We asked several people who knew Vinnie Guarriello best for their remembrances. It was an honor and pleasure to know him. I and many other people in the business learned a lot from him. After retirement, he spent a lot of time with his family. He led a long¸ productive and happy life. He made a lot of money, for himself and for scores of other people. He stood by his factory and his products, his reps and the dealers he respected. Vinnie made them choose.īut Vinnie could also be extremely kind and he was fiercely loyal to his friends. Many of the Blodgett rep groups also sold Frymaster. After Blodgett bought Pitco, he aligned the Blodgett and Pitco rep groups. One of the realities of the equipment business he taught me early on was “You live by the chains, you die by the chains,” his aphorism explaining the boom and bust cycles of chain roll-outs. He could sell to dealers on The Bowery in New York (and the dealer rows in all the other major cities in the U.S.). But if you failed, you didn’t work for him for long. He mentored many of the leading reps in the industry. If you performed for him, everything was fine. They were among the most successful people in this business. They drank and played cards together, bought and drove fast, expensive cars and had a lot of fun. They ran around with Barbara Greene, (who was our other sales rep at FES, but had entered the industry working for Maione at Southbend) Art Conway, who owned Foodservice Product News and a few others. Dean Hutchison founded Dean and Dito Dean. John Mosley was head of sales at Star Manufacturing. Fred Maione ran sales for Southbend Range. George Shelley ran Shelley Equipment and helped assembled Alco Standard’s equipment conglomerate (most of the brands are now part of Manitowoc Foodservice). He became friends with a group of powerful industry executives. Blodgett was his home for decades, though as Nelson Deusebio, who worked for Vinnie for years, points out below, Vinnie remained a New Yorker, not a Vermonter. Ken Jennings, the longtime rep from New England, mentions meeting Vinnie in 1956 when he became head of Blodgett sales. I don’t know exactly how he came to the equipment business. The youngest of six kids in an Italian family, he grew up on the streets of Manhattan and served in the Marines. He was elegant, craggily handsome and could be very, very tough. His impact on the industry and the people in it was profound. It’s difficult to overestimate the influence Vinnie wielded in the equipment business from the late 1950s through the 1990s. After I’d been in the job six months or so, he told his friend Paul Considine (former publisher of FES and the FES sales rep who called on him): “That kid Ashton smokes too much, but he seems to know what he’s talking about. I’m not making this up he had that kind of power.īut Vinnie, in his sarcastic, back-handed way, gave me his blessing. Head of sales for Blodgett and Pitco (Blodgett had recently purchased Pitco), key member of the so-called foodservice rat pack, and a big advertiser in FES, I’d have been in big trouble if Vinnie didn’t approve of me. When I became chief editor at Foodservice Equipment Specialist in 1982, Vinnie was a towering figure in the industry. Like many in the foodservice equipment business, I probably owe my job to Vinnie Guarriello.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |