When I was seven or eight and my grandfather was about the age I am now, he told me this story:
I left school in the fourth grade. That was the end of my education, which never bothered me so much, to tell you the truth. I could read. I added numbers in my head quicker than someone with a pencil and paper. What more did I need? I used to say the reason I was successful in business was I never learned subtraction, so I couldn’t have a loss. Later I learned a few things from books, nothing important.
So I was ten years old and got a job as a bakery boy. Six nights a week—of course, not Friday—I swept the floor and put wood in the ovens and carried bags of flour and sugar. There were no laws about children working or not working. My pay? One dollar—a week, not a day—and one loaf of bread every morning. I arrived at Fishman’s bakery at eleven at night and left at seven, seven-thirty in the morning, depending on when the last baking went in for me to clean up after. There was flour in the air like smoke; it was hot all year from the ovens. Frankly, I liked it very much. The bakers smacked the dough and shoveled bread in and out of the ovens and joked all night long. They were friendly to me. They even yelled in a friendly manner. Also I felt like a big shot, out all...
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