Tony Vivolo, 82, Built Big Real-Estate Empire

Tony Vivolo, a product of Rainier Valley's "Garlic Gulch," quit school in the eighth grade and was too busy working to go back.

When he died Thursday, Nov. 7, of heart failure, Mr. Vivolo had built an estate of almost 20 pieces of commercial real estate that includes supermarkets and fast-food outlets. He was 82.

Mr. Vivolo died in his Alki Point condominium where he had been in bed for 18 months. "He didn't want to go into a nursing home," said Iona, his wife of 57 years.

"He worked himself around the clock" and he was a good provider, she said.

Mr. Vivolo entered the business world at age 13, trading his school books for flowers. He and a partner bought the flowers at the Pike Place Market, made them into corsages and floral bouquets, sprinkled cologne on them, then sold them in the evenings to men taking wives or girlfriends to nightclubs, or to women in the red-light district.

Not too many years later Mr. Vivolo opened a produce market on First Avenue and later moved it to the Market.

Barely in his 20s, he again moved his produce outlet - Tony's Farm Market - to the 4700 block of California Avenue Southwest.

For 18 years, Mr. Vivolo kept the store open seven days a week until about 9:30 at night, said Joseph Vivolo, one of Mr. Vivolo's six sons.

"He was a hard-working man from the school of hard knocks," Joseph Vivolo said.

By the time Mr. Vivolo was 25, he had purchased his first property, a building on Beacon Hill that housed a number of stores including a meat market. "When he paid that off, he found another property and went to a banker here in West Seattle and worked out a deal to buy the property," his wife said.

He usually got up at 3 a.m. to get first choice at railroad cars of produce. "He was very finicky. He loved produce but he wanted only the best. And at each Easter, he sold 5,000 lilies," she said.

For five of the years he owned Tony's he also operated a five-acre vegetable farm in Tukwila.

"He was one of a kind. But he found time to toss the ball around with us on Sundays," Joseph Vivolo recalled. On weekdays, "He was so tired, he would eat and go right to bed," his wife said.

Carefully selling and buying real estate at the same time, Mr. Vivolo built his holdings to the point where he could retire from the produce business in the mid-1950s.

Al DeFelice was a sometime partner of Mr. Vivolo. "I had some money, and he was a smart businessman and he knew a lot more than I did. He was always looking for something, and he did right by me. He made money for me," DeFelice said.

Later Mr. Vivolo had leases from Safeway for its University District store and he leased five Taco Time restaurants.

Other survivors include sons Ronald, Steven, Nicholas, Vance and Vincent. Services are scheduled for 1 p.m. Thursday at Calvary Catholic Cemetery's mausoleum, 5041 35th Ave. N.E.