My dad owned his business when I was born. He was a portrait photographer with a studio on Pacific Avenue about three blocks south of Harding Way in Stockton, California. He took the pictures and developed the film in the dark room. Mom helped him with accounting and sales. That's the capitalism I knew as a child.
I played in the back with a boy a little younger than I whose dad owned the ice cream parlor two doors down.
It was capitalism, but my dad didn't call himself a capitalist or even a businessman. He was a photographer. The other little boy's dad made ice cream and sandwiches. They were their own most important and most productive employees. The people who worked for them were there so that the owners could what they did best, that is make the products that people came off the street to buy. For my dad, there was always a connection between making money and work, because he did most of the work himself.
When I think of my childhood, I see Pacific Avenue and rows of shops that sold gifts, toys, clothes, ice cream and sandwiches, Italian dinners and my dad's studio. I knew the men and women who owned the shops because if I walked into any them, that person might be the one who asked me what I wanted. It was capitalism with a human face.
Perhaps it was too human a face to think of as capitalism.
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