On the rare occasions when my family talked about business, the subject was Kansas City's Boss Pendergast and his potential for muscling my dad's small gravel-and-sand operation.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
During my pre-college years, I went on many trips with my father into the oil fields to visit their operations. On Saturday mornings, I often went with him to visit the company shop. I puttered around the machine, electronics, and automobile shops while he carried on his business.
Growing up in the Midwest, I was very close to my maternal grandmother, who, as a young widow running a small business in 1920s Kansas City, had known firsthand the old Pendergast regime and its classic combine of politics and organized crime.
I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.
I was raised on a family farm in western Minnesota. So I didn't have the background to prepare me for this business life.
My dad was an entrepreneurial businessman, and maybe I got some of his ability.
My dad, he was a construction worker. He was a butcher. He was a deep sea fisherman.
My father was a businessman. We had discussions about honesty and dishonesty.
My family was in two businesses - they were in the textile business, and they were in the candy business. The conversations around the dinner table were all about the factory floor and how many machines were running and what was happening in the business. I grew up very engaged in manufacturing and as part of a family business.
My family background was heavily slanted toward business and seafaring matters.
My mother's a secretary; my father's an electrician in a mining company.