Ahead of his Time

One of the major regrets in my life is that I didn’t get to know my grandfather Sam better. I’ve written about him once before. That blog post was mostly about him as an artist. But Sam was best known as a businessman. At one time, his company, Sample Manufacturing Corporation, was the largest producer of ladies’ dresses in Canada. In addition to innovating by applying an assembly-line model to clothing manufacturing, he was a pioneer of private labeling—selling slightly altered fashion designs to mass-market retailers under their own labels.

Sam passed away in 1989 when he was seventy-six and I was twenty-five. I had just finished graduate school and started my first full-time job working at a library when he got sick. He succumbed quickly to his illness after only a few weeks in the hospital.

As children, we didn’t actually see our grandparents too often. They lived in Florida during the winter and came back to Montreal in the summer. We’d fly down to visit them for two weeks during Christmas and Easter vacations. During the summer months, when they were back in town, my brothers and I were away at sleepaway camp. The only time of year we were really in the same place was at the beginning of the school year, before they returned to Florida for the winter.

My grandparents divorced in 1975, and by the time Sam’s business was winding down in the mid-1980s, he was spending even more time in Florida. By the time I graduated high school in ’81, and my parents’ marriage had come apart, we weren’t visiting Florida as a family anymore. We didn’t see much of Sam in the last decade of his life. My two older brothers saw him more often because, for a period of time, he let them use some of his empty factory space for the kitchen cabinet business they were trying to get off the ground. I, on the other hand, had no interest in business.

What I do remember about Sam has stuck with me—and, oddly enough, become more resonant with age. So many of the things I remember him talking about fifty years ago seem even more relevant today.

Sam was an autodidact. Despite never graduating from high school, he loved books and read widely. He read about politics, economics, philosophy, psychology, and art. When I was at university studying political science I can remember having discussions with him about some of the theories we were learning. I can remember him incisively shooting them down as ivory tower nonsense. 

I remember Sam being deeply interested in the writings of Freud and Marx though. His interest in Freud, I believe, was partly personal—he had underwent psychoanalysis for many years—but also connected to his work as an artist and his belief in the dominant role of the subconscious in life.

He was also interested by psychology as it relates to spectacle. One of his favorite phrases was “Bullshit baffles brains.” What he meant was that people could be manipulated, diverted, or gaslit. He was fascinated by American culture, and especially by the popularity of megachurches and televangelists in the South. On a portable cassette recorder, Sam used to tape the Sunday morning broadcasts of the charismatic preachers—the “Holy Rollers,” as he called them. He loved it when they made their pitch for donations, the psychology of salesmanship.

He was highly skeptical of politics and politicians, and despite his own success as a businessman, he didn’t believe in the future of capitalism. I remember him saying that “capital and labour are in conflict.” I presume much of his economic skepticism came from his difficult experience negotiating contracts with garment workers’ unions. He also said, “The banks own everything,” expressing his doubt in the very concept of private property that underpins the capitalist system.

I remember one time he drew a circle to illustrate why capitalism cannot work in the long run. He said, “Let’s say you have a circle of ten people, and you give each one $100 to sell a product or service to their neighbour in sequence. According to capitalism, each person must make a profit on their transaction. Logically, after a number of cycles, one person will end up with all the money.” (The exact number of cycles depends on the profit margins, but the principle stands.)

Today it seems like Sam was right about everything. Nothing about current events, thirty-six years after his death, would surprise him. Capitalism has failed in the way he foresaw—all the money has ended up in the hands of a few. Politics has proven that “bullshit baffles brains”; people are easily diverted and gaslit.

Sam was ahead of his time.

The truth is, I’m not sure what Sam actually thought, because I never had the depth or maturity to ask him. That’s the source of my regret. I’m just sewing together fabric swaths of memory to create a complete garment he might have worn.