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Tony Gianunzio
92-year-old author proud to be a Romantic by
Theresa Coty O’Neil
T
ony Gianunzio had a sense that he was different. As the seventh son of 11 children, Gianunzio grew up in the Upper Peninsula in a bustling Italian immigrant family where individuality was encouraged. A keen observer, he soaked up everything he saw and still wanted more. “I had a crazy notion in my young life that I wanted to know everything and everybody. I even had a short period of a few weeks when I was sad I couldn’t know everybody in the world,” says Gianunzio, 91, a retired Portage English teacher, former newspaper writer and now book author, whose first book, The Last Romantic War: A Blind Date with History, was self-published last year through the services of Black Lake Studio & Press, in Holland, Mich.
“I always had a love for finding out how something works. I liked to get down to the essence of a thing,” he says. It wasn’t until he was 47 and enrolled in a graduate literature course at Western Michigan University in 1969 that Gianunzio realized there was a name for what he was: a Romantic. “I wish I had known earlier because I spent a lot of time thinking about how I got this way,” he says. “I knew it wasn’t typical.” Romanticism, an intellectual movement that began in the late 18th century, “emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, Tony Gianunzio wrote The Last Romantic War: A Blind Date With History about his time in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II.
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