“Youth is full of sport” is written above Bob Vishno’s photo in the Branford (Conn.) High School yearbook of 1949, a fitting saying for one who would go on to coach golf, basketball, and baseball at Sag Harbor’s Pierson High School for a generation, a 31-year tenure that he and his late wife, Lillian, who also was a Sag Harbor teacher, set forth upon in 1956.
Vishno died at home in Sag Harbor on Friday at 93 of aspirational pneumonia. He had only been ill for a month, said one of his daughters, Dana Truxillo, who, at her father’s insistence, had brought him home following a brief stay at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital a week before he died. “He was ready to go,” she said Monday, adding that her father very much missed his wife of 71 years, who had died a little more than a year ago.
In an interview that appeared on this page last winter, Vishno recalled with a laugh that he and his wife thought they could walk to Sag Harbor for an interview with Pierson’s superintendent once they’d disembarked from the Cross Sound Ferry in Orient. “We’d left the car in Connecticut to save a buck and a half. Luckily, there was a gentleman on the ferry from Westhampton, a helluva nice guy, who said, ‘I’ll take you.’ He drove us from Orient to Greenport to Shelter Island to Sag Harbor, where Crozier was waiting for us.”
While the interviews with the superintendent and school board members went well, he said — they were both hired as elementary teachers — it was really his wife who had sealed the deal, marveling at “all this beautiful water.”
Years later, Vishno, who also served for 17 years as the school district’s athletic director, remarked in a Sag Harbor Express interview that “it’s the relationships you build” that largely endeared him to the village. “That’s why we have stayed here all of these years,” he told Nancy Remkus.
When a former East Hampton Star reporter, Linda Sherry, interviewed the couple on the occasion of their retirement in June of 1987, he said, “We can look back and know there are a lot of people we have helped along the way. . . . Those are the things that really warm my heart.”
Following retirement, Vishno continued to teach golf at the Poxabogue Golf Center in Sagaponack, and taught golf aboard Queen Elizabeth 2 cruises, meeting, he said, a lot of interesting people and seeing much of the world.
Jeff Peters, whom Vishno coached in his high school days, and who visited him frequently in recent years — bringing him a dozen oysters from the American Hotel and a vanilla shake in recent days — maintains that “Coach must be one of the very few in the state with 300-plus wins, or pretty close to that, in baseball, basketball, and golf.”
“If I had to describe Coach Vishno in one word, it would be ‘gentleman,’ ” Peters told Remkus. “He taught us discipline, respect, and to be on time. He was tough, but we knew he cared deep down. If you wanted something, he made you work for it. He brought out the bestinyou....”
“He was a lot of fun to play for,” Jack Youngs said in that same article. “He was a wonderful personality, always smiling and good-natured. We were very blessed to have him in our lives.”
Paul Zaykowski, another of Vishno’s former players with whom Remkus spoke, said, “He taught us the important lessons having to do with all the ‘core’ values, especially character. . . . There is only one Coach Vishno — he changed young men’s lives.”
Robert Vishno was born in Branford, Conn., on Sept. 22, 1931, the son of Herman and Anna Sinkievich Vishno. His father was a high school teacher; his mother a homemaker.
He was a three-sport athlete — football, basketball, and baseball — at
Branford High School and spent a year at Milford Prep before spending a year at the University of Colorado, which had awarded him a football scholarship, and three years at New Haven State Teachers College (now Southern Connecticut State University). He was to earn a master’s degree in education there as well. After college, Vishno, who was an end, played semi-pro football in Branford and New Haven. He was also a third baseman and pitched in baseball.
East Hampton’s late Hall of Fame boys basketball coach, Ed Petrie, and Vishno were fast friends from the moment they met in 1958. Initially, Vishno assisted Petrie at Pierson, taking over the varsity when Petrie moved to East Hampton in 1969.
“I was Ed’s assistant and his best friend for ever and ever,” Vishno said in last winter’s interview. “He was way ahead of the curve — he got things going here by starting Biddy league. He brought them up from here to here” he said, raising his hand from tot to teen level.
“As long as I was able to walk, I was going,” Vishno said when Petrie was honored by the Frank McGuire Foundation at the New York Athletic Club in
2006. “Ed Petrie is one of those guys who come along only once in a while, who has instilled in his players the persistence, dedication, and sense of loyalty that he always had.”
Insofar as Pierson High basketball went, everything came together for Vishno and his players in the 1977-78 season when the Whalers won the state Class C championship, defeating Alexander Hamilton 71-68 in the final, thanks to Peter Schaefer’s two free throws made with seven seconds left to play in overtime.
Fire trucks, with horns blasting and sirens wailing, met the bus on the team’s return to Sag Harbor in the wee hours. “Everybody was there in the gym — it was way late at night, 2 a.m.,” Peters recalled. “Dr. Annacone” — another educator whom Vishno championed — “declared that there would be no school the next day. That’s the year Queen had that big hit, ‘We Are the Champions.’ That song was blaring, and there was Bob, smoking a cigar, with the biggest smile on his face.”
“Gee, what a super weekend,” Vishno was quoted by The Star’s former sportswriter, Steve Bromley Jr., as having said at the time. “Full of joy, and we’ve got a lifetime memory to store away forever.”
Besides his daughters, Truxillo, who lives in Franklinton, La., and Mary Beth Armstrong of Southampton, Vishno is survived by five grandchildren, Meredith Schrader, Terrence Michael Truxillo, Adrienne Bryan, Mark Robert Truxillo, and Lauren E. Truxillo, and 12 great-grandchildren. His son, Robert Jr., predeceased him.
Truxillo said a funeral Mass at St. Andrew’s Catholic Church in Sag Harbor is tentatively set for March 29 at 11 a.m. Burial is to follow in Oakland Cemetery.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Sag Harbor Ambulance Squad, Sag Harbor Helpers, or to a charity of one’s choice.