My Business Career

Two women greatly affected my life in the world of business: my mother and my wife.

From age five to seven, I lived in my mother’s hometown of Toronto, Canada. There, her father and several other of my relatives were in what was called the “second-hand” business. Their merchandise was mostly used goods. They had a whole string of shops along one downtown street, where my mother and I were
frequent visitors.

And my mother was so attuned to this environment, that, to give me a start in it, she once sent me out to stand on a nearby street corner with a display of shoelaces in a little shoulder-tray she made for me. That incident is locked in my memory. But I wasn’t very enthusiastic about selling, and certainly not very successful. The experiment was never repeated.

But that wasn’t the end of my mother’s attempts at foisting a business role upon me. The next occasion came many years later, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, studying for a Ph.D. in History. My parents were still in England, but they knew how hard it was for me financially just to cover ordinary expenses. What used to be called second-hand stores were now, especially in upscale areas like Berkeley, said to be dealing in “antiques.” At that time, it was very hard legally to send money from England. But my mother had the idea of sending me genuine antiques that I could sell to dealers for cash.

For some reason, one particular type of item then much in demand was antique snuffboxes. I had little knowledge of snuff (powdered tobacco), or interest in the boxes people once carried it around in. But I was willing to give this new possible source of income a try. So, I began receiving in the mail packages of ornate little boxes from England. At first I had several local antique dealers very interested. Haggling was distasteful to me, so I just accepted whatever I was offered. But before long, I had glutted the local snuffbox market. Some forays further afield failed to justify the extra trouble, and I soon got out of the whole business. Sadly, this was very disappointing to my parents, after all their efforts buying, packing, and shipping the goods.

Now my wife, Dorothy, comes upon the scene. It was in the early days of our relationship that I discovered that I could make a living just by writing and illustrating my own creations and selling them on postcards. But Dorothy was horrified to see the very casual way I kept accounts and paid my taxes. I believed in simplifying everything, to take as little of my time and money as possible. But she came from a very conventional background, and to her this was simply not the way things were done. The first thing we had to do was officially go into business – which meant getting a business license, which required making an application, forming a Company, and even placing a formal announcement in a local paper. Even if you were just one person, there was a classification for your company as a “Sole Proprietorship.”

But to me, the worst part of this whole process was going to be the way my taxes got paid. Instead of a small single piece of paper, with just a few spaces to fill, there would now be a larger, much more complicated, form – the sort of bureaucratic jungle I had always sought to avoid. When I refused to go down that road, Dorothy – somewhat to my surprise – said that she was perfectly willing to do it for me. I said “Fine!” and withdrew altogether from that part of the business. She took it all over from me – the finance, the accounting, and the taxes. And for the next 50 years, for the entire duration of our marriage, she kept it all going. My part of the enterprise was the creative part. I had no responsibility in her area, but I also had no control.

She not only did the taxes but seemed to enjoy doing them. That doesn’t mean she was good at it, or at any other part of managing my finances. It all seemed to take her endless time. But we had a business, and she kept it going. She secured an accountant and hired an employee – one faithful person who was with us for 30 years.

And that was my business career.