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of getting big. It's the American dream, but I'm not certain it's a good one.

At any rate, Donald and I were worried about the value that would be put on the company when one of us died. If it was too high, how was the survivor going to pay to get that half and how was the widow of the one that died going to raise enough cash to pay the tax? Supposing they put a value on it of about five times what we thought that it was worth? We didn't know ourselves how much it was worth! So we had a contract drawn up whereby the survivor would be able to buy the other one's half for $500,000. This would prevent, we hoped, the widow of the dead man coming into the business because much as we loved our wives we didn't think the survivor would like to have the other's widow in the business!

Did you hear anything about it from your wives?

We didn't even ask them. Donald certainly didn't want my wife as an active partner and I most certainly didn't want his. This is something that plagues quite a lot of partnerships very seriously. It has nothing to do with affection. Men just don't like to have women thrust into the business with them. If they pick them themselves, it's bad enough.

We also hoped that this price would influence the government in what the value of the business was. We knew that it was worth a lot more than that, but we had no idea how much more.

The first time that we even thought about the possibility