Dick Torio

1929 - 2014

(News article) Dick Torio, a former All-American wrestler and the longtime owner of a legendary West Toledo fitness club, died on Tuesday. He was 84.

Mr. Torio died at Hospice of Northwest Ohio in Perrysburg Township. A cause of death was not immediately available.

A former All-American wrestler at the University of Toledo and a Korean War veteran, Mr. Torio opened Torio's Health Club on Berwick Avenue in 1957, where it remained until closing in 2013.

While Mr. Torio was known for his dedication to fitness and to a healthy lifestyle, his daughter, Sheila, spoke of her father's presence within the community and his attributes as someone with networking skills.

Each Christmas, Ms. Torio said, her father would string up the holiday cards the family received - cards that came from neighbors in Toledo and from as far away as Japan, Turkey, and Iran. It was a testament, she said, to her father's gift as a conversationalist.

"He never knew a stranger," Ms. Torio said. "Everyone he met, he reached out to them. That's why he had so many enduring relationships. Any age, any generation, he made a friend."

Born Dominic Torio on Dec. 31, 1929, in Jersey City, N.J., he grew up a child of the Great Depression. In the years immediately after the Depression, his family did whatever it could to make ends meet, including "home work" in the tenements of the New York City suburbs. That would include anything from sewing buttons on coats to shelling peanuts inside the home, and those tasks meant extra money for families.

"My dad saw it as a golden opportunity," Ms. Torio said. "That gave his family access to work they may not have had. He shined shoes. He offered to carry peoples' groceries up four flights of steps in a tenement just to make a few coins. He was always a very busy person, a person who saw an opportunity and took it. He was a go-getter. That was him. That's who he was."

John Robinson Block, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Blade, mourned Mr. Torio's passing.

"Anyone privileged enough to know Dick Torio loved him and was lucky he chose to spend his life in our city," Mr. Block said.

Mr. Torio was a multisport athlete at Jersey City's Lincoln High School, but in his final season of high school football, he underwent surgery to insert steel plates into a broken arm and was in a cast for two months. A doctor told him he would never participate in sports again.

Mr. Torio wouldn't hear of it. He went to the University of Toledo with childhood friend Jim Vitale, a former Rogers High School athletic director, and joined the Rockets' wrestling program.

"We came here on a Greyhound bus in 1949," Mr. Torio told The Blade in 2012. "I went to Toledo partially because [UT coach] Joe Scalzo was starting wrestling there. We didn't have wrestling in high school."

Mr. Torio became the first college wrestler to earn All-America status at three weight classes: In 1951, he placed third in the NCAA tournament at 177 pounds; in 1952, he took fourth at heavyweight, and in 1953, he placed third at 191.

He later became a wrestling coach at UT and was one of the sport's top international referees, working at the summer Olympic games in 1960, 1964, 1972, and 1976. In 1968, he was manager of the U.S. Greco-Roman wrestling team. Mr. Torio was inducted into the AAU National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

Mr. Torio coached Greg Wojciechowski, an Olympic heavyweight wrestler and an NCAA champion at the University of Toledo. He said Mr. Torio had a natural gift for teaching, as well as a strong sense of family values and a passion for the sport of wrestling.

"He was a giving person," Mr. Wojciechowski said. "He used to run amateur wrestling tournaments in the area as a volunteer, and he would travel around the country, doing it all as a volunteer. He was giving, and he was good at what he did."

As the owner of Torio's Health Club, he ran a venue that drew a cross-section of Toledo residents, from Olympic-caliber wrestlers to local judges and blue-collar workers.

In the gym, Mr. Torio was known to cut an intimidating presence with both his intellect and his physical stature. In working with gym members, sometimes he found the big issues and emphasized cross-training. Other times he'd find where small adjustments needed to be made.

"His favorite thing was to let you do an exercise that was particularly difficult," said Jon Richardson, a Toledo lawyer. "He'd let you get to the end of it and then he'd say, 'I don't think you're doing that right.' He'd tell you do to it over, and that was his all-time favorite thing to do to somebody."

Mr. Richardson admitted that he could never appease Mr. Torio with what the gym owner considered the "perfect squat." But he remembered when an Olympic-caliber wrestler pleaded with Mr. Torio that he couldn't bench press a heavier weight.

Mr. Torio told him to stop doing bench presses and to focus on squats for two weeks, even as the wrestler argued that he wanted to improve his bench press. When the wrestler returned to the bench press, he found he could lift additional weight.

"He knew there was a right way and a wrong way to do something, and that you maximized the benefit if you did it the right way," Mr. Richardson said. "For Mr. Torio, a subtle change was an essential change."

But unlike current fitness centers and gyms, Mr. Torio reached out to every individual who walked into his facility, whether it was a high school student or a senior citizen.

"You do not see that now," said Don Harbaugh, a Toledo resident and the head of HDD Holdings. "At that time, this was a real gym. There were wrestling mats and free weights, and discipline was needed to exercise properly.

"Dick wouldn't let you get away with doing anything that wasn't correct. He helped your discipline and your self-worth."

The gym also provided an intellectual haven. Mr. Harbaugh recalled that Mr. Torio's gruff exterior belied his intelligence and his affinity toward others. Mr. Torio would pin newspaper clippings on the walls of the facility and underline passages that struck a chord in them, a conversation-starter for gym members.

"You came in to release the stress of the day and to get physical relief, but the mental side of it was just as important," Mr. Harbaugh said. "Dick was a developer of your character and your intellect, and there was a feeling for your community and for the people who needed your help. It was much, much more than a gym. There was the feeling that it was also a classroom at the gym."

Her father's gym and his family, Sheila Torio said, were the focus of his life.

"He was always reaching out to people, and his favorite avenue was through health," she said. "Whether it was through sports or helping people become healthy."

Mr. Torio is survived by his wife, Barbara Grochowski of Toledo; seven children, Mary Torio, Coady Torio, Sheila Torio, Gino Torio, Tony Torio, Angela Beauregard, and Theresa Torio; and 13 grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his first wife, Ann Cody, in 1977.

Arrangements are by Blanchard-Strabler Funeral Home. The family will receive visitors at 9 a.m. Saturday at Gesu Roman Catholic Parish, followed by a Mass at 11 a.m.

Contact Blade sports writer Rachel Lenzi at: rlenzi@theblade.com, 419-724-6510, or on Twitter @RLenziBlade.