The first time John R. Favia received a shipment of live lobsters at his seafood supply firm, he and the other workers put them in a kiddie wading pool with tap water — and killed them all.
Mr. Favia flew to Maine to get a lobster lesson, where he learned they have to be kept in saltwater, recalled his wife, Joyce.
A lot has changed since he co-founded Supreme Lobster & Seafood in 1973. The Villa Park company went on to become a top distributor of lobster and fish to Great Lakes and Las Vegas restaurants. Its white trucks, with a large lobster painted on the side, criss-cross the region. The firm’s website says, “If it swims, we have it.” That includes lobsters from not only Maine, but from the waters of Africa, Australia, Brazil and Canada.
After leaving Supreme Lobster in the 1980s, he worked as a seafood broker and operated restaurants. For the last decade he managed a Kildeer eatery, Gianni’s Cafe, owned by his daughter, Crissy, and her husband, Mike Siena.
Mr. Favia, of Lake Zurich, died June 17 of congestive heart failure in hospice care. He was 76.
He was born in Bari, Italy, where he remembered seeing the remnants of spent bombs from World War II. In 1946, he came to America through Ellis Island with his family. His father, Pasquale, had already saved up money at a railroad job in the U.S., where he lived in cramped conditions with other workers. “He remembered his dad saying, ‘We’ve got 25 guys sleeping in one room,’ ’’ his wife said.
Pasquale and Maria Angela Liberio Favia settled on Taylor Street in Chicago and attended church at Our Lady of Pompeii Shrine, 1224 W. Lexington. Young John Favia’s sisters, Vincenza and Guistina, were about 15 years older, so he navigated his new language, city and schoolwork largely on his own.
“He would never have been able to ask his parents or his sisters any questions, doing his homework,” his wife said. “I asked him, how did you learn English? He goes, ‘That first summer we came, I remember playing outside with kids my age, and you just learn.’ ’’
He attended St. Philip High School in Chicago and served four years in the Army.
He and Joyce Piszczek had a boy-meets-girl moment at an Italian beef stand in Melrose Park. “I was in the car with a bunch of girls, and he was in the car with four or five guys,” she said. Wearing his Army uniform, he approached, with an abundant head of dark hair that she said made him resemble the singer Julius La Rosa. “He came to my window and we started talking. After 30 minutes talking, he said, ‘Would you like to go for a cup of coffee?’ ”
She and her sister, Andrea, were streetwise city girls who attended Steinmetz High School. Her sibling took a look at his car. “My sister wrote down the plates, and said, ‘OK, I’m giving you 45 minutes.’ ”
“I believed in him,” Joyce Favia said.
Within 45 minutes, he returned her to the beef stand, unscathed, and their romance began. “Everything was fine, and we dated ever since,” she said.
They married in 1965 at St. Priscilla Church near Addison and Harlem. “I was the first non-Italian” in the family, she said. They raised their children in River Grove.
He was in data processing when he co-founded Supreme Lobster with his friend, Tony Bianco, and his nephew, Dominic Stramaglia, who remains in charge of the company today. “When we took our first order, they sent in cases and cases of live Maine lobster and we had just a little office,” she said. “We threw them in a plastic wading pool, and we killed them. We didn’t know they had to have saltwater. They all died.”
But after getting a lesson in arthropod husbandry in Maine, “then we started making lobster tanks,” she said. They learned to care for the clawed crustaceans, from their eyestalks to their succulent tails.
“We were the first ones to sell it to Dominick’s and Jewel. They put it in the tanks,” Joyce Favia said.
But perhaps because of his formative years in Bari on the Adriatic Sea, he enjoyed mollusks more. “He used to pick clams and mussels right off the side of the rocks,” she said.
Mr. Favia also is survived by another daughter, Dina Wohler, and four grandchildren. Services have been held.
