Yolanda Tamburrino was born Sept. 10, 1926, in Chicago, the first child of Frank William Tamburrino (1898-1969) and Margaret Marie Michel Tamburrino (1901-1989) and grandchild of August Tamburrino (1876-1839) and Elizabeth Pugni Tamburrino (1879-1967) and of Frank Nicholas Michel (1872-1955) and Emma Agnes Etzkorn Michel (1876-1962).
She was educated in Catholic schools in Chicago, including St. Scholastica Academy (closed in 2012 after nearly 150 years) and Mundelein College (now part of Loyola University), from which she earned a bachelor's degree (1948). She earned a master's degree in journalism from Marquette University (1957), studied in the summer at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont and at the University of Colorado in Boulder and did doctoral studies in mass communications at Syracuse University.
Playing her part as "Rosie the Riveter" in World War II, during one summer in college she worked for the federal government in a Chicago factory as an inspector of landmine fuses. Adding to the diversity of her experiences, she sold men's pajamas at Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago's Loop. Although her father's principal employment was in banking, for a time he owned a Chicago flower shop where she was pressed into service on the biggest holiday weekends.
Meanwhile, she continued to learn German cooking and baking from her 2nd-generation-American maternal grandmother and Italian cooking and baking from her 2nd-generation-American paternal grandmother. Yolanda's mother always said, "She could do anything perfectly if you just gave her the directions. She could look at an expensive dress in a downtown Chicago store window and come home and make a perfect copy. She could see a photo of a cake in a magazine ad and create something that looked just like the one in the photo."
The same confidence to try anything served her well in teaching high school English in St. Paul, Minn., and English literature and journalism at Clarke College (now Clarke University) in Dubuque, Iowa.
In 1969, she came to Syracuse University, attracted by what was then the School of Journalism and later became the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she became a full-time faculty member. When she arrived on campus, her husband-to-be, Jay Wright, was a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University. While he was away, other faculty members were already telling her that they should meet, because they would be kindred spirits. They did, and they were – for 50 years.
For most of those years, they taught classes (Yolanda teaching mostly newswriting, Jay teaching mostly communications law) on similar schedules in the same building – not infrequently having the same students but in different years. A small group of S.U. students took so many courses from them that the students joked, "We majored in the Wrights."
But both were able to be guided by their personal preferences, and Yolanda's was to teach part-time, regularly teaching the beginning newswriting course which was the foundation for all that followed, and having time to pursue other interests as well. Her "other interests" were multiple. She taught French cooking at the Country Kitchen, a cookware store attached to the Silver Nutmeg store in Fayetteville. She wrote and edited their newspaper-style description of their classes. She always continued learning more about cooking -- from Nancy Radke, her colleague and friend at the Country Kitchen who taught Northern Italian cooking with skill and enthusiasm, from classes in Europe with celebrity chefs Robert Carrier in England and Darina Allen at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, and, even in reruns, from the legendary Julia Child.
It was not unusual for her to come home having received an offer from someone who had discovered her multi-talented nature and wanted her to try something new. Some professors at the university, recognizing her well-honed skills at teaching newswriting, wanted her to design computer software that would teach newswriting and grade the papers. Nice idea, but she loved the personal connection with her students.
She became skilled at cross-stitch and needlepoint and quilting and basketmaking. A friend who was a sales representative for a nationally known publisher wanted her to put together a proposal for a book on needlepoint. She declined. But he said he would earn points for submitting the proposal even if it didn't go anywhere. So, she put together the proposal. The publisher immediately sent her a book contract to sign. Although she would have been paid as author of the book, she would have had to spend many hours designing and making needlepoint projects to be photographed – for which she would not have been paid. She was happy to assign that idea to the woulda-coulda bin.
A senior administrator at S.U. discovered Yolanda's writing and organizational skills and hired her as Associate Director of Publications and made her Editor of the university's alumni magazine. Yolanda had an unorthodox idea – that alumni magazines need not be boring. Taking inspiration from the then-newly-popular New York magazine, she created a regular feature called "S.U.'s Who" with short items about interesting people. She enjoyed interviewing the university's newsworthy alums, like fashion designer Betsey Johnson in Manhattan. When she received a routine notice from a publisher about a new book authored by an S.U. alum, she said, "It can't be that this woman graduated in the year they claim, because she'd have to be in her 90's." But, with a journalist's instinct for a good story, she phoned the alum, who was indeed in her 90's but invited Yolanda to "afternoon tea." While she was preparing the tea, the lady offered Yolanda a look at her china cabinet. Yolanda complimented her on a fancy goblet, and the woman replied, "Yes, Adolf Hitler gave me that when I visited Berchtesgaden." "Trust but verify" wasn't such a popular phrase in those days, but Yolanda did trust but verify, and everything the woman said was absolutely true. After an interview, the two became good friends.
Parts of the editing job were wonderful. She even took on a free-lance assignment to edit a book on Boehm porcelains for an alum who admired her editing skills. Not so wonderful, however, was that, while Jay had the usual freedoms of an academic's time schedule, Yolanda was tied to regular office hours and to overtime when a magazine deadline loomed. And not so wonderful was the fact that the couple's usual 4-week, self-guided-in-a-rental-car trips to France or Italy or England didn't fit well with the Publications job.
For one issue of the alumni magazine, she decided to publish stories about dorm life in different decades, so she found alums who had lived in S.U. dorms in the '30's, '40's, '50's, etc., and paired their recollections with interior photos of dorm rooms (not easily found), so that readers could see when students brought just a radio, then a small TV, then a record player, then a more elaborate Hi-Fi system with speakers, etc., up to
computers and refrigerators. Subjects of posters decorating dorm rooms varied also, of course, by decade. The issue inspired an unprecedented number of fan letters. "I stayed up all night reading this issue from cover to cover. Who does that with an alumni magazine?" wrote one happy reader. The next week a memo arrived on Yolanda's desk with a complaint from a university administrator: "Please in the future be sure not to refer to 'dorms' or 'dormitories.' We call them 'Residential Living Centers.'" That was a signal to Yolanda that it was time to return to the classroom teaching she loved.
In 1978-79, when her husband received a fellowship to go Connecticut to study, an administrator there asked what his wife did. When he said, "She's a college professor too," the administrator replied, "Oh, I'm so sorry. There is such a glut of trailing spouse talent around New Haven, that it would be just about impossible to get a teaching job." Yolanda never knew the meaning of the word impossible. The University of New Haven was delighted to hire her to teach English. And she took great joy in working with students who were typically the first in their families to go to college but who were quickly hooked on Yolanda's own infectious love of learning. At the end of the year, no one cared that her husband was returning to Syracuse, but U.N.H. wanted Yolanda to stay as a permanent member of the faculty. Her love of the students, her frequent bus trips into Manhattan with a church group from New Haven, and the city's Italian heritage with dueling "we're the best" pizza parlors, might have made that tempting. But then she might never have become a restaurant critic.
Back home in Central New York, she read that the Syracuse Herald-Journal was looking for a critic. When they realized they had an applicant who had taught French cooking, taught journalism, knew how to meet deadlines and be accurate, and had dined in 3-Michelin-star restaurants in France and Italy and Germany and England, but still liked a good hamburger, she must have seemed like a good match for the job. And she hoped that, 27 years later, they still thought so. Apparently somebody did, because the Syracuse Press Club awarded her their Bliven-Ganley-Rossi Career Achievement Award in 2011. That was preceded by other awards, sometimes from unexpected sources like the New York State Mental Health Services Council, which presented her with a Media Sensitivity Award in 1989 "For her critical review of the Provisions Bakery, which is operated … as a vocational training program for people recovering from psychiatric disabilities." As the award said, "Although the review centered on the Provision Bakery's merits as an eating establishment, it also gave a clear message that persons with psychiatric disabilities, if given a chance, can be contributing members of the work force." Ever the teacher, Yolanda was happy to spread that message by a truthful report of an excellent food experience. She knew from the beginning of her reviewing that some of the best experiences happened when they weren't necessarily expected.
By her monthly food features, for which she created recipes, wrote the copy, cooked the food, and styled it for the newspapers' photographers who came to her house for the photoshoots, she demonstrated that she could cook food as well as critique it.
From the first summer after their marriage, the Wrights' 4-week trips to Europe were an important part of their lives, and an important part of Yolanda's learning about food. In the early "If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium" days when airlines offered two free stops en route to a destination, and two free stops on the return trip, they visited places from Dublin to Athens (not on the same trip) and from Madrid to Stockholm. Eventually they settled into a comfortable pattern of alternating all-England and all-France trips. Until they decided to take a side trip from Nice, France, driving over into Italy. From then on, trips were most often all-Italy.
On trips, she usually wrote travel pieces for the Syracuse newspapers. One featured a stay in an Italian "agriturismo" (a combination working farm and somewhat primitive overnight place with dinner) at which Yolanda shared cooking duties one day with the owner's wife to prepare mid-day dinner for about 20 farm workers and evening dinner for about 20 tourists who were overnight guests. Despite her own limited knowledge of Italian and the woman's non-existent knowledge of English, they proved once again that food speaks a universal language and that smiles and gesturing can convey just about anything. At the other extreme, Yolanda became particularly fond of the extraordinary luxury destination of Villa d'Este on Lake Como, so that became a stop on several of the Wrights' Italian itineraries and the source of numerous memories, including the evening George Clooney came down from his own villa on the lake to stop in for dinner at the "less formal" of the hotel's restaurants. Always eager to learn, Yolanda was up early in Parma one morning to "be there when the fresh milk arrived from the farms" to watch the making of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese from beginning to end. Equally memorable were uncounted meals in tiny restaurants, some with no names ("it will be the storefront that says 'ristorante'"), where owners had no idea that Yolanda was a writer, much less a restaurant critic, and wouldn't have cared anyway, but they appreciated her enthusiasm for their good food and ended up inviting her into the kitchen to meet the chef (more often, the "cook"), who often ended up hugging Yolanda as a new friend.
Although she knew it was a logical question, when asked for her "favorite" Syracuse restaurant or her "favorite" place in Italy, Yolanda typically avoided answering, because she didn't have favorites in her mind. In Italy, even though she loved Rome (and her last hotel there, so close to the Vatican that she could see the Pope's private library window from her room in the hotel) and Florence (a balcony of a boutique hotel on the far side of the Arno with a view of the city's famed skyline) and Venice (a little hotel balcony of what she called "our" room, visited multiple times, with a view of the Lagoon), she loved in a different way the quieter spots – Gubbio and Norcia and Bobbio among them – bypassed by most Americans.
From 1983 on, Jay and Yolanda were owners of The Levi Snell House in Fayetteville. Built about 1855, it is individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Yolanda laughingly enjoyed the 1855-appropriate, gaudily Victorian interior the Wrights created in "bordello style" with red silk and gold and mirrors. The house won the "Tender Loving Care Award" from the Preservation Association of Central New York (PACNY) in 2010.
Yolanda was a long-time parishioner at Immaculate Conception Church in Fayetteville and a faithful participant at the 7:30 Sunday Mass for the many years she lived in the village.
She is survived by her husband of 50 years and by seven nieces and nephews: Gregory W. Frenzel of New Jersey, James F. Frenzel of Idaho, Mari Gasperino of Maryland, Ann Payne of Florida, Michael Tamburrino of Georgia, Paul Tamburrino of South Carolina and Robert Tamburrino of Georgia. She is also survived by sister-in-law Linda Tamburrino of Georgia as well as by godchildren.
She was predeceased by a brother, James R. Tamburrino of Georgia, and a sister, Frances Payne of Florida, and a sister-in-law, Jacquelin Wright Frenzel of New Jersey.
Special thanks are due to Kamele Kidd, Front-Line Caregiver Extraordinaire, who dispensed more love in Yolanda's time at the Nottingham nursing home than most people could in a lifetime. No one who saw much of them together could have doubted that Yolanda returned that love. Much gratitude too, to Kamele's fellow caregivers who recognize that quality care is not just about physical help but is about gifts of the spirit as well.
Thanks of a different kind, but no less sincere, to literally dozens of friends who, at their own expense, accompanied the Wrights on 27 years of restaurant reviews, particularly to those who were willing to go on the spur of the moment, those who understood they might not be able to order what they wanted because four different entrees needed to be sampled, those who were required to have dessert "in the interest of research," those who were slightly uncomfortable at telling a server a dish was wrong because Yolanda "couldn't tell 100,000 readers that it was wrong if you didn't even inform the server," those who learned to be quiet while Yolanda was trying to take notes surreptitiously under the tablecloth before the server returned to take orders, and those who didn't preface their requests with, "we'd love to go with you again -- tell us when you're going to Pascale's or the Horned Dorset or Petite Maison" and instead took their chances at a never-heard-of place and learned, as Yolanda did, that discovering a really good restaurant experience in an unlikely setting was great fun. And boos to those who went to restaurants without Yolanda and amused themselves by saying to servers, "One of us is Yolanda Wright, and we won't say which one." The servers didn't believe them anyway.
Services were private.
Contributions to Immaculate Conception Church, Fayetteville, NY, or to Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1100 Carmel Drive, Dubuque, Iowa 52003, or to a charity of one's own choosing.
She was educated in Catholic schools in Chicago, including St. Scholastica Academy (closed in 2012 after nearly 150 years) and Mundelein College (now part of Loyola University), from which she earned a bachelor's degree (1948). She earned a master's degree in journalism from Marquette University (1957), studied in the summer at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont and at the University of Colorado in Boulder and did doctoral studies in mass communications at Syracuse University.
Playing her part as "Rosie the Riveter" in World War II, during one summer in college she worked for the federal government in a Chicago factory as an inspector of landmine fuses. Adding to the diversity of her experiences, she sold men's pajamas at Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago's Loop. Although her father's principal employment was in banking, for a time he owned a Chicago flower shop where she was pressed into service on the biggest holiday weekends.
Meanwhile, she continued to learn German cooking and baking from her 2nd-generation-American maternal grandmother and Italian cooking and baking from her 2nd-generation-American paternal grandmother. Yolanda's mother always said, "She could do anything perfectly if you just gave her the directions. She could look at an expensive dress in a downtown Chicago store window and come home and make a perfect copy. She could see a photo of a cake in a magazine ad and create something that looked just like the one in the photo."
The same confidence to try anything served her well in teaching high school English in St. Paul, Minn., and English literature and journalism at Clarke College (now Clarke University) in Dubuque, Iowa.
In 1969, she came to Syracuse University, attracted by what was then the School of Journalism and later became the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she became a full-time faculty member. When she arrived on campus, her husband-to-be, Jay Wright, was a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University. While he was away, other faculty members were already telling her that they should meet, because they would be kindred spirits. They did, and they were – for 50 years.
For most of those years, they taught classes (Yolanda teaching mostly newswriting, Jay teaching mostly communications law) on similar schedules in the same building – not infrequently having the same students but in different years. A small group of S.U. students took so many courses from them that the students joked, "We majored in the Wrights."
But both were able to be guided by their personal preferences, and Yolanda's was to teach part-time, regularly teaching the beginning newswriting course which was the foundation for all that followed, and having time to pursue other interests as well. Her "other interests" were multiple. She taught French cooking at the Country Kitchen, a cookware store attached to the Silver Nutmeg store in Fayetteville. She wrote and edited their newspaper-style description of their classes. She always continued learning more about cooking -- from Nancy Radke, her colleague and friend at the Country Kitchen who taught Northern Italian cooking with skill and enthusiasm, from classes in Europe with celebrity chefs Robert Carrier in England and Darina Allen at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, and, even in reruns, from the legendary Julia Child.
It was not unusual for her to come home having received an offer from someone who had discovered her multi-talented nature and wanted her to try something new. Some professors at the university, recognizing her well-honed skills at teaching newswriting, wanted her to design computer software that would teach newswriting and grade the papers. Nice idea, but she loved the personal connection with her students.
She became skilled at cross-stitch and needlepoint and quilting and basketmaking. A friend who was a sales representative for a nationally known publisher wanted her to put together a proposal for a book on needlepoint. She declined. But he said he would earn points for submitting the proposal even if it didn't go anywhere. So, she put together the proposal. The publisher immediately sent her a book contract to sign. Although she would have been paid as author of the book, she would have had to spend many hours designing and making needlepoint projects to be photographed – for which she would not have been paid. She was happy to assign that idea to the woulda-coulda bin.
A senior administrator at S.U. discovered Yolanda's writing and organizational skills and hired her as Associate Director of Publications and made her Editor of the university's alumni magazine. Yolanda had an unorthodox idea – that alumni magazines need not be boring. Taking inspiration from the then-newly-popular New York magazine, she created a regular feature called "S.U.'s Who" with short items about interesting people. She enjoyed interviewing the university's newsworthy alums, like fashion designer Betsey Johnson in Manhattan. When she received a routine notice from a publisher about a new book authored by an S.U. alum, she said, "It can't be that this woman graduated in the year they claim, because she'd have to be in her 90's." But, with a journalist's instinct for a good story, she phoned the alum, who was indeed in her 90's but invited Yolanda to "afternoon tea." While she was preparing the tea, the lady offered Yolanda a look at her china cabinet. Yolanda complimented her on a fancy goblet, and the woman replied, "Yes, Adolf Hitler gave me that when I visited Berchtesgaden." "Trust but verify" wasn't such a popular phrase in those days, but Yolanda did trust but verify, and everything the woman said was absolutely true. After an interview, the two became good friends.
Parts of the editing job were wonderful. She even took on a free-lance assignment to edit a book on Boehm porcelains for an alum who admired her editing skills. Not so wonderful, however, was that, while Jay had the usual freedoms of an academic's time schedule, Yolanda was tied to regular office hours and to overtime when a magazine deadline loomed. And not so wonderful was the fact that the couple's usual 4-week, self-guided-in-a-rental-car trips to France or Italy or England didn't fit well with the Publications job.
For one issue of the alumni magazine, she decided to publish stories about dorm life in different decades, so she found alums who had lived in S.U. dorms in the '30's, '40's, '50's, etc., and paired their recollections with interior photos of dorm rooms (not easily found), so that readers could see when students brought just a radio, then a small TV, then a record player, then a more elaborate Hi-Fi system with speakers, etc., up to
computers and refrigerators. Subjects of posters decorating dorm rooms varied also, of course, by decade. The issue inspired an unprecedented number of fan letters. "I stayed up all night reading this issue from cover to cover. Who does that with an alumni magazine?" wrote one happy reader. The next week a memo arrived on Yolanda's desk with a complaint from a university administrator: "Please in the future be sure not to refer to 'dorms' or 'dormitories.' We call them 'Residential Living Centers.'" That was a signal to Yolanda that it was time to return to the classroom teaching she loved.
In 1978-79, when her husband received a fellowship to go Connecticut to study, an administrator there asked what his wife did. When he said, "She's a college professor too," the administrator replied, "Oh, I'm so sorry. There is such a glut of trailing spouse talent around New Haven, that it would be just about impossible to get a teaching job." Yolanda never knew the meaning of the word impossible. The University of New Haven was delighted to hire her to teach English. And she took great joy in working with students who were typically the first in their families to go to college but who were quickly hooked on Yolanda's own infectious love of learning. At the end of the year, no one cared that her husband was returning to Syracuse, but U.N.H. wanted Yolanda to stay as a permanent member of the faculty. Her love of the students, her frequent bus trips into Manhattan with a church group from New Haven, and the city's Italian heritage with dueling "we're the best" pizza parlors, might have made that tempting. But then she might never have become a restaurant critic.
Back home in Central New York, she read that the Syracuse Herald-Journal was looking for a critic. When they realized they had an applicant who had taught French cooking, taught journalism, knew how to meet deadlines and be accurate, and had dined in 3-Michelin-star restaurants in France and Italy and Germany and England, but still liked a good hamburger, she must have seemed like a good match for the job. And she hoped that, 27 years later, they still thought so. Apparently somebody did, because the Syracuse Press Club awarded her their Bliven-Ganley-Rossi Career Achievement Award in 2011. That was preceded by other awards, sometimes from unexpected sources like the New York State Mental Health Services Council, which presented her with a Media Sensitivity Award in 1989 "For her critical review of the Provisions Bakery, which is operated … as a vocational training program for people recovering from psychiatric disabilities." As the award said, "Although the review centered on the Provision Bakery's merits as an eating establishment, it also gave a clear message that persons with psychiatric disabilities, if given a chance, can be contributing members of the work force." Ever the teacher, Yolanda was happy to spread that message by a truthful report of an excellent food experience. She knew from the beginning of her reviewing that some of the best experiences happened when they weren't necessarily expected.
By her monthly food features, for which she created recipes, wrote the copy, cooked the food, and styled it for the newspapers' photographers who came to her house for the photoshoots, she demonstrated that she could cook food as well as critique it.
From the first summer after their marriage, the Wrights' 4-week trips to Europe were an important part of their lives, and an important part of Yolanda's learning about food. In the early "If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium" days when airlines offered two free stops en route to a destination, and two free stops on the return trip, they visited places from Dublin to Athens (not on the same trip) and from Madrid to Stockholm. Eventually they settled into a comfortable pattern of alternating all-England and all-France trips. Until they decided to take a side trip from Nice, France, driving over into Italy. From then on, trips were most often all-Italy.
On trips, she usually wrote travel pieces for the Syracuse newspapers. One featured a stay in an Italian "agriturismo" (a combination working farm and somewhat primitive overnight place with dinner) at which Yolanda shared cooking duties one day with the owner's wife to prepare mid-day dinner for about 20 farm workers and evening dinner for about 20 tourists who were overnight guests. Despite her own limited knowledge of Italian and the woman's non-existent knowledge of English, they proved once again that food speaks a universal language and that smiles and gesturing can convey just about anything. At the other extreme, Yolanda became particularly fond of the extraordinary luxury destination of Villa d'Este on Lake Como, so that became a stop on several of the Wrights' Italian itineraries and the source of numerous memories, including the evening George Clooney came down from his own villa on the lake to stop in for dinner at the "less formal" of the hotel's restaurants. Always eager to learn, Yolanda was up early in Parma one morning to "be there when the fresh milk arrived from the farms" to watch the making of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese from beginning to end. Equally memorable were uncounted meals in tiny restaurants, some with no names ("it will be the storefront that says 'ristorante'"), where owners had no idea that Yolanda was a writer, much less a restaurant critic, and wouldn't have cared anyway, but they appreciated her enthusiasm for their good food and ended up inviting her into the kitchen to meet the chef (more often, the "cook"), who often ended up hugging Yolanda as a new friend.
Although she knew it was a logical question, when asked for her "favorite" Syracuse restaurant or her "favorite" place in Italy, Yolanda typically avoided answering, because she didn't have favorites in her mind. In Italy, even though she loved Rome (and her last hotel there, so close to the Vatican that she could see the Pope's private library window from her room in the hotel) and Florence (a balcony of a boutique hotel on the far side of the Arno with a view of the city's famed skyline) and Venice (a little hotel balcony of what she called "our" room, visited multiple times, with a view of the Lagoon), she loved in a different way the quieter spots – Gubbio and Norcia and Bobbio among them – bypassed by most Americans.
From 1983 on, Jay and Yolanda were owners of The Levi Snell House in Fayetteville. Built about 1855, it is individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Yolanda laughingly enjoyed the 1855-appropriate, gaudily Victorian interior the Wrights created in "bordello style" with red silk and gold and mirrors. The house won the "Tender Loving Care Award" from the Preservation Association of Central New York (PACNY) in 2010.
Yolanda was a long-time parishioner at Immaculate Conception Church in Fayetteville and a faithful participant at the 7:30 Sunday Mass for the many years she lived in the village.
She is survived by her husband of 50 years and by seven nieces and nephews: Gregory W. Frenzel of New Jersey, James F. Frenzel of Idaho, Mari Gasperino of Maryland, Ann Payne of Florida, Michael Tamburrino of Georgia, Paul Tamburrino of South Carolina and Robert Tamburrino of Georgia. She is also survived by sister-in-law Linda Tamburrino of Georgia as well as by godchildren.
She was predeceased by a brother, James R. Tamburrino of Georgia, and a sister, Frances Payne of Florida, and a sister-in-law, Jacquelin Wright Frenzel of New Jersey.
Special thanks are due to Kamele Kidd, Front-Line Caregiver Extraordinaire, who dispensed more love in Yolanda's time at the Nottingham nursing home than most people could in a lifetime. No one who saw much of them together could have doubted that Yolanda returned that love. Much gratitude too, to Kamele's fellow caregivers who recognize that quality care is not just about physical help but is about gifts of the spirit as well.
Thanks of a different kind, but no less sincere, to literally dozens of friends who, at their own expense, accompanied the Wrights on 27 years of restaurant reviews, particularly to those who were willing to go on the spur of the moment, those who understood they might not be able to order what they wanted because four different entrees needed to be sampled, those who were required to have dessert "in the interest of research," those who were slightly uncomfortable at telling a server a dish was wrong because Yolanda "couldn't tell 100,000 readers that it was wrong if you didn't even inform the server," those who learned to be quiet while Yolanda was trying to take notes surreptitiously under the tablecloth before the server returned to take orders, and those who didn't preface their requests with, "we'd love to go with you again -- tell us when you're going to Pascale's or the Horned Dorset or Petite Maison" and instead took their chances at a never-heard-of place and learned, as Yolanda did, that discovering a really good restaurant experience in an unlikely setting was great fun. And boos to those who went to restaurants without Yolanda and amused themselves by saying to servers, "One of us is Yolanda Wright, and we won't say which one." The servers didn't believe them anyway.
Services were private.
Contributions to Immaculate Conception Church, Fayetteville, NY, or to Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1100 Carmel Drive, Dubuque, Iowa 52003, or to a charity of one's own choosing.
Yolanda Tamburrino was born Sept. 10, 1926, in Chicago, the first child of Frank William Tamburrino (1898-1969) and Margaret Marie Michel Tamburrino (1901-1989) and grandchild of August Tamburrino (1876-1839) and Elizabeth Pugni Tamburrino (1879-1967) and of Frank Nicholas Michel (1872-1955) and Emma Agnes Etzkorn Michel (1876-1962).
She was educated in Catholic schools in Chicago, including St. Scholastica Academy (closed in 2012 after nearly 150 years) and Mundelein College (now part of Loyola University), from which she earned a bachelor's degree (1948). She earned a master's degree in journalism from Marquette University (1957), studied in the summer at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont and at the University of Colorado in Boulder and did doctoral studies in mass communications at Syracuse University.
Playing her part as "Rosie the Riveter" in World War II, during one summer in college she worked for the federal government in a Chicago factory as an inspector of landmine fuses. Adding to the diversity of her experiences, she sold men's pajamas at Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago's Loop. Although her father's principal employment was in banking, for a time he owned a Chicago flower shop where she was pressed into service on the biggest holiday weekends.
Meanwhile, she continued to learn German cooking and baking from her 2nd-generation-American maternal grandmother and Italian cooking and baking from her 2nd-generation-American paternal grandmother. Yolanda's mother always said, "She could do anything perfectly if you just gave her the directions. She could look at an expensive dress in a downtown Chicago store window and come home and make a perfect copy. She could see a photo of a cake in a magazine ad and create something that looked just like the one in the photo."
The same confidence to try anything served her well in teaching high school English in St. Paul, Minn., and English literature and journalism at Clarke College (now Clarke University) in Dubuque, Iowa.
In 1969, she came to Syracuse University, attracted by what was then the School of Journalism and later became the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she became a full-time faculty member. When she arrived on campus, her husband-to-be, Jay Wright, was a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University. While he was away, other faculty members were already telling her that they should meet, because they would be kindred spirits. They did, and they were – for 50 years.
For most of those years, they taught classes (Yolanda teaching mostly newswriting, Jay teaching mostly communications law) on similar schedules in the same building – not infrequently having the same students but in different years. A small group of S.U. students took so many courses from them that the students joked, "We majored in the Wrights."
But both were able to be guided by their personal preferences, and Yolanda's was to teach part-time, regularly teaching the beginning newswriting course which was the foundation for all that followed, and having time to pursue other interests as well. Her "other interests" were multiple. She taught French cooking at the Country Kitchen, a cookware store attached to the Silver Nutmeg store in Fayetteville. She wrote and edited their newspaper-style description of their classes. She always continued learning more about cooking -- from Nancy Radke, her colleague and friend at the Country Kitchen who taught Northern Italian cooking with skill and enthusiasm, from classes in Europe with celebrity chefs Robert Carrier in England and Darina Allen at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, and, even in reruns, from the legendary Julia Child.
It was not unusual for her to come home having received an offer from someone who had discovered her multi-talented nature and wanted her to try something new. Some professors at the university, recognizing her well-honed skills at teaching newswriting, wanted her to design computer software that would teach newswriting and grade the papers. Nice idea, but she loved the personal connection with her students.
She became skilled at cross-stitch and needlepoint and quilting and basketmaking. A friend who was a sales representative for a nationally known publisher wanted her to put together a proposal for a book on needlepoint. She declined. But he said he would earn points for submitting the proposal even if it didn't go anywhere. So, she put together the proposal. The publisher immediately sent her a book contract to sign. Although she would have been paid as author of the book, she would have had to spend many hours designing and making needlepoint projects to be photographed – for which she would not have been paid. She was happy to assign that idea to the woulda-coulda bin.
A senior administrator at S.U. discovered Yolanda's writing and organizational skills and hired her as Associate Director of Publications and made her Editor of the university's alumni magazine. Yolanda had an unorthodox idea – that alumni magazines need not be boring. Taking inspiration from the then-newly-popular New York magazine, she created a regular feature called "S.U.'s Who" with short items about interesting people. She enjoyed interviewing the university's newsworthy alums, like fashion designer Betsey Johnson in Manhattan. When she received a routine notice from a publisher about a new book authored by an S.U. alum, she said, "It can't be that this woman graduated in the year they claim, because she'd have to be in her 90's." But, with a journalist's instinct for a good story, she phoned the alum, who was indeed in her 90's but invited Yolanda to "afternoon tea." While she was preparing the tea, the lady offered Yolanda a look at her china cabinet. Yolanda complimented her on a fancy goblet, and the woman replied, "Yes, Adolf Hitler gave me that when I visited Berchtesgaden." "Trust but verify" wasn't such a popular phrase in those days, but Yolanda did trust but verify, and everything the woman said was absolutely true. After an interview, the two became good friends.
Parts of the editing job were wonderful. She even took on a free-lance assignment to edit a book on Boehm porcelains for an alum who admired her editing skills. Not so wonderful, however, was that, while Jay had the usual freedoms of an academic's time schedule, Yolanda was tied to regular office hours and to overtime when a magazine deadline loomed. And not so wonderful was the fact that the couple's usual 4-week, self-guided-in-a-rental-car trips to France or Italy or England didn't fit well with the Publications job.
For one issue of the alumni magazine, she decided to publish stories about dorm life in different decades, so she found alums who had lived in S.U. dorms in the '30's, '40's, '50's, etc., and paired their recollections with interior photos of dorm rooms (not easily found), so that readers could see when students brought just a radio, then a small TV, then a record player, then a more elaborate Hi-Fi system with speakers, etc., up to
computers and refrigerators. Subjects of posters decorating dorm rooms varied also, of course, by decade. The issue inspired an unprecedented number of fan letters. "I stayed up all night reading this issue from cover to cover. Who does that with an alumni magazine?" wrote one happy reader. The next week a memo arrived on Yolanda's desk with a complaint from a university administrator: "Please in the future be sure not to refer to 'dorms' or 'dormitories.' We call them 'Residential Living Centers.'" That was a signal to Yolanda that it was time to return to the classroom teaching she loved.
In 1978-79, when her husband received a fellowship to go Connecticut to study, an administrator there asked what his wife did. When he said, "She's a college professor too," the administrator replied, "Oh, I'm so sorry. There is such a glut of trailing spouse talent around New Haven, that it would be just about impossible to get a teaching job." Yolanda never knew the meaning of the word impossible. The University of New Haven was delighted to hire her to teach English. And she took great joy in working with students who were typically the first in their families to go to college but who were quickly hooked on Yolanda's own infectious love of learning. At the end of the year, no one cared that her husband was returning to Syracuse, but U.N.H. wanted Yolanda to stay as a permanent member of the faculty. Her love of the students, her frequent bus trips into Manhattan with a church group from New Haven, and the city's Italian heritage with dueling "we're the best" pizza parlors, might have made that tempting. But then she might never have become a restaurant critic.
Back home in Central New York, she read that the Syracuse Herald-Journal was looking for a critic. When they realized they had an applicant who had taught French cooking, taught journalism, knew how to meet deadlines and be accurate, and had dined in 3-Michelin-star restaurants in France and Italy and Germany and England, but still liked a good hamburger, she must have seemed like a good match for the job. And she hoped that, 27 years later, they still thought so. Apparently somebody did, because the Syracuse Press Club awarded her their Bliven-Ganley-Rossi Career Achievement Award in 2011. That was preceded by other awards, sometimes from unexpected sources like the New York State Mental Health Services Council, which presented her with a Media Sensitivity Award in 1989 "For her critical review of the Provisions Bakery, which is operated … as a vocational training program for people recovering from psychiatric disabilities." As the award said, "Although the review centered on the Provision Bakery's merits as an eating establishment, it also gave a clear message that persons with psychiatric disabilities, if given a chance, can be contributing members of the work force." Ever the teacher, Yolanda was happy to spread that message by a truthful report of an excellent food experience. She knew from the beginning of her reviewing that some of the best experiences happened when they weren't necessarily expected.
By her monthly food features, for which she created recipes, wrote the copy, cooked the food, and styled it for the newspapers' photographers who came to her house for the photoshoots, she demonstrated that she could cook food as well as critique it.
From the first summer after their marriage, the Wrights' 4-week trips to Europe were an important part of their lives, and an important part of Yolanda's learning about food. In the early "If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium" days when airlines offered two free stops en route to a destination, and two free stops on the return trip, they visited places from Dublin to Athens (not on the same trip) and from Madrid to Stockholm. Eventually they settled into a comfortable pattern of alternating all-England and all-France trips. Until they decided to take a side trip from Nice, France, driving over into Italy. From then on, trips were most often all-Italy.
On trips, she usually wrote travel pieces for the Syracuse newspapers. One featured a stay in an Italian "agriturismo" (a combination working farm and somewhat primitive overnight place with dinner) at which Yolanda shared cooking duties one day with the owner's wife to prepare mid-day dinner for about 20 farm workers and evening dinner for about 20 tourists who were overnight guests. Despite her own limited knowledge of Italian and the woman's non-existent knowledge of English, they proved once again that food speaks a universal language and that smiles and gesturing can convey just about anything. At the other extreme, Yolanda became particularly fond of the extraordinary luxury destination of Villa d'Este on Lake Como, so that became a stop on several of the Wrights' Italian itineraries and the source of numerous memories, including the evening George Clooney came down from his own villa on the lake to stop in for dinner at the "less formal" of the hotel's restaurants. Always eager to learn, Yolanda was up early in Parma one morning to "be there when the fresh milk arrived from the farms" to watch the making of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese from beginning to end. Equally memorable were uncounted meals in tiny restaurants, some with no names ("it will be the storefront that says 'ristorante'"), where owners had no idea that Yolanda was a writer, much less a restaurant critic, and wouldn't have cared anyway, but they appreciated her enthusiasm for their good food and ended up inviting her into the kitchen to meet the chef (more often, the "cook"), who often ended up hugging Yolanda as a new friend.
Although she knew it was a logical question, when asked for her "favorite" Syracuse restaurant or her "favorite" place in Italy, Yolanda typically avoided answering, because she didn't have favorites in her mind. In Italy, even though she loved Rome (and her last hotel there, so close to the Vatican that she could see the Pope's private library window from her room in the hotel) and Florence (a balcony of a boutique hotel on the far side of the Arno with a view of the city's famed skyline) and Venice (a little hotel balcony of what she called "our" room, visited multiple times, with a view of the Lagoon), she loved in a different way the quieter spots – Gubbio and Norcia and Bobbio among them – bypassed by most Americans.
From 1983 on, Jay and Yolanda were owners of The Levi Snell House in Fayetteville. Built about 1855, it is individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Yolanda laughingly enjoyed the 1855-appropriate, gaudily Victorian interior the Wrights created in "bordello style" with red silk and gold and mirrors. The house won the "Tender Loving Care Award" from the Preservation Association of Central New York (PACNY) in 2010.
Yolanda was a long-time parishioner at Immaculate Conception Church in Fayetteville and a faithful participant at the 7:30 Sunday Mass for the many years she lived in the village.
She is survived by her husband of 50 years and by seven nieces and nephews: Gregory W. Frenzel of New Jersey, James F. Frenzel of Idaho, Mari Gasperino of Maryland, Ann Payne of Florida, Michael Tamburrino of Georgia, Paul Tamburrino of South Carolina and Robert Tamburrino of Georgia. She is also survived by sister-in-law Linda Tamburrino of Georgia as well as by godchildren.
She was predeceased by a brother, James R. Tamburrino of Georgia, and a sister, Frances Payne of Florida, and a sister-in-law, Jacquelin Wright Frenzel of New Jersey.
Special thanks are due to Kamele Kidd, Front-Line Caregiver Extraordinaire, who dispensed more love in Yolanda's time at the Nottingham nursing home than most people could in a lifetime. No one who saw much of them together could have doubted that Yolanda returned that love. Much gratitude too, to Kamele's fellow caregivers who recognize that quality care is not just about physical help but is about gifts of the spirit as well.
Thanks of a different kind, but no less sincere, to literally dozens of friends who, at their own expense, accompanied the Wrights on 27 years of restaurant reviews, particularly to those who were willing to go on the spur of the moment, those who understood they might not be able to order what they wanted because four different entrees needed to be sampled, those who were required to have dessert "in the interest of research," those who were slightly uncomfortable at telling a server a dish was wrong because Yolanda "couldn't tell 100,000 readers that it was wrong if you didn't even inform the server," those who learned to be quiet while Yolanda was trying to take notes surreptitiously under the tablecloth before the server returned to take orders, and those who didn't preface their requests with, "we'd love to go with you again -- tell us when you're going to Pascale's or the Horned Dorset or Petite Maison" and instead took their chances at a never-heard-of place and learned, as Yolanda did, that discovering a really good restaurant experience in an unlikely setting was great fun. And boos to those who went to restaurants without Yolanda and amused themselves by saying to servers, "One of us is Yolanda Wright, and we won't say which one." The servers didn't believe them anyway.
Services were private.
Contributions to Immaculate Conception Church, Fayetteville, NY, or to Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1100 Carmel Drive, Dubuque, Iowa 52003, or to a charity of one's own choosing.
She was educated in Catholic schools in Chicago, including St. Scholastica Academy (closed in 2012 after nearly 150 years) and Mundelein College (now part of Loyola University), from which she earned a bachelor's degree (1948). She earned a master's degree in journalism from Marquette University (1957), studied in the summer at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont and at the University of Colorado in Boulder and did doctoral studies in mass communications at Syracuse University.
Playing her part as "Rosie the Riveter" in World War II, during one summer in college she worked for the federal government in a Chicago factory as an inspector of landmine fuses. Adding to the diversity of her experiences, she sold men's pajamas at Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago's Loop. Although her father's principal employment was in banking, for a time he owned a Chicago flower shop where she was pressed into service on the biggest holiday weekends.
Meanwhile, she continued to learn German cooking and baking from her 2nd-generation-American maternal grandmother and Italian cooking and baking from her 2nd-generation-American paternal grandmother. Yolanda's mother always said, "She could do anything perfectly if you just gave her the directions. She could look at an expensive dress in a downtown Chicago store window and come home and make a perfect copy. She could see a photo of a cake in a magazine ad and create something that looked just like the one in the photo."
The same confidence to try anything served her well in teaching high school English in St. Paul, Minn., and English literature and journalism at Clarke College (now Clarke University) in Dubuque, Iowa.
In 1969, she came to Syracuse University, attracted by what was then the School of Journalism and later became the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she became a full-time faculty member. When she arrived on campus, her husband-to-be, Jay Wright, was a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University. While he was away, other faculty members were already telling her that they should meet, because they would be kindred spirits. They did, and they were – for 50 years.
For most of those years, they taught classes (Yolanda teaching mostly newswriting, Jay teaching mostly communications law) on similar schedules in the same building – not infrequently having the same students but in different years. A small group of S.U. students took so many courses from them that the students joked, "We majored in the Wrights."
But both were able to be guided by their personal preferences, and Yolanda's was to teach part-time, regularly teaching the beginning newswriting course which was the foundation for all that followed, and having time to pursue other interests as well. Her "other interests" were multiple. She taught French cooking at the Country Kitchen, a cookware store attached to the Silver Nutmeg store in Fayetteville. She wrote and edited their newspaper-style description of their classes. She always continued learning more about cooking -- from Nancy Radke, her colleague and friend at the Country Kitchen who taught Northern Italian cooking with skill and enthusiasm, from classes in Europe with celebrity chefs Robert Carrier in England and Darina Allen at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, and, even in reruns, from the legendary Julia Child.
It was not unusual for her to come home having received an offer from someone who had discovered her multi-talented nature and wanted her to try something new. Some professors at the university, recognizing her well-honed skills at teaching newswriting, wanted her to design computer software that would teach newswriting and grade the papers. Nice idea, but she loved the personal connection with her students.
She became skilled at cross-stitch and needlepoint and quilting and basketmaking. A friend who was a sales representative for a nationally known publisher wanted her to put together a proposal for a book on needlepoint. She declined. But he said he would earn points for submitting the proposal even if it didn't go anywhere. So, she put together the proposal. The publisher immediately sent her a book contract to sign. Although she would have been paid as author of the book, she would have had to spend many hours designing and making needlepoint projects to be photographed – for which she would not have been paid. She was happy to assign that idea to the woulda-coulda bin.
A senior administrator at S.U. discovered Yolanda's writing and organizational skills and hired her as Associate Director of Publications and made her Editor of the university's alumni magazine. Yolanda had an unorthodox idea – that alumni magazines need not be boring. Taking inspiration from the then-newly-popular New York magazine, she created a regular feature called "S.U.'s Who" with short items about interesting people. She enjoyed interviewing the university's newsworthy alums, like fashion designer Betsey Johnson in Manhattan. When she received a routine notice from a publisher about a new book authored by an S.U. alum, she said, "It can't be that this woman graduated in the year they claim, because she'd have to be in her 90's." But, with a journalist's instinct for a good story, she phoned the alum, who was indeed in her 90's but invited Yolanda to "afternoon tea." While she was preparing the tea, the lady offered Yolanda a look at her china cabinet. Yolanda complimented her on a fancy goblet, and the woman replied, "Yes, Adolf Hitler gave me that when I visited Berchtesgaden." "Trust but verify" wasn't such a popular phrase in those days, but Yolanda did trust but verify, and everything the woman said was absolutely true. After an interview, the two became good friends.
Parts of the editing job were wonderful. She even took on a free-lance assignment to edit a book on Boehm porcelains for an alum who admired her editing skills. Not so wonderful, however, was that, while Jay had the usual freedoms of an academic's time schedule, Yolanda was tied to regular office hours and to overtime when a magazine deadline loomed. And not so wonderful was the fact that the couple's usual 4-week, self-guided-in-a-rental-car trips to France or Italy or England didn't fit well with the Publications job.
For one issue of the alumni magazine, she decided to publish stories about dorm life in different decades, so she found alums who had lived in S.U. dorms in the '30's, '40's, '50's, etc., and paired their recollections with interior photos of dorm rooms (not easily found), so that readers could see when students brought just a radio, then a small TV, then a record player, then a more elaborate Hi-Fi system with speakers, etc., up to
computers and refrigerators. Subjects of posters decorating dorm rooms varied also, of course, by decade. The issue inspired an unprecedented number of fan letters. "I stayed up all night reading this issue from cover to cover. Who does that with an alumni magazine?" wrote one happy reader. The next week a memo arrived on Yolanda's desk with a complaint from a university administrator: "Please in the future be sure not to refer to 'dorms' or 'dormitories.' We call them 'Residential Living Centers.'" That was a signal to Yolanda that it was time to return to the classroom teaching she loved.
In 1978-79, when her husband received a fellowship to go Connecticut to study, an administrator there asked what his wife did. When he said, "She's a college professor too," the administrator replied, "Oh, I'm so sorry. There is such a glut of trailing spouse talent around New Haven, that it would be just about impossible to get a teaching job." Yolanda never knew the meaning of the word impossible. The University of New Haven was delighted to hire her to teach English. And she took great joy in working with students who were typically the first in their families to go to college but who were quickly hooked on Yolanda's own infectious love of learning. At the end of the year, no one cared that her husband was returning to Syracuse, but U.N.H. wanted Yolanda to stay as a permanent member of the faculty. Her love of the students, her frequent bus trips into Manhattan with a church group from New Haven, and the city's Italian heritage with dueling "we're the best" pizza parlors, might have made that tempting. But then she might never have become a restaurant critic.
Back home in Central New York, she read that the Syracuse Herald-Journal was looking for a critic. When they realized they had an applicant who had taught French cooking, taught journalism, knew how to meet deadlines and be accurate, and had dined in 3-Michelin-star restaurants in France and Italy and Germany and England, but still liked a good hamburger, she must have seemed like a good match for the job. And she hoped that, 27 years later, they still thought so. Apparently somebody did, because the Syracuse Press Club awarded her their Bliven-Ganley-Rossi Career Achievement Award in 2011. That was preceded by other awards, sometimes from unexpected sources like the New York State Mental Health Services Council, which presented her with a Media Sensitivity Award in 1989 "For her critical review of the Provisions Bakery, which is operated … as a vocational training program for people recovering from psychiatric disabilities." As the award said, "Although the review centered on the Provision Bakery's merits as an eating establishment, it also gave a clear message that persons with psychiatric disabilities, if given a chance, can be contributing members of the work force." Ever the teacher, Yolanda was happy to spread that message by a truthful report of an excellent food experience. She knew from the beginning of her reviewing that some of the best experiences happened when they weren't necessarily expected.
By her monthly food features, for which she created recipes, wrote the copy, cooked the food, and styled it for the newspapers' photographers who came to her house for the photoshoots, she demonstrated that she could cook food as well as critique it.
From the first summer after their marriage, the Wrights' 4-week trips to Europe were an important part of their lives, and an important part of Yolanda's learning about food. In the early "If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium" days when airlines offered two free stops en route to a destination, and two free stops on the return trip, they visited places from Dublin to Athens (not on the same trip) and from Madrid to Stockholm. Eventually they settled into a comfortable pattern of alternating all-England and all-France trips. Until they decided to take a side trip from Nice, France, driving over into Italy. From then on, trips were most often all-Italy.
On trips, she usually wrote travel pieces for the Syracuse newspapers. One featured a stay in an Italian "agriturismo" (a combination working farm and somewhat primitive overnight place with dinner) at which Yolanda shared cooking duties one day with the owner's wife to prepare mid-day dinner for about 20 farm workers and evening dinner for about 20 tourists who were overnight guests. Despite her own limited knowledge of Italian and the woman's non-existent knowledge of English, they proved once again that food speaks a universal language and that smiles and gesturing can convey just about anything. At the other extreme, Yolanda became particularly fond of the extraordinary luxury destination of Villa d'Este on Lake Como, so that became a stop on several of the Wrights' Italian itineraries and the source of numerous memories, including the evening George Clooney came down from his own villa on the lake to stop in for dinner at the "less formal" of the hotel's restaurants. Always eager to learn, Yolanda was up early in Parma one morning to "be there when the fresh milk arrived from the farms" to watch the making of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese from beginning to end. Equally memorable were uncounted meals in tiny restaurants, some with no names ("it will be the storefront that says 'ristorante'"), where owners had no idea that Yolanda was a writer, much less a restaurant critic, and wouldn't have cared anyway, but they appreciated her enthusiasm for their good food and ended up inviting her into the kitchen to meet the chef (more often, the "cook"), who often ended up hugging Yolanda as a new friend.
Although she knew it was a logical question, when asked for her "favorite" Syracuse restaurant or her "favorite" place in Italy, Yolanda typically avoided answering, because she didn't have favorites in her mind. In Italy, even though she loved Rome (and her last hotel there, so close to the Vatican that she could see the Pope's private library window from her room in the hotel) and Florence (a balcony of a boutique hotel on the far side of the Arno with a view of the city's famed skyline) and Venice (a little hotel balcony of what she called "our" room, visited multiple times, with a view of the Lagoon), she loved in a different way the quieter spots – Gubbio and Norcia and Bobbio among them – bypassed by most Americans.
From 1983 on, Jay and Yolanda were owners of The Levi Snell House in Fayetteville. Built about 1855, it is individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Yolanda laughingly enjoyed the 1855-appropriate, gaudily Victorian interior the Wrights created in "bordello style" with red silk and gold and mirrors. The house won the "Tender Loving Care Award" from the Preservation Association of Central New York (PACNY) in 2010.
Yolanda was a long-time parishioner at Immaculate Conception Church in Fayetteville and a faithful participant at the 7:30 Sunday Mass for the many years she lived in the village.
She is survived by her husband of 50 years and by seven nieces and nephews: Gregory W. Frenzel of New Jersey, James F. Frenzel of Idaho, Mari Gasperino of Maryland, Ann Payne of Florida, Michael Tamburrino of Georgia, Paul Tamburrino of South Carolina and Robert Tamburrino of Georgia. She is also survived by sister-in-law Linda Tamburrino of Georgia as well as by godchildren.
She was predeceased by a brother, James R. Tamburrino of Georgia, and a sister, Frances Payne of Florida, and a sister-in-law, Jacquelin Wright Frenzel of New Jersey.
Special thanks are due to Kamele Kidd, Front-Line Caregiver Extraordinaire, who dispensed more love in Yolanda's time at the Nottingham nursing home than most people could in a lifetime. No one who saw much of them together could have doubted that Yolanda returned that love. Much gratitude too, to Kamele's fellow caregivers who recognize that quality care is not just about physical help but is about gifts of the spirit as well.
Thanks of a different kind, but no less sincere, to literally dozens of friends who, at their own expense, accompanied the Wrights on 27 years of restaurant reviews, particularly to those who were willing to go on the spur of the moment, those who understood they might not be able to order what they wanted because four different entrees needed to be sampled, those who were required to have dessert "in the interest of research," those who were slightly uncomfortable at telling a server a dish was wrong because Yolanda "couldn't tell 100,000 readers that it was wrong if you didn't even inform the server," those who learned to be quiet while Yolanda was trying to take notes surreptitiously under the tablecloth before the server returned to take orders, and those who didn't preface their requests with, "we'd love to go with you again -- tell us when you're going to Pascale's or the Horned Dorset or Petite Maison" and instead took their chances at a never-heard-of place and learned, as Yolanda did, that discovering a really good restaurant experience in an unlikely setting was great fun. And boos to those who went to restaurants without Yolanda and amused themselves by saying to servers, "One of us is Yolanda Wright, and we won't say which one." The servers didn't believe them anyway.
Services were private.
Contributions to Immaculate Conception Church, Fayetteville, NY, or to Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1100 Carmel Drive, Dubuque, Iowa 52003, or to a charity of one's own choosing.
Family Members
See more Wright or Tamburrino memorials in:
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- Onondaga County Wright or Tamburrino
- New York Wright or Tamburrino
- USA Wright or Tamburrino
- Find a Grave Wright or Tamburrino
