Virgil Fassio

Steel City to Emerald City Virgil Fassio

A FIRST-GENERATION Italian-American, Virgil Fassio lived the American Dream. From 1978-1993, Fassio was the tough, energetic publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a civic-minded newspaperman who liked making things happen--and happen they did at the feisty, colorful morning paper beloved by loyal readers. He worked tirelessly helping make Seattle a better place to live and work. He loved baseball and travel, too, almost as much as newspapers, and had traveled to more than 80 countries by the time he turned 90 in 2017. The author had wanted to be a diplomat. But in a chance conversation at a Pittsburgh bar in 1947, the 20-year-old Navy veteran decided to start a neighborhood newspaper. This was the start of his 46-year publishing career. Fassio became a respected industry leader working on newspapers in Pennsylvania and Delaware on his way to Seattle with career-building stops at the Detroit Free Press and Chicago Tribune. Though he came to know presidents, politicians, and other famous people, and despite his many accomplishments, Fassio remained true to his roots in a mixed, working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.