Matthew Fazio

Matt was born July 3, 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. He was the middle child with an older brother Joey and a younger brother Louis. Went to Grover Cleveland High School where he first started playing the saxophone in his school band. He later started to play the clarinet, the flute and base guitar. He put together his own band and played for all occasions.

His mom Fay and father Charlie sent Matt to barber school and then opened his own barbershop in Jamaica NY.

I met Matt when he played for my senior dance on April 28, 1961. As he always said he had to wear me down before I finally went out with him. We were engaged in September 1961 and married June 9, 1962. He was the father of three wonderful children, Deborah, Charles and Daniel.

Matt was a great musician and later on opened Go Go music studio in our home for beginners and advanced students where Frankie and Sal Russo advanced their music career and became like family to us. They were and still are best of friends.

He loved each and everyone of our family and treated our daughter-in-laws and son-in-law as thou they were his own children. He spent many hours playing and making all the grandchildren laugh. He would act silly to make the little ones laugh and did puppet shows for the others. Even the older grandchildren remember the silly things he did with each one of them.

There wasn’t a person he met that he didn’t like. Even all our neighbors remember when we first moved into the neighborhood 22 years ago. He told them all we had family dinner on Tuesday nights and our door was open to anyone who wanted to join us for dinner. He was a fabulous cook. Matt and I wrote 2 cookbooks; all sauces. We appeared on QVC twice and with the money we made we started manufacturing 4 of our sauces in jars. The books and the jars of sauce was sold in AJs. We were then on some of the TV shows locally; Sonora Living, News 12 and Lydia. Our sauces were sold in most of the gourmet stores up and down the West Coast until our manufacturer went out of business and so did we.

Our family has grown to over 32 people and two more great grandchildren are on the way. Six of our grandchildren, Nicole, Mark, were born in NY, then we added 3 more in AZ. Four are married, one almost engaged. We have 5 adopted grandchildren.

He was always talking about God and how he should always be part of our family. He was very proud of being a 4th degree with the Knights of Columbus.