This is the month of year when — for a quarter century — Westporters flocked to Festival Italiano at Luciano Park.
We were joined by thousands of others — plenty of actual Italians, and many more wannabes — from as far away as Brooklyn.
The Italian Festival is gone. So are the days when Saugatuck was a true Italian neighborhood, filled with extended families, shops and restaurants handed down through generations, and a special atmosphere remembered lovingly by the ever-dwindling number of people fortunate enough to grow up there.
Sam Febbraio did. The other day, while going through his mother’s papers, Tony Giunta found a list Sam made.
Tony thinks Sam typed it up in the mid-1960s. It’s filled with his best recollection of the names of people and places in Saugatuck in the 1930s and ’40s.
If you are a native Westporter — particularly from Saugatuck — you’ll remember many of these names.
If you don’t: You missed some of the best times — and people — our town has ever seen.
I’m sure “06880” readers will have comments about some of them. We should all read them.
It’s a way of celebrating our own Festival Italiano.
