired and I vice-chaired. I don’t
even remember how many hours it took us. Far too many for me, who am
claustrophobic and suffer jet-lag horribly. I saw light and dark
alternating from my window, and he asked me, “Is it 4pm or 4am?”
“It’s night,” I replied, seeing dark outside. “No, it’s morning!” he
said. It wasn’t true: he was merely joking, just to kill time.
Finally, he added, in a consolatory tone, “Anyway, don’t lose heart:
at 12 we’ll do a three-hour stopover in Honolulu, and you’ll be able
to stretch your legs.”
We touched down in
Honolulu at midnight. “Didn’t you say that we would be here at 12?”
I asked him. And Dan, always disarming, replied, “Sure. Look at your
watch: isn’t it 12?”
God willing, we
made it to Melbourne. Two days later, we were on our way back.
“We’ll stop one day in Sydney,” he told me, “to catch our breath and
visit the city.” Some visit! We slept like logs, even on board the
ship that toured the bay, where we risked a sunstroke. “We didn’t
see anything,” Dan remarked after boarding our plane, “but on the
other hand we carry with us quite a bit of Australian sun.” In fact,
we were beet red. When people back home inquired about where we had
been, he replied, with a Bohemian air, “We went on holiday in
Honolulu and Sidney.” We had traveled half the globe in six days.
One day, RAI — in
its goodness — found out that there was an Italian-language daily
newspaper in Canada, Corriere Canadese, and asked for an interview
with the publisher — Dan Iannuzzi — and the associate publisher —
myself. Everything went fine, but the interview aired at 2am. “They
couldn’t air it during the day,” commented Dan, “otherwise we would
have brought their audience up, humiliating programmes that cost
them millions.”
My dear Dan, I like
to remember you like this. Light-hearted, surreal, smiling even in
critical moments. I take your smartness, your intuition, your
entrepreneurial spirit, your stubbornness (just ask the CRTC) for
granted. Those are gifts that even the Parliaments in Ottawa and
Toronto recognized. I prefer to keep thinking of you as the friend
who nine years ago, in Rome, told me, “Why don’t you come and spend
some time in Canada? People never grow old there, because they’re
always under ice.” I came, and thanks to you, Dan, I lived an
exceptional professional and human experience. Alas, it flew by far
too fast. “The sad side of beautiful things,” you told me once, “is
that they don’t last forever.” Like your life.
A painful,
astonished emptiness is left in mine.
***
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