When my dad was sixteen, his father died. From then on, my dad and his brother had to start working at his father= s Garbage Business. His uncle was the closest thing to a father after the death, and helped my father and his brother to try and grow up and learn the family business. Tragically, my father's uncle died as well and they were alone for good. His mother did not work, and by the time he was eighteen, it was time to be the owner and full time worker of the family business. My dad and his brother began working as best they could as the owners of their father's garbage company, Liberty Ashes. It was from then that they knew they were in it for life and are both in it to this day. For teenagers, they did a good job of running the business and today it supports both their families very well.

As I grew up around my father, I saw his reactions when he comes home from work showing me he works very hard in what he does. He has been doing it for a long time. Hard work is a big issue in my family. Some Sundays, the whole family would be outside doing yard work. My brother and me would get angry over the things they made us do, but we had to do it. As a result, we learned from it, such as opening our beautiful in ground pool together. Our father taught us that A nothing will ever come easy in life; you have to work hard for everything.@ There is so much stress in the business he= s in. I have a good idea of what he goes through at work because I have worked there during the summer. It is a very stressful job to be the owner of a garbage company. There are a lot of issues that go on in the offices, and sometimes people don't know how to handle them so they turn to my father. He gets a lot of complaints that are regarding the business, and he gets frustrated over the little things that are a pain in the butt. When I work for my dad, I sometimes feel a lot of stress after coming home from a day’s work from nine to five. Some days there will be nothing to do, and it will be slow, other days the phones don't stop ringing and complaints keep coming in. The garbage trucks run twenty-four hours a week, seven days a week and even run on some holidays. You feel like ripping your hair out sometimes over the amount of things that goes on in each office. It is crazy!

Since my father was not able to go to college because of his father's death and had began working at such a young age, I now see why my father wants me to do well in school, and get good grades. He wants the best for me. It would make him very proud seeing his son go to college and do something he never got a chance to do. I know he does not want me to take over the business, he knows I can achieve my own goals. He told me that the business would always be there for me if I decided to do it, but he feels I should keep and open mind to what I want to do. I respect my father for this and how he works so hard to support the family.

One of the most helpful things that he has told my siblings and I is to "Try." You never know what you can do until you "Try it." He is always telling us to try new things and try to do something that we think we can't do. He has said this for a long time. His experiences have made me believe in myself that I can do what I want in this world if I "Try." If you put your mind to it, you can do it, and that is what he wants us as his kids to do, put our minds to something, and do it. My dad has taught me how to swim, water ski, snow ski and drive a boat. He has exposed us to some great things in life that I will never forget.

My father has become a very successful businessman. He has invested in real estate over the years so he now has more then the Garbage Company. He is always experimenting with different ways to create energy. He does recycling, he works wit magnets, he filters used oil to run in his garbage trucks and many other interesting ideas. Some are successful, some aren= t, but anyway, he does A try.@