Background
Harry Cohen came from a poor immigrant family of eight, the son of Alexander and Rose (Diamond) Cohen. He quit school at age 15 to help support them. Working as a doorman at a theater in Winnipeg, he obtained a job at Warner Bros. as a film inspector during the Great Depression. In 1932, he was transferred by Warner to Calgary, Alberta. Taking a liking to the city, he persuaded his entire family to move West in 1934. They arrived broke, and their arrival marked the beginning of an amazing success story.
Harry's five brothers, John, Albert D. Cohen, Morley Cohen, Samuel N. Cohen, and Joseph H. Cohen, set up a small retail store and, by 1939, the family had scraped together enough monies to create General Distributors Ltd., a wholesale import firm. While his brothers went off to war, Harry (disqualified from service because of stomach ulcers), attended to the family business while still working for Warner Bros.. It is during this time that he met and married Martha Cohen, who would eventually become one of Calgary's leading female community-builders and receive national recognition for her many accomplishments.
Read more about this topic: Harry B. Cohen
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)