03-06 Wives, Mothers

As a student of small business, there are ample studies of the role of spouses in family businesses. In most cases, it is the story of a husband starting a small business and the wife working in the business while raising children. For our family, mother was a central part of our own Family Business 101 story.
I was only five years of age, and with brother Ian in a carriage I can remember mother painting shelves at 734 Bay Street in February 1938 just before Dad opened his first store. He had left “Eatons” a month earlier.
And again, I have a powerful memory of mother entering sales into the ledger, helping Dad’s secretary on Saturday morning. It was in the late 1940s about a year after we had all been to Ireland. I loved coming down to the store with my brother Ian.
Dad showed me how to roll cloth and to put it into the shelves, with the browns with the browns and the blues with the blues. No, he said. “That is green not brown.” By then Dad knew we were all colour-blind.
Mary and I were married in 1955, and I worked Saturdays at the store and mother was always there. Love the photo of mother and Dad and Mary on our wedding day.
And in the 1960s when I was at Ryerson opening the branch stores, mother would come out to the branches, and again enter all the week’s sales into the sales journal.
Dad died in January, 1980 and Peter carried on the business. Peter had some good times and some bad times. But during difficult times mother was there for Peter just as she had been there for Dad.
What students of small business miss is that regardless of the legal structure of a family business, the spouse is always an emotional partner. And often the hardest job is being the spouse. I can remember mother working in the store every day and rushing home to be there when we came home from school. She always made a hot meal for us no matter how hard she had worked for our father during the day.