IT WASN’T a long walk, just a block south on Park Street from College Court, where they lived, then right, up Regent Street a few more blocks, an easy stroll in the cool evening air. Vito Parisi and his young friend George Fabian didn’t talk much. Fabian was just a high school kid on that night in April 1948, and Parisi was preoccupied with what lay ahead. He must have feared the worst. In the end, he made history.
Parisi, a Madison native who was responsible for the loudest sustained roar in the storied history of the University of Wisconsin Field House, died quietly in Colorado last week. He was 80 and had been suffering from pneumonia and other illnesses.