LYNN — Dionne Warwick may not have known her way to San Jose — at least not back in 1968 when she recorded Burt Bacharach’s song — but on April 15, 1983 she found her way to Symphony Hall in Boston with some of her Hollywood friends to give the late Tony Conigliaro a helping hand.
Warwick, who is performing Thursday night at Lynn City Hall Auditorium, agreed to do a benefit to help defray medical bills incurred by the late Red Sox slugger, after he’d had a heart attack in January of 1982. The star-crossed Conigliaro never fully recovered, and died in 1990 at the age of 45.
With Warwick that night was legendary crooner Frank Sinatra and Marvin Hamlisch, who arranged the score for “The Sting,” and composed the music for “A Chorus Line.”
Tony Conigliaro was a local product. He was born in Revere, lived in Swampscott, and was educated at St. Mary’s in Lynn. And the hometown team, the Boston Red Sox, drafted him out of high school.
By 1964, he was in the starting lineup for the Sox and hit a towering home run in his first at-bat at Fenway Park
But in 1967, after being the youngest (at the time) American Leaguer to hit his 100th home run, he was beaned during a game against the California Angels by Jack Hamilton.
Conigliaro, or “Tony C” to his fans, missed the last part of that Impossible Dream pennant-winning season, and all of 1968, before making a dramatic comeback with a home run on opening day 1969. By then, his brother Billy joined him in the outfield for the Red Sox. Warwick said she met both brothers when the Red Sox were on a trip to the West Coast.
Richie Conigliaro, the lone surviving brother (Billy died last February) said Tuesday that, thanks to Warwick, what was already slated to be a banner evening turned into a pennant winner with the appearance of Sinatra.
Originally, singer Lionel Richie was supposed to attend, “but Dionne called me, and said I have some good news and some bad news. She said that Richie was not going to be able to make it, so I asked what the good news was. She said, ‘I have Frank Sinatra.’
“That shows you the kind of person (Sinatra) was,” Conigliaro said. “Here’s this superstar, and he flew out here with his whole band.”
Lifelong friend and high school teammate Tom Iarrobino attended with his wife, Ruth; brother, Joe; and friends Tony Nicosia and Frank Carey.
“She put on a full-fledged show,” Iarrobino recalled Wednesday. “She was outstanding.
“Afterward, there was a reception at Pier Four, and Dionne couldn’t have been more gracious,” Iarrobino said.
At the time, Joe Iarrobino was a marketing executive for Mr. Coffee, a product endorsed by Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio, who also attended the reception.
“He brought (DiMaggio) over to meet us, and he couldn’t have been nicer either,” Tom Iarrobino said.
Also attending were Willie Mays and Ted Williams.
Warwick, 80, carved out a career singing songs written by Bacharach. She turned 15 of his, and songwriting partner Hal David’s songs, into Top-40 hits. Most notable of these songs were, “Do You Know The Way to San Jose?”, “Walk On By,” “I Say A Little Prayer,” “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again,” and “Message to Michael.”
In 1982, Tony Conigliaro had just auditioned for the position as Red Sox color announcer when he suffered a heart attack that left him cognitively compromised for the rest of his life. Warwick, in an interview with United Press International (UPI) in February of 1983, said that she couldn’t reconcile the image of Conigliaro lying in a hospital with the person she met in the 1970s.
She told UPI she was donating her time because she found it, “kind of hard to accept that a virile, good-looking guy like Tony Conigliaro is just lying there in a hospital bed doing nothing.”
She expressed hope at the time that it would be the last such benefit Conigliaro would need.
“I don’t think there will be any need, a year from now, to hold another benefit concert for Tony C,” she said in the article. “I’m an optimist.”
The concert raised $500,000, “which was a lot of money back then,” Richie Conigliaro said. The family used about half of that money for Tony’s medical and rehabilitation expenses, “but then he passed (in January 1990),” Richie said. “We donated the other half of that money to the Jimmy Fund.”
Thursday’s show begins at 8 p.m.
