When I was a young boy, I remember my father making breakfast for my family on Saturday and Sunday mornings. My little brother and I would sit at the kitchen table waiting like two young princes, immersed in the comic section of the Chicago Sun-Times, while the magic happened.
Prior to making breakfast, my father would visit a nearby Jewish delicatessen named the Onion Roll for bialys, bagels and great chocolate donuts. He would cook the eggs with onions, green peppers and tomatoes while my mother would fry the bacon and toast the bread. He used to make the best scrambled eggs. Sometimes he made fried sliced potatoes with eggs and onions, a depression era dish that his mother made for him in the 1920s and early ’30s, as a side. Add a dab of ketchup and it was heaven.
When the breakfast was ready, my brother and I feasted as if we had not eaten for days. It would make my father, who was over 50-years our senior, very happy to watch us eat the food he had prepared.
In those days we had no idea that a cardiologist would quiver at the thought of what we were actually eating, but it was a simpler time, full of simpler pleasures.
Armando and Joseph Fosco
After breakfast, my father and I would leave our home together (my little brother would choose to come along sometimes) and drive about 40-miles north to a little community near the Illinois/Wisconsin border to go antiquing. My old-man (as I now occasionally refer to him) had a great eye for discovering rare valuable items. He enjoyed the art of buying rare collectibles. He used to hide his brand new luxury automobiles from the antique dealers by parking his car in a location out of their sight. The automobiles that he usually drove were American made cars, either Buick Park Avenues or Oldsmobile Regency Ninety Eights. As I think back to my father’s automobiles I remember how impressive they seemed to me at the time. He rarely drove Cadillacs, citing that too much attention was drawn to cars of such status (today a Cadillac is an ordinary as a Chevrolet in my opinion).
