Don't Look Down!

1

San Francisco

The Entrepreneurial Mind

Entrepreneurs are like immigrants: They hunger for independence and the opportunity to own their destiny. They seek to live on their own terms, unencumbered by conventional expectations. They shake off the constraints of tradition and bureaucracy. They eagerly take risks, face challenges, and bounce back from soul-crushing setbacks. That spirit runs deep in my family history. It is my lucky inheritance.

My paternal great-grandparents came to America from Italy with little more than a dream and the guts to chase it. Their son, my grandfather, ditched a steady job during the Great Depression to start his own business. My father made a gutsy decision to shutter the family business, pull up stakes, and start a better life in the Sierra foothills. Their stories fill me with admiration and gratitude. They remind me daily that anything is possible if you put your heart, mind, and soul into it. They push me onward.

John Campana, his wife, Mary Victoria Iona, and their infant son, Dominik, left Catanzaro, Italy, a small city in the southern region of Calabria, by steamship in 1902. They fled poverty and political unrest. It was a four-thousand-mile odyssey to a strange land populated by people speaking an unfamiliar tongue. They endured cramped and unsanitary steerage conditions and faced impertinent questions and potential rejection by uniformed officers at Ellis Island. But they trusted that luck, perseverance, and hard work would help them survive and prosper.

Instead of settling among the tenements of Little Italy or the crowded streets of East Harlem, they took a northbound train into the heart of upstate New York, where the landscape opened to wide rivers and factory towns tucked between hills. They settled in Rome, a modest, industrious city in Oneida County, where opportunity, though elusive, was at least on offer. John found work in a brass mill, shoveling coal into the roaring furnaces—a task no doubt as exhausting as it was dangerous. It was nothing to brag about but paid enough to secure a mortgage on a small house in the Italian quarter.

The Campanas lived at the intersection of two worlds, balancing the pull of their heritage and the push of their new homeland. In school, the children stumbled over English idioms and playground slang, their accents marking them as different. Little by little, they adjusted, learning not only how to speak the language but also how to wear it like a second skin.

In 1922, John and Mary packed their belongings, gathered their children, and boarded a train west. Booming postwar San Francisco promised not only better weather but also fresh opportunities for Italian Americans. It was another daunting move, twenty-five hundred miles across the country to a city they knew only by reputation, but after years of scraping by on the East Coast, a chance worth taking.

Train tickets were expensive, $50 a person, a small fortune for a family of eleven, but they managed it by selling what they could and leaving the rest behind. The five-day journey was no small feat with nine children in tow. There was little rest in the stiff coach seats, and keeping the younger ones entertained for days on end felt like an endurance test.

They jammed into a small apartment at 1845 Mason Street, between Russian Hill and the Italian mecca of North Beach, and settled in as best they could. John took a job as a janitor at the Federal Reserve Bank, cleaning marble floors and brass railings. The oldest child, Dominik, called Don, sold meat for Armour & Company, the giant meatpacking company out of Chicago, making his rounds to the small grocers and delis that lined the Italian markets of North Beach.

In 1928, Don married Helen Rosalie Mendler, the spunky twenty-three-year-old daughter of a German-born brewery worker. They rented a bungalow at 939 Plymouth Avenue, on the southwest edge of the city in Oceanview, a working-class neighborhood where gardens and chicken coops were as common as front porches. The house was small but had enough space for the life they wanted to build.

On October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday, the US stock market experienced a catastrophic crash, marking the beginning of the Great Depression. My father, Robert, was three months old.

Somehow my grandfather's energy, wit, and resourcefulness kept him employed as a salesman for Armour & Co. His job involved delivering sausages, ham, and smoked delicacies from the company's plant on Battery Street. More importantly, it required building trust with owners of delicatessens and small grocery stores, many of whom were also first- or second-generation Italian immigrants. He was well suited to the task. His outgoing, charismatic personality won him many friends. He had more than a knack for sales—he had an instinct for seeing the bigger picture.

My grandfather was compact and rotund, with a ruddy complexion and an animated manner—people likened him to New York City's mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the energetic "Little Flower" who charmed and invigorated the Big Apple during the Depression. Don approached business like an entrepreneur, taking risks, building connections, and turning small wins into bigger opportunities. He treated his route like a business, thought strategically about expanding his territory, and spotted opportunities others overlooked.

Not surprisingly, Armour's archrival Hormel hired him in 1937 to help introduce a new canned pork product called Spam, a cheap, convenient protein that needed no refrigeration; it was perfect for financially stressed households, and sales soared. The experience gave him the financial resources and confidence for what would come next. My grandmother Helen once told me, "We needed plenty of both."

In 1940, the Don J. Campana Co. opened in a small, rented cold-storage warehouse in an alley off Minna Street between Third and Fourth in the South of Market district. It was a neighborhood of printing companies, machine shops, and single-room hotels. It was farther away from the North Beach Italian community, but the rent was lower.

In retrospect, it was an ambitious, if not foolhardy, undertaking. Don not only competed with other mom-and-pop distributors but also with the much bigger and well-established purveyor Molinari & Sons. Why did he think he could survive in that cutthroat arena? It's hard to know. But San Francisco was growing fast, and I can only surmise that he figured his deep relationships with deli owners gave him an edge.

It was tough going. Every weekday before sunrise, Don loaded his GMC panel truck with the day's orders and blocks of ice to keep them fresh. Sometimes, his younger brothers Frank, Sam, Ned, or Angelo pitched in, but they had other jobs, and he often had no other company than the occasional stray cat.

Looking back eighty years later, I marvel at the guts it took to start that business. As someone who has built my own companies, I know how it feels to build something from nothing and how isolating it can be. Entrepreneurship may be freeing, but it's a heavy freedom. The weight of every decision falls on your shoulders.

Don wore many hats—buyer, logistics guy, salesman, and problem-solver, with no real divide between business and family life. Helen kept the books, sent out invoices to customers they trusted with credit, and made sure the bills got paid.

Bringing in prosciutto, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and salami by ship from Italy wasn't easy or cheap. Dealing with overseas suppliers involved correspondence via letter or telegram. Don and Helen had to coordinate every purchase, shipment, and customs form to ensure everything arrived on time and met US laws. Shipping was so slow and unpredictable that they constantly ran out of one thing or another.

After Pearl Harbor, further chaos ensued. Products from Italy became hard to get, forcing Don to find local producers able to mimic traditional Italian methods. Rationing added another complication. But war also created opportunity. With men deployed, working women sought the kind of convenient, shelf-stable, and prepared products that Italian markets offered.

After World War II, the Don J. Campana Co. grew rapidly. With soldiers home and consumer spending on the rise, Americans developed a taste for international foods like salami, sausages, and cheeses. San Francisco's Italian American community had more disposable income, eating out more often and buying specialty products. Granddad seized the opportunity. He expanded his product line; established supplier relationships with upscale restaurants, hotels, and supermarkets; and scaled his operations to meet growing demand.

He invested in new trucks, hired employees, and increased his visibility in San Francisco's business community. Stability also allowed him to deepen his involvement in civic and social organizations. He became active in the Calamari Club, a business group focused on Italian American connections. He became a life member of the Freemasons, an organization committed to personal growth and community service. He took a leadership role in the Shriners, focusing on children's healthcare. He actively participated in the Elks Lodge, supporting veterans and local charity efforts.

All this networking was undoubtedly good for business, but I like to think it was more than that. It was about strengthening human relationships, earning trust, and giving back—core principles that matter as much in business as in life. These values shaped how he interacted with employees, partners, and customers, underscoring a belief that business success was about more than profits.

My father absorbed these lessons, though he approached life differently. He shared the understanding that business is about making a meaningful impact on the community and the world. That belief filtered down to me as well. Throughout my career, relationships, trust, and giving back have been guiding principles. Supporting causes, engaging with the community, and building strong connections haven't just enriched my life—they've also been key to my success.

Every generation is shaped by its times. My grandfather, who grew up in a rough-and-tumble world and started his career in the go-go 1920s, saw life as an arena for bold moves, where fortune favored those willing to dive in, take chances, and weather setbacks without hesitation. To him, risk was just part of the game, a necessary ingredient for success, and he embraced it with grit, knowing there were always opportunities around the corner if you hustled hard enough.

My father, molded by the memory of the Depression, was keenly aware that things could spin out of control without warning. Daily life was strongly affected by faraway events and random tides. He preferred known ground to uncertain heights. Where my grandfather moved boldly, my father measured his steps. Easygoing and good-humored, he sought to minimize conflict and avoid unnecessary risks.

After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School, located on the west side of the city, Dad enlisted in the Navy, just as the war was ending. The military, scaling back, offered not the thrill of distant battles but the promise of structure. He imagined orders to the sunny South Pacific: palm trees, open skies, and a taste of adventure. Instead, he shuffled papers on Treasure Island, a man-made speck in San Francisco Bay. Though it suited his demeanor, he once confided to me that the assignment left him with a nagging sense of missing out on something bigger. "I told people I served on an island in the Pacific," he once said. "It was technically true, or close enough." Was that an admission or a joke? I wasn't sure, and I'm not sure he was either.

After leaving the Navy in 1950, Dad settled into a job at his father's company, which had grown to 150 commercial accounts around the Bay Area. It had a half dozen trucks on the move daily: Dad drove one, his younger brother Richard another, and a distant relative I called Uncle Nick a third. There was also a rowdy bunch of hired hands.

At age twenty-one, Dad courted a teenage Treasure Island pool secretary. She came from money and looked it: fashionable clothes, a genteel manner, and an air of sophistication. Her parents, Ellsworth and Mildred Roberts, owned hundreds of acres of East Bay farmland developed into suburban neighborhoods and industrial zones after World War II. On Sunday, August 31, 1952, the society page of The Oakland Tribune contained the following item:

The bride of Robert Don Campana of San Francisco since mid-August is the former Diane Clare Roberts of San Leandro, whose marriage took place at St. John's Church in San Leandro. Her father, Ellsworth G. Roberts, walked with her up the aisle, following her three attendants. Bridesmaids Mrs. Donald G. Boone and Barbara Ellison were in yellow and lavender ballerina-length dresses, each with the other's costume color repeated in her bouquet and headpiece of carnations.

The marriage was an unlikely union, a fusion of modest ambition and inherited wealth: he the twenty-three-year-old son of a second-generation Italian immigrant raised on hard work and pragmatism; she born into a world where money softened life's edges. There were whispers around the family about the Robertses selling off one big tract or another, and it didn't go unremarked that Diane's grandmother Minnie lived in a luxury high-rise overlooking Oakland's Lake Merritt. She also drove an expensive car. In any case, little wealth trickled down to our household.

Without going too deeply down a psychology rabbit hole, I've often wondered whether my parents' different life experiences had anything to do with my entrepreneurial passion. Did the interplay of those two worlds spark a competitive impulse? Did I want to prove I belonged in my mom's tony world? Or did I just want to drive a nice car like Minnie?

I came into this world on January 2, 1954. For the first five years of my life, we lived in a small apartment on a busy street in the suburb of Daly City, just south of the San Francisco line. It was a growing postwar suburb, with rows of modest, single-family homes built for returning veterans and young families seeking a fresh start.

With the impending arrival of their third child, my sister Laureen, my parents bought a three-bedroom concrete home in a new South San Francisco subdivision called Sunshine Gardens. South San Francisco was an industrial hub known for its factories, meatpacking plants, and an iconic hillside sign proclaiming it "The Industrial City." By the late 1950s, it was evolving into a residential suburb with new schools and parks. Sunshine Gardens was a peaceful enclave with modest ranch-style homes and small yards. It was a wholesome, working-class neighborhood in a Leave It to Beaver era. My small bedroom adjoined that of my parents. My sister Kathleen occupied the third bedroom, later sharing it when Laureen came along.

On Sundays, we'd often head back into the city and bond with assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins at the home of my dad's parents. Although the meat business was doing well, and they could afford something bigger, they lived on the first floor of a three-story building they owned, renting out two apartments above.

When the family assembled, food was plentiful. The aroma of fried garlic and smoky sausages floated through the Italian German household. Family gatherings were chaotic symphonies: kids whining and adults blustering about sports, business, and some relative's new baby. I couldn't wait to get back to Sunshine Gardens.

When I was seven years old, my grandfather died unexpectedly at age fifty-nine. My memory of the days surrounding his passing is blurry. I had no real conception of death and only a vague recollection of my grandfather as anything but a looming presence.

My grandfather's passing sent ripples through both the business and my family, affecting all in ways that I could not fully appreciate. For any founder-run company, suddenly losing its chief is a shock; a business built on relationships and personal trust relies heavily on its leader. There was no succession plan. My grandmother had no desire to step in full time, nor did she have the necessary contacts or credibility with Italian deli owners. The role fell to Dad. It was not a burden he wanted or was in any way prepared for.

Life in South San Francisco was secure and predictable. I played baseball with friends in the quiet streets and biked where I wanted. In grammar school, I was known as a happy-go-lucky prankster. One teacher, knowing Dad was in the meat business, asked me to get cow eyeballs for biology class. I brought them in a cardboard container, like a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket. The orbs floated in blood. Not one to pass up an opportunity for mischief, I poured some down my arm, dropped to the floor, and screamed. A panicked teacher brought a cup of water from the bathroom and flooded my arm to find the source of the bleeding. She found . . . nothing. That little episode earned me a two-day suspension. It was not my first run-in with the education establishment, nor, unfortunately, the last.

My father, despite his reluctance to challenge authority, shared my iconoclasm about school. When I needed a parent's note to explain an absence, Dad wrote that I had contracted bubonic plague. "It was a frightening situation," he began, "but we luckily found a specialist from Tanzania who saved my son's life. We are so grateful for this miracle." The principal read it, peered unsmiling over her reading glasses, and silently gestured toward my classroom.

My fourth-grade teacher was a strict, squat woman who wore wool wraparound dresses, even on the warmest days. In my mind, she represented everything boring and stifling about the adult world. One day, she strode to the front of the room, her face gray, and grimly announced: "The president has been shot in Dallas." The air went heavy, the rowdy classroom silent. The outside world had forced its way into our safe suburban lives.

The next few days were a patchwork of somber images, with my parents glued to the black-and-white TV. Stone-faced newsmen droned in somber tones, a horse-drawn wagon carried a flag-draped coffin, the slain president's little boy stood next to his mom, saluting. I sensed that something fundamental had changed. The world wasn't as safe, orderly, or predictable as I had thought.

It would be a stretch to say that warm November week set the stage, planted the seed, or whatever analogy you want to use for everything that came after. I can't say it sparked in me a desire to grab control, to make sure my life was my own. I'll leave that kind of armchair psychology to others. But it undoubtedly influenced, in some small way, my perspective on life.

In junior high, I got into fights. A guy challenged me to meet him behind the parking lot after school. Classmates circled and cheered as we battled to a draw. This behavior did not go unnoticed by teachers or my parents. "I don't know what's gotten into you," my dad said one night. Was that a question? I didn't know. I just shrugged.

My grandmother, tired of keeping the books, began dating and married a rich widower from San Mateo named Kai Freitag. They moved to Woodside, California, an exclusive enclave south of San Francisco, and seemed to play golf all the time. The woman at the center of our extended family suddenly belonged to a different world. It felt like she had moved on to something I wasn't fully part of.

Sometimes I drove with Dad to the firm's office. One of the Campana company's biggest clients was the Matson Steamship Company. Hazel, my grandmother Campana's sister, was the president's secretary. Matson's sleek, modern headquarters overlooked San Francisco Bay and the Embarcadero. From Aunt Hazel's window, I saw the SS Lurline, Matson's gleaming white passenger liner. The Lurline gained fame in the 1930s by ferrying celebrities and the well-to-do between San Francisco and Hawaii. By the early 1960s, it was nearing the end of that glamorous life due in part to Pan American World Airways' long-haul flights with Boeing's 707, but I didn't know that. Seeing the huge ship gave me a thrill.

I rode with my dad to the dock and watched longshoremen hoist our delicacies onto the ship as it prepared to head out under the Golden Gate Bridge and over the Pacific. I imagined the exotic adventures awaiting its passengers and wondered what it would be like.

On another day, Uncle Nick let me ride with him on deliveries. He had what my dad called the gift of gab. Having spent his childhood in Italy, he engaged old Italian deli owners in their native tongue using many hand gestures. I didn't understand what they said, but it was good-natured banter. The deli owners pointed to items in the display cases and handed Nick a list of items to bring on his next trip.

Hanging around the Campana warehouse and riding along on routes gave me an early glimpse of running a small business. The real action was not in fancy boardrooms, like in the movies, but on loading docks and storefronts surrounded by hanging salamis and cheese wheels. I soaked in the cadence of commerce, the nods of understanding between parties, the value of relationships.

But those experiences also revealed a side of life that my Sunshine Gardens friends never saw. Robbery was an ever-present threat. Uncle Nick kept a loaded revolver in his truck's glove compartment and tucked it into his jacket pocket when we stopped at delis in certain neighborhoods. A few shopkeepers paid cash, and the bad guys knew it. One day, a group of roughnecks crowded around us, demanding money. My uncle reached into his jacket pocket; the lurkers knew what was in there and backed off. "This is the real world," Uncle Nick said as we drove away. "You need to learn about it."

It was the hard underbelly of America. I gazed out the truck windows at men who failed in their lives and were trapped in a cycle of alcohol and drugs. I wondered how people in America could end up that way. It scared me.

San Francisco was changing. Hippies filled the streets around Haight-Ashbury. The so-called Summer of Love in 1967 also brought drugs, protests, and violence. The following year, someone shot and killed two high school students on a remote road north of the city. It was to be the first in a series of attacks by the Zodiac Killer.

I also sensed a mood change in our household. My parents became more subdued, my father's loud laugh less frequent, my mother's movements a little too quick. I felt a heaviness in the air. One night, half asleep, fretting no doubt about undone homework or fantasizing about a girl, I heard sharp voices through the thin drywall. The words were muffled, but the sentence fragments had a sharp edge:

The meaning hovered just out of reach, but I knew it had something to do with money. My stomach churned. Psychologists say children sense when something disrupts the emotional balance of the household; it disturbs their sense of well-being. Lying in bed, I stared at the ceiling, feeling vulnerable and much older.

By 1968, the Don J. Campana Co. was a shell of the once-prosperous enterprise my grandfather had built. More people shopped at big supermarkets. Middle-class tastes continued shifting toward mass-market foods, and many young people rejected anything that sniffed of tradition. Traditional Italian meats and cheeses didn't fit the new gestalt. The small grocers and delis that supported the business were vanishing as owners died and leases expired.

The Campana building looked run down. Employees drifted away, laid off or lured by other opportunities. Uncle Richard, my dad's only sibling, moved to Santa Rosa to ride horses, or so the story went. (He later divorced his wife, married a woman in Indiana, managed a company that made industrial vent pipes, and died near South Bend in 2016 at the age of eighty-three.)

Industries, markets, and companies, like people, have a natural life cycle. There comes a time when business owners must make a tough decision: Ride it to the bottom or quit while there's still money in the bank. In the end, it wasn't a tough call for Dad. One evening, he came home from the city with some news. San Francisco was planning a big convention center in the South of Market neighborhood. The city was to condemn hundreds of homes and business buildings, including ours. "Maybe it isn't so bad," he said. "Things just aren't what they used to be. We're done."

Fortunately, at age forty, he had another option in his back pocket. He and I had been spending weekends building a log cabin on a little lot his mother bought in Murphys, a gold rush town in the scenic Sierra foothills. It was 150 miles by car but a thousand miles away from the pressures of city life. An appliance and furniture store there offered him a management job.

In January 1969, halfway through my freshman year at El Camino High School, the Don J. Campana Company closed for good. A "For Sale" sign appeared in the front yard of the little Sunshine Gardens house. A moving van pulled up out front, collected our stuff, and headed toward Murphys as we started a new life.