FRONTENAC, Kan. — At the annual Festa Italiana in Frontenac on Saturday evening, one walked among tents crammed with cooks and crowds, cashed in tickets for a tray full of ethnic delights such as cavatini, bagna cauda and antipasto, and happily surmised that this was Frontenac at its best.
Among the tents there were cooks whose ancestor immigrants had settled the area.
There were cooks with the obligatory vowels sprinkled throughout their last names that just sounded as if they belonged there — Cussamanio, Brunetti and Merando.
There were recipes that spoke of the diversity of the community, originally settled by coal miners from dozens of Balkans countries in addition to Italy.
But though the annual festival is a terrific snapshot of the ethnic heritage of the community and the love its residents have of good food, good beverages and good fellowship, that’s not what it’s about.
What speaks volumes about the hundreds of people it takes to make the food festival possible each year, and of the thousands of hours they put in to pull it off, is the real reason behind it: supporting education.
As an outsider to Frontenac who married into lots of vowels here a decade ago, I once was enamored with the chance to learn to make capalettis and potica at the hand of a great-grandmother-in-law, and to see old-school Italian sausage-making at the Frontenac Garage just as it was done for decades.
It wasn’t until I joined the Frontenac School District a few years ago as a part-time high school journalism teacher that I realized what really was at the core of the community: It wasn’t the food. It wasn’t the last names. It is the school.
Old-timers realize this perhaps more than anyone. Their parents settled this area in search of a better life, one they could achieve through hard, dirty work beneath the earth. They, in turn, hoped for an even better life for their children and grandchildren, something they knew could come from toiling in classrooms.
And so it has been ever since. The community has supported the district, rallying around it to support it by passing bond issues, by cheering at sporting events, by volunteering in the elementary library.
Its citizens came through again 10 years ago when the Frontenac Education Foundation asked volunteers for a food festival that, in future years, would take on a life of its own.
Over the years, the event has raised tens of thousands of dollars for grants for special projects, mobile computer labs to put new technology into the hands of students, furnishings for a new wing on the elementary school, and an eight-semester scholarship for each graduating senior who goes on to college — some 1,500 having been awarded to date!
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