Naughty and Nimble How smoking in third grade taught me to be an entrepreneur.
I learned a valuable business lesson from cigarettes, when I was barely 10 years old.
I had recently started pilfering ciggies from my mother’s Benson & Hedges pack which treated her condition I dubbed “automotive narcolepsy”. Despite being born and raised in France, my mom couldn’t even inhale, but she figured out that puffing on smokes kept her awake enough to make the 30-minute trip to Marshalls for our annual back to school shopping. She bought a pack every few years, and it lived in the junk drawer in our kitchen, next to rolling pins, duct tape, scotch tape and metal thumb tacks.
The tannish brown pack was always there when you yanked the drawer open, and one year I decided that I, too, would like to smoke. I’m not sure how or why, but I enlisted Thomas, the younger boy next door. He was from a large Lithuanian British family, with three older siblings named, Dainus, Elena and Donna. I wanted to be named Donna, probably because she was older, had boobs. She had that killer hairdo of the 1970’s, the one with the part in the middle, with the sides curled up like a sweet wave, that bounced when she walked. Anyway, Thomas was the only younger kid around, so I’m sure I roped him in.
One day I grabbed the pack, tucked it into the armpit of my softball shirt, the one with the baby blue sleeves and collar. A small, wimpy pack of matches were already tucked into the cellophane sleeve. I bee-lined it for my backyard where Thomas stood under a huge tree, wearing his Crocker Farm t-shirt, and a sad, brown, bowl-cut.
We hoofed it up to Mt. Pollux, where we climbed up one of the two maples perched at the top of a hill that allowed for 360-degree views of the notorious Pioneer Valley. We found a branch that split into a big, fat Y, and sat facing each other. We clenched the long, white 100-length cigarettes in our nine- and ten-year-old teeth (some baby, some not), and struck match after match, throwing the used ones away until we were successful.
Once our lungs were fully polluted and our hands reeked like ashtrays, we would slink back down the hill and split off to our houses. Once home, I put the pack back in the junk drawer, shoved to the bottom.
This routine worked well until the Benson & Hedges pack started to look empty, and I figured we would surely be discovered any minute. I was attached to my smoking ritual, and determined to find a way to find more ciggy butts.
It occurred to me one day that we could make our own cigarettes from the half-smoked butts thrown from cars that littered busy South East Street. We wandered up and down the road and collected the discarded smokes into the pouches of our t-shirts. Then, we found a quiet spot in the pine trees behind my house, and one by one, held the filters, some pink lipstick-stained while we hollowed them out and into a pile. Jackpot!
I had scored rolling papers also from the junk drawer at my house. They were left behind by a French-dad, Jean a family friend. One of many visitors from other countries who were like wallpaper in my childhood. There, in the background, unmistakable. Jean had a deep voice that came out from behind a massive, bushy beard, turned up at the ends, like a villain. Except he was kind. Jean rolled his cigarettes (with tobacco from a red pouch he kept folded in his bag), on the small porch in our yard. Jean also wore tighty whitey underpants with the words “Home of the Whopper” printed on them. His daughters and I giggled madly when he wore them on our joint-family outings to skinny dip at Hampshire Pond.
Thomas and I learned to roll our own cigarettes with Jean’s rolling papers. Poorly, but well enough to enjoy the medley of various brands of cigarettes, and eventually even learn to inhale. We were resourceful and determined, in addition to being naughty.
A decade later, that resourcefulness would prove critical to my budding lip balm company, Mad Gab's. My first batch was a whim, then I was convinced to sell in stores around Amherst. In addition to labels, ingredients and other very-formal-sounding things, the store owners wanted displays to put out “testers” of the lip balm. They expected me to figure out how to accomplish this. (Note: testers are gross. They’ve always been gross. How we missed that for so many years, and how testers still exist at all, is a mystery.) What could hold five plastic square boxes, and look legit enough to sit in a store? In the basement of the 27-story library at UMass, I dove into the Thomas Registers (the internet before the internet), basically a huge phone book. There, I discovered the Florence Casket Company, up the road near Northampton.
In the hand-me-down 1984 SAAB, I whipped through the back roads of Hadley, where it was easy to speed because everyone knew where the cops like to tuck away on the dirt side-roads. I showed up unannounced, at a creepy, old brick building by a railroad track, just behind the Miss Florence Diner. It was one of the classic diners in the silver train car, I used to go with Lori and her dad Bobby D, and my mom during the years after Tony died, and when Lori’s mom Bonni worked a lot.
Bells rang on the door as I fluttered into the casket factory. The startled octogenarian who greeted me with a scowl was clearly the matriarch, and gate keeper. I explained my mission with classic rapid-fire delivery, and watched her frown turn upside down. Her eyes even sparkled as she called for her gigantic grandsons, who quickly appeared in gray coveralls, with sawdust on the tops of their heads and shoulders. She instructed them to take me to the bowels of the factory and instructed them to “let her take whatever she wants”, followed by two sharp claps.
I left with mahogany, cherry, oak and maple scraps packed into a green recycling bin I took from my mom’s house, with no idea how I would transform them into a display, but feeling victorious, nonetheless.
I sped away quickly, my long curls flapping out the sunroof, DJ Jazzy Jeff thumping in the air, when a message from my angels appeared, in the form of blue lights. I was pulled over on the way home from the coffin factory for speeding. I had talked myself out of countless speeding tickets, so I wasn’t worried. I was even less worried when the cop walked up and I saw it was Sully, my old softball coach from the one season Lori, and I tried to play a sport. We spent most of it giggling in the outfield and hung up our gloves pretty damn quickly.
Sully and I caught up and when I told him about my mission, he laughed.
“Gabby, you know I work with adults with disabilities who run a woodworking shop, right?”
I did not.
Sully took the recycling bin from the trunk of my car and put it in his cruiser. We scribbled some ideas down on the back of a Stop & Shop receipt and he sped off. While I got back in my car, I noticed a bunch of frat boys had watched the entire transaction and were standing speechless, red Solo cups in hand, with jaws on the dirt floor near their hacky sack and requisite chained up dog.
Resourceful and lucky, maybe with a smidgen of blessed to go along with it.
When I scored that coffin wood, it felt like a miracle. When Sully and his guys transformed the scraps into tester blocks for my lip balms I had a huge light bulb moment.
I get to do this? I get to identify a problem and then find a solution and watch it unfold? And, I get to do it with no money, which only adds to the challenge?
Instead of thinking about what an insane path I was heading down as a small business owner/entrepreneur, one where there were very few rules, no directions, and definitely no safety net, I thought to myself: Wow, look what I just did. I solved a problem and now have created something that exists in the world. I found other humans who cared about what I was doing and helped me make it happen!
From that moment on, I was hooked.
No rules? Constant challenge? Major limitations? Sign me up! I knew I could and WOULD figure out whatever needed figuring out. I assumed things would be tricky, complicated and challenging, and I think that’s one of the reasons I kept going. And keep going. Thirty-five years, and counting.
