After leaving baseball, Ilitch started a pizza business in 1959.

"I started out in architecture school, and got into the pizza business to pay my way through school," he has said.

"The pizza business was losing so much money I never got back into architecture."

What he did have a vocation for, it turned out, was the pizza business - and controversy.

He never left, staying to set up a pizza business.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the growth of what has become the borough's trademark, the pizza business.

Even in the pizza business, craftsmen are being replaced by machines.

It is also big in the fresh pizza business.

He met his wife and together they worked to build up a pizza business.

Their pizza business, the core of the family wealth, has lost momentum relative to the competition.