STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Every family has them — summer vacation stories. As an only child and the daughter of Frank Silvestri — a proud, card carrying UFT member, retired New York City public school teacher and president of the Albert Shanker fan club who looked forward to his two weeks away in August — there are a few to share.
In full disclosure, so as not to embarrass my Dad or besmirch the Silvestri name, this article was written with the express permission of Frank, who now heartily laughs at some of these recollections. Although back then, maybe they weren’t so funny. That said, we’ll start with a 14-day whirlwind tour of Italy by bus led by an opera-singing guide named Giovanni. He dubbed our clan of Frank, Pat and Pamela “The Holy Family.”
Anyway, the hotel in which we stayed in Rome was located rather close to the city zoo. At night, the staff turned off the air conditioning around midnight which made the rooms so hot we had to open the windows. That allowed all sorts of noises to filter in — including sounds presumably coming from the zoo.
The next day, the first day at breakfast with other people on our tour, a guy from Chicago complained to Giovanni that the nocturnal activity of the animals were so loud he couldn’t sleep.
“I was awake all night. There was this roaring sound,” he told Giovanni, guessing the loud creature was an elephant or angry bear.
The next night, it was the same deal — hot room, windows open, unearthly creature rumblings. At breakfast the following morning, the dude from Chicago offered a reenactment of the offending sounds. Suddenly, we had an epiphany: the man described a sound to which we had been accustomed — the snoring from none other than Giovanni’s Holy Family patriarch.
Memorable travels also happened Stateside.
Our annual August vacation once took us to sunny Florida to visit Disney. My Dad believed it would be more economical to stay at a place outside of the theme park. Accommodations were a motel favored by Frank for its all-you-can-eat breakfast smorgasbord and memorable for the cigarette butts at the bottom of an otherwise nice pool. My mother thought it was hilarious that our Alamo rental car came with postcards of smiling models showing off brownish sedans.
“Why would we send these back home?” my mother said laughing. That sense of humor came in handy when we parked the Alamo auto in the sunbaked Disney parking lot aptly named “Pluto.” It certainly felt like we parked in outer space.
Another summer respite took us to the sandy shores of Beach Lake in Pennsylvania. The chosen resort had a few things going for it by way of the brochure — a game room, a really nice looking pool and, as the name would suggest, a lake. But this particular week, Mother Nature had an unseasonably chilly stretch of days in mind for the Silvestri’s, which rendered water amenities useless. The pinball machines were broken. And the black-and-white tiny TVs in our rooms displayed images only when two hands simultaneously held an aluminum foil cable left behind by courteous and knowing prior guests.
Beach Lake was a place my mother had gone as a child and she had fond memories of the town. At the particular resort where we stayed there were die-hard regulars who boasted anniversaries of their return to the rustic resort by decade. One set of perennial visitors, an elderly brother and sister, had been coming to Beach Lake since they were teens. And they knew all the traditions of the resort from what to expect on certain days with group activities and meals. As there was not much going on with normal outdoorsy stuff, our focus, and my Dad’s attention, turned to food.
The brother and sister were assigned our table for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And the brother prided himself on knowing what to expect with the menu. It was a predictable one for Beach Lake alums with things like meatloaf on Monday, turkey on Tuesday and so on. This man knew exactly what would appear on any given day of the week — the kind of muffin, style of egg and sandwich bread — and announce it just before it would come to the table. After the Harbinger of Meals declared a few times the feast in detail before it arrived, my father had enough.
“You know, I like the element of surprise sometimes,” said my Dad, joking but not joking.
Well, that was the last trip to the Keystone State for a family destination — except when I went to Bryn Mawr College. But that’s a Frank Silvestri summer story for another day.
Pamela Silvestri is Advance Food Editor. She can be reached at silvestri@siadvance.com.
Family summer vacations and an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord | Pamela’s Food Service Diary - SILive.com
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