Tommy Longo in 1960
When Antonino Longo arrived in Toronto in the early 1950s, he found a job in a metal foundry. The work was hard and the hours were long. He came home coughing from the polluted air, his arms scarred with burns. His three eldest sons pleaded with him to find another line of work.
"The only time I'll quit is when you boys have a business of your own," he told them.
And so in 1956, two Longo brothers - Tommy and Joe - borrowed $10,000 to buy a five-year lease on the Broadway Fruit Market, 2,000 square feet in a building at Yonge and Castlefield Streets. And not long after, Antonino Longo did indeed join the company. That store was the modest start of what became a mini-empire: when Tommy died Jan. 30 at age 76 after a brief battle with leukemia, the extended family oversaw a chain of 23 Longo stores in Greater Toronto, employing more than 4,200 people.
According to those who knew him best, however, what set Tommy Innocenzo Longo apart was not his considerable business achievements, but his character - his wisdom, leadership skills, work ethic and generosity.
Born Sept. 25, 1934 in Termini Imerese, Sicily, Italy, Longo began learning the lessons of the soil at age nine - helping his father on the family's 30-hectare farm, a two-hour ride by mule cart, near the village of Buonfornello. During the Second World War, when the Allies bombed nearby Palermo, the family moved into the mountains, a period Tommy would later remember as "a holiday." But the war years were difficult; when it was time for Tommy to wear a suit for his first communion, his mother Rosa sewed it from a piece of linen tablecloth. For his sister Zina's ceremony, Rosa recycled her own wedding dress.
But post-war conditions weren't appreciably better and in 1949, seeking a better life, Antonino Longo went to Winnipeg, where one of Rosa's brothers had earlier settled. Tommy arrived the following year, in 1950, aboard the Vulcania - the rest of the Longo family emigrated in 1951 - and immediately went to work for another uncle in his Toronto grocery store. By that time, he had already absorbed the virtues of hard work and had a solid foundation of agrarian knowledge. He would continue to apply those lessons for the next five decades, making early morning six-days-a-week trips to the city's Ontario Food Terminal to purchase fruit and vegetables, and helping the Longo stores earn a reputation for selling high-quality produce.
"For my father," says his son, Anthony, "being in the food business was not work. It was fun. He made it fun. Right to the end, he was visiting stores, saying hello to employees and customers."
But by his own admission, Tommy could be a stern taskmaster. "God forbid that there was lettuce with a little bit of brown in it," his sister Mary, who took telephone orders, would later recall. "He'd throw it across the store."
In 1959, Tommy married Zina Battaglia, 19, - also the daughter of new Italian immigrants. For a number of years, his wife Zina also worked in the store and later contributed an old family sausage recipe that has since been developed into a product line with eight flavours of pork and three of chicken.
When the original Yonge Street lease expired, the brothers faced a problem. They'd been so successful that the landlord was demanding a huge increase in rent. Reluctantly, they abandoned the Yonge Street site and, a short time later, relocated the store to Toronto's east end, buying a dark, rundown property at Woodbine and Mortimer for $5,000 and borrowing another $12,000 to renovate it. Technically, it became the first Longo's Food Market. The first week, they grossed $600. A few months later, they were at $4,000 and by the time they sold it, in 1971, weekly sales were $11,000. By then, they already opened a 3,000-square-foot store in Malton, the first of a constellation of Longo outlets in the region. Of the 23 stores, 19 were opened after 1989, the latest last year in Maple Leaf Square beside the Air Canada Centre.
For most of the early decades, Tommy ran the business in consultation with two brothers, Joe and Gus. Although new locations were chosen with careful eye to demographics, Longo saw the growth strategy as a way "to provide career opportunities to team members," says Anthony Longo, now the company's CEO. " 'If we don't open new stores,' my father used to say, 'all the best people will leave.' It was part of his philosophy of helping people to be the best that they can be."
Away from the business, Longo became an enthusiastic card player, gardener and golfer, playing at the Bayview Country Club and in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he maintained a winter home. His golf outings were usually accompanied by drop-ins at various Logo stores. A devout Catholic, he attended church every Sunday, helped underwrite the Salt + Light Catholic Television Network, and remained active within the Toronto Italian community.
"He had a very clear understanding of the difference between right and wrong and he was very clear about the importance of helping your community, your family and friends," says Anthony Longo.
Under the auspices of the Longo Family Charitable Foundation, the company supported dozens of charitable causes, including disease prevention and education for families, children and youth projects, Big Brothers and Sisters, and child nutrition and food aid programs. Longo's passion for golf inspired the annual Fore Kids' Sake Charity Golf Tournament, which has raised about $1.8- million to support organizations in the Toronto area.
During the SARS scare in Ontario in 2003, when many suppliers were refusing to make deliveries to hospitals, Longo ordered a company truck to take 400 cases of bottled water to the York Central Hospital Foundation, and never charged for the delivery.
Longo's niece, Roseanne Longo, chairwoman of the family foundation, said, "Tommy set the bar high with his example of a strong work ethic and living our values of honesty and mutual respect. He made everybody feel special. No matter who you were in the company, or in the family, he always made sure you felt appreciated and valued. My sisters and I used to always joke with each other about which of us was his favourite niece. I feel privileged to have been part of his life."
Charles Schwartz, Longo's lawyer for 43 years, says: "Tommy was a special man, an honourable and a happy man. He led by example. If there was something that needed to be done, he did it. He had the wisdom, the ability to get people to work together. I was an articling student when I met him and he mentored me. I watched how he handled people. He never imposed decisions, but searched for a consensus. Among the people I've met in my career, he'd rank right at the top, along with the late Eph Diamond of Cadillac Fairview. I think he could have been anything. He led in the most unassuming way, so much so that you never knew he was leading, but he was."
Diagnosed with leukemia in October, Longo underwent two rounds of chemotherapy. The second set proved difficult and he contracted pneumonia. When another virus attacked, his body was unable to fight it.
Tommy Longo leaves his wife of 51 years, Zina, his four children Anthony (Gay), Joey (Donna), Rosie (Bryan) and Marie (Danny) and 13 grandchildren.