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Lawrence Eisenberg grew up listening to his parents lecture him about his future by pointing out that if he had any smarts, and he did, he should grow up to be a dentist, or a doctor, which might have been the case if young Lawrence hadn’t had ideas of his own about following in his father’s footsteps.

Sam Eisenberg was a hard worker, a guy who drove a bus for the Associated Hebrew Schools of Toronto by day and, after supper each night and on weekends, put on a shirt and tie and a spiffy looking cap to drive a taxi. Sam’s cab was a green 1956 Buick, known around town as the No. 7 cab, partly because his taxi owner’s licence was the seventh one issued by the city in the 1950s and partly because he, in a brilliant stroke of cross-marketing, handed out free packs of Number 7 brand cigarettes to his fares.

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The Industrial Revolution should be called the Screw-the-Little-Guy Revolution

Sam’s son, the hypothetical dentist, started driving cabs part time at age 18. His dad taught him that the key to being a successful cabbie was to be a gentleman, open doors for passengers, give impeccable service and lock up a few regulars for leaner times. In 1966, Sam died of heart failure at the wheel of his school bus, just shy of undergoing a medical procedure that might have saved his life, and his only son gave up on the idea of dentistry to drive full time and support the family.