Our usual Italian breakfast was nothing fancy, but it was filling. It consisted of a good slice or two of thick, homemade Italian bread (didn’t matter if it was freshly baked), buried in a bowl filled with “caffe e latte.” Not many families had or could afford cereal on the morning menu. After breakfast, it was off to school. Most of the kids “hoofed” it; no yellow buses waiting to shuttle them. The primary means of transportation were ugly looking “clod hopper” shoes, no such things as silver-black, high-top Adidas sneakers.

A lot of us Italian kids packed lunches, wrapped in thick wax paper, stashed in brown bags. Buying lunch at the school cafeteria was out of the question, and subsidized lunch and milk programs had yet to be invented as part of the school curriculum. It wasn’t difficult to tell what was in those brown bags, particularly on the days when they had thick “sangwiches” made of fried eggs and peppers, or fried baloney and “cicoria” greens.