Izzy by Peter C. Newman

Author:Peter C. Newman [Peter C. Newman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443400152
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

It was easy to pick the exact date when Izzy’s youngest son became his eventual heir. It all had to do with lemonade, and it happened when Leonard was four years old. He had been selling glasses of the cool drink in front of his house on a hot summer’s day and proudly came home with six dollars. His father used the occasion to give him a lesson in how business really worked. “How much did it cost your mother to go to the store and what did she pay for the lemonade?” Izzy asked Leonard. “What was the cost of the ice cubes, the Dixie cups? What was the price of your little cart and the tray you used as a cash register?”—and so on. The realities of entrepreneurship must have sunk in, because Leonard readily admitted that in adulthood he never signed a business deal without remembering the lemonade episode, even if at the time he “lost six dollars and was a puddle of tears.”

The previous year he had picked flowers from the neighbour’s yard and tried to sell them back to the owner, while David and Gail attempted a similar trick with crabapples. At age seven Leonard found a diamond ring in a back lane and set off to the neighbour’s house to determine its owner, speculating what the reward might be. Izzy grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and said, “Kid, there should never be a reward for honesty.” When Leonard was fourteen, the senior Asper urged him to read The Revolt, Menachem Begin’s account of Israel’s founding, a book powerful enough to turn young Leonard into a Zionist. “My hero growing up was Ken Dryden [the Habs’ goalie], not Conrad Black, who my father recommended,” Leonard recalled. “I was only eight at the time, and around the dinner table we would discuss current events and you had damn well better know what happened that day. So, I’m eight years old and trying to memorize every page of the Globe and Mail. We used to watch The Brady Bunch, and when we heard Dad coming, flip to the news. By the time I was twelve, I’d be sitting there talking to Supreme Court judges and cabinet ministers. You can’t pay for that kind of education.” Leonard was regularly perusing the Wall Street Journal and carrying around the Canadian Securities Handbook, although he was shy and sometimes forgot what he had rehearsed when it was his turn to speak at the dinner table. But he was also the most studious. For his higher education he picked Brandeis in Waltham, near Boston, the only non-sectarian Jewish-sponsored college in the U.S., where he graduated with honours in political science. It was his first taste of independence, and it was there that he began to gain the self-confidence that eventually drove him to aspire to the highest office in his family firm. Following his graduation, he took a law degree at the University of Toronto. “I loved contract

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