When I first began covering Springfield in the mid 1990s, I quickly began learning the city’s landmarks, both formal (the Campanile, Forest Park, the old graveyards that my friend Tom Devine introduced me to) and informal (Mom & Rico’s, Gus & Paul’s, the City Line Café and Van Horn Spa).
In the latter category fell the old white Cadillac that sat parked proudly (if not necessarily legally) in front of the lovely old building at Elm Street, just across from City Hall. And I quickly learned who owned that beauty of a vehicle: Tony Ravosa Sr., the retired attorney, businessman and gadfly who for years was as key a part of downtown Springfield as its bricks-and-mortar institutions. Last weekend, Ravosa died, at age 78.
I sometimes found myself thinking of Ravosa in tandem with another Springfield businessman of his generation, the late Peter Picknelly; indeed, in their later years the two men engaged in some very public scuffling over Picknelly’s purchase of Ravosa’s Elm Street building, where the latter had made both his office and his home. Both were old-school patriarchs, with a fondness for old cars and an unabashed love for their home city. But while Picknelly might have been the more successful of the two, Ravosa was the more colorful, feuding quite spiritedly, for instance, with the Springfield Republican.
While there was no love lost between Ravosa and Republican big wigs like David Starr, he was (for those of us not working for the Republican, at least) a reporter’s dream, a personable fellow with lots of juicy stories to tell, and the time to tell them. His inability to avoid controversy—indeed, perhaps his zeal for it—was apparently passed on to his son, Tony Jr., who made all kinds of enemies during his time on the Springfield City Council by going after some of the biggest establishment power players, including a failed run against Richie Neal for Congress.
Devine offers a great history of the younger Ravosa’s political career on his blog, as well as a warts-and-all remembrance of “Old Man Ravosa”—including a mysterious apparent assassination attempt in the 1980s.
“Despite all the controversies however, it was never in doubt that Tony Ravosa loved Springfield dearly,” Devine writes. “While others of his stature fled to the suburbs, he was one of the few who stayed, living and working in the heart of downtown to the bitter end. We are unlikely to see the likes of Tony Ravosa in Springfield again, and I believe we are poorer for it.”
