Prospective students visit UATs TechTrek Discovery Expo. UATs Tech Trek exposition is an open house built around the concept of a technology conference. In 1. 99. 0, Susan Orlean published a book called Saturday Night, in which she set out to document how Americans spend their weekly reprieve from work. Saturday night, she wrote, is when you want to do what you want to do and not what you have to do. One thing people want to do on Saturday night is go out to dinner, so Orlean dedicated a chapter to the restaurant experience. She set this section of the book at the Hilltop Steakhouse, in Saugus, Massachusetts. The Hilltop occupied a zoning law less stretch of Route 1 just north of Boston. A few miles to the south was Weylus, a maximalist Chinese restaurant that looked as if it had been airlifted to Essex County from the Forbidden City. A few miles to the north was The Ship, a seafood place in the shape of a schooner that had somehow run aground along the landlocked highway. The Hilltop Steakhouse, Saugus, Massachusetts. Photo by Bold WillieFlickr. Even with these neighbors, the Hilltop stood out. It had a 6. 8 foot neon cactus sign, a herd of life size fiberglass cattle grazing out front, and an ever present line of customers waiting for one of the 1,4. Old West outpost, from Dodge City to Santa Fe. Attached to the restaurant, in the rear, was the Butcher Shop. According to Orlean, it was the largest refrigerated store in the world. At the peak of the Hilltops popularity, it was not uncommon for patrons to eat a steak in the restaurant, bundle up for a visit to the butcher shop, and emerge into the 7 acre parking lot with a full stomach and an armload of sirloin for home. PreSchool-Madison-100/3727711675.jpg' alt='Annual Editions Early Childhood Education 09 10' title='Annual Editions Early Childhood Education 09 10' />Emblazoned on the Hilltops cactus, in a flowery script, was the signature of its founder, Frank Giuffrida. The son of Sicilian immigrants, Giuffrida grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, an old mill town on the banks of the Merrimack River. On Monday, the New York Times published a copy of the special science section of the draft 2018 National Climate Assessment, which federal climate researchers had. Texts and audio books available online, at Project Gutenberg. Welcome. The OIA is an independent body set up to review student complaints. Free to students, the OIA deals with individual complaints against Higher Education. Breaking News News get the latest from the Dallas News. Read it here first. His father died when Giuffrida was still a boy, so Frank dropped out of school and started working in the family business, a butcher shop. In the early 1. 96. Route 1 called the Gyro Club. There he would fulfill the lifelong dream of a John Wayneloving meat cutter opening a Western themed steakhouse, with his wife Irene serving as hostess. Giuffridas formula was large portions at low prices he bet that he could make up for his thin margins with high volume. It worked. In 1. 98. Boston Globereported that the Hilltop was spending 2. People couldnt finish their 1. By the time Orlean interviewed Frank and Irene, they had built the Hilltop into a local institution doing business on a national scale. Last year, the Hilltop grossed forty seven million dollars and served food to two and a half million people, Orlean wrote. This represents more food sold and more people served than at any other single restaurant in the country. Free Adobe Indesign Tri Fold Brochure Template. New York Citys Tavern on the Green was a distant second. Orlean embedded with a platoon of seen it all waitresses, studied the rituals of the customers waiting for a table who played whist, completed crosswords, and drank cocktails to kill time during what could be a two hour wait, and witnessed two large gentlemen order a cheeseburger and a tenderloin each. There was one character, however, missing from Orleans otherwise comprehensive account the Hilltops owner. Giuffrida had sold the restaurant two years earlier, to a local businessman named Jack Swansburg. The first thing I asked my father when he told me he was buying the Hilltop was whether his signature would replace Giuffridas on the giant cactus. His response Nobody wants to buy a steak from Jack Swansburg. Franks name would stay on the sign, and Frank and Irene would fly in from Florida, where theyd retired, when reporters turned up to write about the restaurant. This made good business sensenew ownership can spook the diehardsbut it frustrated my efforts, as an 1. America. It was like telling people it was my dad, not Red Auerbach, calling the shots in the Celtics front office. People didnt think I was bragging. They thought I was lying. Frank Giuffrida died of a stroke in 2. I never got to ask him why he decided to sell the Hilltop to my father. Surely Giuffrida had other suitors for a business so profitable and iconic, and surely a man who inscribes his name on a 6. But my guess is that he saw my father as a kindred spirit. Though Jack had no experience running a restaurant, or for that matter any business in the service industry, he was, like Frank, a self made man, a blue collar guy from Winthrop, Massachusetts, who had pulled himself up by his proverbial bootstraps. Image via Wikimedia Commons. In 1. 63. 0, John Winthrop composed his famous sermon in which he set forth his vision for a community that would be as a city upon a hill, a beacon of Puritan virtue shining from the New World. The city he founded was Boston. The town bearing Winthrops name is a working class enclave nestled between Logan Airport and the plant that treats Greater Bostons sewage. My father grew up on the top floor of a clapboard double decker near Belle Isle Inlet, a brackish basin that separates Winthrop from Logans runways. When he turned 1. Jacks father, a truck driver, told him it was time he found a job. A local roofing company was hiring. So my father became, in his typically earthy turn of phrase, a shit bum roofer. Roofing in that era was a particularly grueling trade. Higher skilled laborerscarpenters, sheet metal workerslooked down on the men who made their living pouring 4. New England elements. A roofer, however, still took pride in his work when wed drive through the Boston area, my father could never resist pointing out the projects hed worked on. See that brick building hed say, gesturing toward an anonymous structure alongside the Southeast Expressway. I put the roof on that. Once, my sister reported that a favorite elementary school teacher did roofing work over the summer, thinking this would please our father. Hes not a roofer, Jack shot back. Hes a shingler. Economic mobility is greater in Canada, Denmark, and France than it is in the United States. By that time my father had left the roofing business. He had started his own roofing company in his mid 2. My father has never had any vanity about what sort of business hes in, so long as he sees a return on my invested dollars, a phrase he repeats, in his thick Boston accent, like a mantra. Over the course of my childhood he owned a paving company, a company that installed garage door openers, and, my favorite, a company that refurbished golf balls. He would pay a guy to fish shanked balls out of golf course water hazards, power wash the muck out of the dimples, and sell the balls to driving ranges and country clubs at a nice profit. Mostly, though, my father made his money in real estate. Specifically, he bought and sold buildings he affectionately refers to as pigs big, ugly industrial spaces. Buildings with saw tooth roofs and wrinkle tin sides. Buildings that housed sheet metal shops, produce industry middle men, discount furniture store distribution hubs. In his late 2. 0s and early 3. Hilltop, he built a small empire in the hardscrabble ring around Boston in Charlestown, Everett, the precincts of Cambridge that Harvard and MIT students studiously avoid, and in Chelsea, where his first roofing shop had been. I once asked my father how he knew when a pig was a good investment, since aesthetics, and even location, seemed not to factor into his calculus. When Im looking at a building, he said, I drive up to it. If my balls tingle, I buy it.