Fisina “Fiz” Tomaselli and Dr. Thomas Garrett Flynn lived lives that became part of the everyday story of New Canaan.
They served in different places—one in parish life and youth athletics, the other in the practice of medicine—but together they represent a kind of citizenship that sustains communities across generations. In New Canaan, it is a kind of citizenship that is not uncommon.
Fiz Tomaselli was one of those figures whose presence seemed to follow the path of young people through town life.
She was born here and graduated from New Canaan High School in 1949, where she played varsity sports and served as captain of the girls’ basketball team. Athletics remained part of her life long after graduation. Yet her influence on sports in New Canaan came not from competition but from the traditions she helped build.
In 1972 she “adopted” the New Canaan High School hockey team. She opened her home to players, coaches and managers, hosting dinners—lasagna and pizza meals that soon became part of the season’s rhythm and part of what it meant to belong to the team. Years passed, players graduated, new teams formed, but the tradition endured. Generations of athletes remember those evenings as part of their experience growing up in New Canaan.
With her husband Larry, she also founded the annual New Canaan High School alumni ice hockey game. The event supported the junior varsity hockey program and brought former players back to the rink, reconnecting them with teammates and with the town that shaped them.
Her service to the school extended across its daily life. She served on the Parent Faculty Board, the Sports Council Board and the Hall of Fame Committee. She volunteered in both the guidance department and the athletic department. In 2000 she was inducted into the New Canaan High School Hall of Fame.
Another center of her life was St. Aloysius Church.
There she served for decades as volunteer bookkeeper, worked on the parish financial committee and numerous boards, and became the first woman to serve on the Parish Council Board. Parish life was woven into the structure of her days and into the rhythm of her family life.
Dr. Tom Flynn served the town in another place familiar to families: the pediatrician’s office.
For decades he practiced pediatrics in New Canaan. Parents brought newborns through his doors and returned year after year as those children grew. In many cases he cared for more than one generation within the same family.
That kind of medical practice becomes part of a town’s shared memory. Parents remember the advice given when a fever spiked late at night. Children grow up recognizing the doctor who watched them grow.
Churchill once wrote, “Show me the manner in which a nation or community cares for its children, and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people.”
In towns like New Canaan, that care takes many forms.
It appears in a physician who devotes a lifetime to the health of local families. It appears in a volunteer who feeds a hockey team and in doing so creates a tradition that binds generations together.
What stands out about New Canaan is not that lives like these existed here.
It is that they are part of a pattern.
Look across the institutions that shape the town—churches, youth sports, civic boards, charities—and you see it again and again. Residents step forward. They give time. They take responsibility. They build traditions that strengthen the institutions serving the next generation.
The passing of people like Fiz Tomaselli and Dr. Tom Flynn reminds us how much of the town’s character has been shaped by such lives.
The best way to honor them is both to remember what they did and to continue the work.
