Melvin Bassi

Bassi was born on November 14, 1926, to an Italian family in Charleroi, Pennsylvania; his mother Clara was an Italian translator for travel agency and his father Bruno worked in a local mill.[1][2] He graduated from Charleroi High School in 1944, where he had played football, basketball, and baseball.[1][3] He later married his high school sweetheart, Lillian, with whom he had four children.[1][2]

After graduation from high school, he joined the United States Navy and became a signalman during World War II.[1] During a typhoon that grounded the destroyer on which he was a shipman, he and his crewmates became stranded on Japanese-occupied Okinawa.[1] They avoided capture and were later rescued.[1][2] He later served on the USS Pawnee, where he coincidentally served with a cousin from Charleroi.[1]

After returning from the service, he became the first member of his family to attend college, studying economics at Washington & Jefferson College.[2] There, he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and played baseball for four years.[3] He played football alongside "Deacon" Dan Towler and Chuck Heberling, for a year before an injury forced him from the game.[3] Following graduation in 1949, he was offered a job with a Fortune 500 company on the condition that he anglicize his name to drop the "i." Bassi refused and enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.[2]

He died of a heart attack on May 2, 2007, at Jefferson Regional Medical Center in Jefferson Hills, Pennsylvania.[2] He was buried on May 7, 2007 at Monongahela Cemetery. He was a youth baseball coach for 18 years and a regional football referee for decades.[2] He worked as a football referee for high school and college games, turning down an offer to be a referee for professional football.[1]

In 1973, he was named to the Washington & Jefferson College Board of Trustees.[3]

He had a fascination with the American Civil War, visiting historical sites in Tennessee just days before his death.[2]

During the 1980s, he was a key figure in raising $1.5 million for the Mon Valley YMCA.[2]

In 1998, he received Washington & Jefferson College's Entrepreneur of the Year award.[3] In 2005, he was named to the Washington & Jefferson College Athletic Hall of Fame and received the Robert M. Murphy Award.[3] In 2006, he received the Washington County Chamber of Commerce Exceptional Community Commitment Award.[8]

Upon his passing, the Mon Valley Regional Chamber of Commerce began the Melvin B. Bassi Memorial Golf Tournament in his honor, with the proceeds going to Leadership Washington County.[9] During the 2007 Commencement for Washington & Jefferson College, President Tori Haring-Smith dedicated a large portion of her speech to the graduating class to Bassi's legacy.[7]