Mar 5, 2024 4 min read

Discovering a son’s entrepreneurial spirit

By Nick Jacobs

He disappeared one warm spring morning, and about the same time we realized he wasn’t in the house, our phone rang. It was the preacher’s wife who lived next door. Her exact words were something like, “Nicky just sold us a used magazine and ran next door to Susie’s.”

Because these were city blocks that were jampacked with houses, it only took us about 30 seconds to find our 4-year-old son knocking on our neighbor’s door. He was carrying a stack of our old magazines and decided that he would sell them for a nickel each.

This was not a new idea for him because the previous summer he had been manufacturing popsicle stick crosses with Elmer’s glue and selling them to the same neighbors. We were never quite sure what he would try to sell or trade next, but it was clear there would always be something. It was even more clear that he was good at it.

By the time he got to middle school, his entrepreneurial skills had developed even more elaborately in a way that was, well, interesting.

Early one evening, I walked past his basement bedroom door and noticed him standing over his 1980s waterbed counting out lots and lots of $1 bills. There were so many that I became concerned that he had become involved in some type of middle school crime ring.

When I pulled him aside to ask him where he got all the money, his initial response was, “I can’t say.” That set off every parent alarm bell in my head. As a former junior high school teacher who had prided myself on my ability to get my students to “come clean,” I immediately asked him if he’d go for a ride to the store with me. He agreed.

Once I got him into the car, I said, “If you’ll tell me your secret, I’ll tell you an even bigger secret.” Of course, this was a ploy, but he fell for it. He made me go first, though, and I had to come up with some magnificently designed story about one of his relatives who had passed away. That made my tale bulletproof because it could neither be proven nor denied. Then he came clean to me.

Part one was that one of his friends from band, a senior in high school, was working weekends as a disc jockey at a small, locally-owned FM radio station. His friend had access to new CDs as they were released, but that access was limited to the four walls of the tiny studio where he was playing the music.

Part two was that my son had seen me reading The New York Times Sunday edition one weekend and noticed advertisements for cassette tapes. I know these audio devices may be foreign to some of you, but cassette tapes were our mode of capturing digitally recorded music in the 1980s. He discovered that he could buy unrecorded tapes in bulk for about $1 each, which was $2 less than they cost locally.

Part three: He bought the tapes, gave a dozen to his buddy to record the new CDs, and then sold them for $3 each to the kids in the school cafeteria. That was a $2 saving for the buyers, and he and the DJ each got a buck. It was a brilliant black-market scam.

I could only convince him to stop selling these pirated tapes by having my friend, the district attorney, call him and threaten to arrest him.

I’m happy to report he’s now an extremely successful senior managing director in a top international, commercial real estate company with clients all over the world. Pre-COVID, he’d call us from places like France, Brazil, Israel, China, and Argentina, but he has never stopped helping the area.

Who could have ever guessed? We could.

Nick Jacobs is a Windber resident.