Longtime Board of Review member honored for decades of service

GROSSE POINTE SHORES — If you want to be popular in your community, denying your neighbor’s request for a property tax reduction isn’t a great way to do it.

That’s what members of the Board of Review often have to do, as they analyze claims by homeowners that their property tax assessment is too high. It’s a challenging and thankless job. Nonetheless, it’s one longtime Grosse Pointe Shores resident John Lizza did with pride for 32 years.

“The job is 10 cuts below dog catcher on the social scale,” Lizza joked to the Shores City Council.

Lizza, the former chair of the Shores Board of Review, served on the board from 1992 until his resignation in December 2024. He was honored by the city with a proclamation during a May 20 City Council meeting.

Lizza — who says he’s 98.9 — will turn 99 in September.

“I considered it my contribution to a great community,” Lizza said of his years on the board.

As part of the proclamation — read by Mayor Ted Kedzierski — Kedzierski said the council and Shores residents “share in the pride felt by John’s family and congratulate him on his outstanding achievements and the latest honor given.”

Born on Detroit’s east side in 1926 to an Italian father, August, and an Irish mother, Helen, Lizza graduated from St. Anthony High School in 1944 and promptly enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps, serving for two years before being honorably discharged in 1946. While attending what was then called the University of Detroit for college, Lizza worked the afternoon shift at the main post office branch in Detroit, where he met his future wife, Therese “Terry” Lizza, to whom he was married for 65 years, until her death in 2016. Lizza earned a law degree from the University of Detroit in 1953 and opened his first law firm in the Penobscot Building — Lizza, Mulcahy, Casey & Lawson. He partially retired in 2008 but continued to practice out of an office in Grosse Pointe Farms until 2023.

Lizza said he never planned to have such a long Board of Review tenure.

“I was only going to do a year or two,” Lizza said.

He moved to the Shores in 1991, after previously living in Grosse Pointe Farms, where he served on that city’s Board of Review for 14 years. Lizza’s friend, Ed Brady, a former president of the then-Shores Village Council, tapped him for the Shores Board of Review opening soon after Lizza became a Shores resident.

Lizza has been defying expectations for seniors for decades. He played competitive badminton for 60 years, where he was ranked fifth in doubles for seniors — considered those over age 50. He didn’t stop competing until one week after his 87th birthday. Prior to that, he often bested competitors considerably younger.

“He loves the community service idea,” said daughter Jeanne Lizza, of Grosse Pointe Woods. “He loves the community. Community involvement, being about others — that’s what it’s all about.”

Jeanne Lizza is one of a family of five siblings; two of her brothers live in Grosse Pointe Shores, she said.

John Lizza now has 13 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

The number of years Lizza served is what’s remarkable.

“Not many people sign up year after year — and certainly not (for) 32 (years),” Jeanne Lizza said.

John Lizza, who traveled the world extensively, said the experience of visiting other cities only made him fonder of his own community.

“I thank God every day that I live in Grosse Pointe Shores,” he told the council.

John Lizza said the city is in good hands with the current Board of Review, and said he enjoyed the time he served.

“It was a pleasure,” he said.

The Lizza family was happy to see their patriarch be recognized for his years of service to his city.

“It was nice of them to honor my dad,” Jeanne Lizza said.