Column: On My Watch – Celebrating Tony Marzullo’s 95th Birthday
By Anne W. Semmes
It’s not every day one gets invited to an Italian birthday party at a restaurant (T&J in Port Chester) where the Italian food flows through five courses, and there are dozens of family members with some stretching across four generations. But then it was town legend Tony Marzullo who has graced this town with his green thumb – you see his trees planted beside Cos Cob Library, and elsewhere, and his plantings at the Cos Cob VFW Park on Strickland Road.
You might have seen him at the recent Greenwich Tree Conservancy Tree Party at McArdle’s talking with his friends Tree Warden Greg Kramer and First Selectman Fred Camillo. You will likely see him at summer’s end at the Greenwich Botanical Center’s Dahlia Show, his favorite flower that has won him top prizes. His tomatoes are also a prize, and he can claim membership of that once august Westchester-Fairfield Horticultural Society.
You can read about him in his Oral History at Greenwich Library and learn how his grandparents arrived here in 1893 off a ship from Naples, from Rose, Italy, found “in the toe” of that country. The family set up a greenhouse – 15-feet wide by a 130-feet long in 1924, under the name of Frank Marzullo and Sons on Valley Road in the Cos Cob area. Tony would be pleased to make his home in Cos Cob and raise his family with his now late wife, Shirley.
So Happy Birthday Tony (actually May 8) Marzullo, and happy dahlia growing in your 95th year!
