Sudden Death of a Farmer

New York, 1895

Abram Bennett of Queens dropped dead yesterday morning from heart disease. He was a well known farmer and an exemplary citizen. He went to the breakfast table in good spirits and ate as heartily as usual. As he arose from the table he fell to the floor and died in a few seconds. He was about 52 years of age and leaves a widow and one daughter.

—The Long Island Farmer, Jamaica, N.Y., Jan. 18, 1895, unknown page number.

Is a Good Breakfast Necessary? Yes

1901

A good breakfast is the physical basis of a day's work. The American breakfast, regarded with so much horror on the European continent, has contributed largely to make the nation what it is today. It enabled our forefathers to do an amount of work which it appalls foreigners to contemplate.

As a rule there is something wrong with the man or with his habits if he cannot eat a good breakfast. A man who works at high tension all through the morning hours without this substantial foundation is working entirely upon his nerves. That means disordered nutrition and sooner or later bankruptcy and collapse.

If a man gets up in the morning with a bad taste and no inclination for food, it is because his system is full of waste and his circulation of obstructions. Let him make a radical change in his habits and train his digestive organs to accommodate a nourishing morning meal. — Medical Brief.

The Solitary Breakfast – 1917 and 2007

1917

At first blush breakfast seems a sociable meal; at that hour a man is best satisfied, or least discontented, with himself, and in a mood to make the most of the world. Human vitality at its maximum, mere existence lugs exhilaration along with it; good humor mantles everything. But there is an uncertainty in company even when you may choose it; for temperament is never to be wholly trusted (artists are dangerous people to meet at breakfast), and there are a thousand happenings — troubled sleep, early awakening, mosquitoes, a surmised mouse, no hot water, buttoned boots, putting studs in a shirt — that may occur between going to bed at night and coming down to breakfast in the morning, and ill-adjusted feelings in even one member of the company may dampen the spirits of all. Company is no doubt the better state, and brings out the full capacities for pleasure that lie in breakfast, but a solitary breakfast is safer; solitary pleasantness is more tempered, but it is more certain. — Henry Dwight Sedgwick in Yale Review.

2007 (me)

There's always some 'feeling out' in the morning, which only takes a few seconds, to see if the company you keep has gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. By the time you actually get to breakfast, though, you definitely know. Anyway, who has time for breakfast, and who really cares to have company doing it? Out in public, seeing the various ones having their breakfast, it's like any other time. Among the billed cap set, I don't notice any distinguishing between a quiet few bites and the same old uproar of any other time. When I get up my eyes are somewhat sleep-shot, but some of these others, you'd never know they needed it.

As for the "surmised mouse," I suppose that means something. Which would be this, he hears some noise, real low level noise, chewing on a box maybe, or scampering, and surmises it's a mouse in the house. I tell you, if I surmised there were a mouse nearby, my surmising would soon become complete knowledge, and the mouse would be hunted down and extracted from the premises as soon as I had the energy to do so, which would necessarily be at that same precise moment.