Close your eyes and picture this: thousands of drunken college students crowding Fairfield Beach Road. Friends screaming obscenities at each other. Music blaring for hours throughout the day. Vomit covering patches of grass and concrete. Picket fences torn down.
For Vince Biondi and Kathy Siano, this is no imaginary situation. In fact, it is a recurring vision of Fairfield University’s once highly regarded Clam Jam event.
“It was a disgrace to Fairfield University and an orgy of drunkenness,” said Siano, 65. “Clam Jam was not a pleasant event for anyone who lived nearby – in fact, it was a nightmare.”
But Siano and husband Biondi, who were partly responsible for legally ending Clam Jam in 2001, will no longer deal with student shenanigans at beach. The couple has sold their house and moved to Pennsylvania.
“We’re living in Pennsylvania now to be closer to our kids,” said Siano. “But I still consider myself a Fairfielder.”
Even more shocking than the outspoken couple’s relocation is the new inhabitant of their home, located at 664 Fairfield Beach Road: a Fairfield University freshman.
Siano, who has expressed contempt for disrespectful students, does not believe having a student live in her house is hypocritical.
“I believe in obeying the law, and the law says I cannot discriminate,” she said. “[The family] offered what I was asking for … and the fact that a student is living there doesn’t faze me one way or another.”
Biondi, 65, said the student’s father was prepared to pay cash for the home, estimated at $859,000.
“Her family impressed us very much and they told us that they were acquiring it for their student who had missed out and had evidently made a late decision with housing on campus,” said Biondi, previous chairman of the Greater Bridgeport Transit Authority.
Siano agreed that the female student seemed respectful and responsible.
“I have no reason to believe she will misbehave. She seems to come from a very good family and my impression was that she was very well brought up,” said Siano.
During their 26 years of living at the beach, however, the couple said they have experienced frightening situations.
“There were many nasty accidents over the years,” Siano said. “People falling off roofs, people diving into shallow water off the reef, terrible automobile accidents, assaults – all kinds of things.”
Siano said she once witnessed a horrible display involving a female who was accosted by an adult male after leaving the Seagrape. Siano and Biondi awoke to the female’s shrieks and loud banging on their door.
“I had never seen such terror as that girl exhibited,” Siano said of the girl who was chased across the street and into Siano’s backyard. “If we hadn’t been home, I’m not at all sure that she would have been safe.”
However, the couple said they have also had positive experiences with responsible students who respect their neighbors.
Their dog, for example, was a gift from a student neighbor 12 years ago.
Asked if students should be able to reside at the beach, Siano replied, “I think the students have an absolute, 100 percent right to be at the beach. What they don’t have is the right to break rules and disturb their neighbors.”
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