I would compare that to when I first started with the Montreal Canadiens; it was a big family then, where the guys really stuck together and worked like a unit. But when I came back in '88, it was not like that anymore.
There's virtually nothing made up in 'The Immigrant.' So much of the film came from somewhere in my family's past. All the details are from my own family.
And we had a DJ - my childhood friend from Chicago came to be the DJ at our party out in LA. It was a party, rockin' and rolling, and it was dancing and fun. For me it was different; just to have family with us.
None of our family businesses were focused on technology. It was '93 when I came out of law school, and the Internet was taking hold. So I started New World Ventures.
My mother - who's from Iowa - owns and runs her own day-care centre, while my father's a developer. And my musical influences, I think, came from my father's side of the family.
I came from a poor family. My father was from Glasgow, Scotland; my mother's brothers were brakemen on the railroad. We didn't have anything but mush for breakfast.
One way and another I was having a ball - playing gigs, jamming and listening to fine musicians. Then came a crisis at home. My stepfather fell sick, and it meant I had to support the family.
My own sense of family, where I came from and what I made for myself is an important part of my life.
My parents were, had a marriage of passion, and the passion was about their religious beliefs. They were both immigrant families that - well, my father's family came as Puritans to Massachusetts.
I came from an intellectual family. Most were doctors, preachers, teachers, businessmen. My grandfather was a small businessman. His father was an abolitionist doctor, and his father was an immigrant from Germany.
My family came in 1635 from England and settled in Williamsburg. Shortly after, they split up; half went to New England and half stayed in Virginia. I'm a Virginian Ballard.
Both my parents were migrant workers who came to the U.K. in the Fifties to better themselves. The culture I grew up in was to work hard, save hard and to look after your family.
I'm actually Cuban-born, born in 1956, the year Fidel Castro came into power, and my father moved my family to Miami a few years later when things were starting to look bad.
I never went to college. But the structure I grew up with was planted so deep that when it came to doing business, I knew how to be disciplined, create teamwork, and persevere. It set me up to be an entrepreneur and a successful franchiser.
If you knew my life and understood where I came from, you would agree that Auntie Anne's, Inc. is a modern day business miracle.
My dad is in the music business in Nashville. I was the third child born in my family, and there are three notes in a chord, so that's how they came up with my name.
My father and grandfather were businessmen. The family business was Adelphi Paints in New Jersey. When the first energy crisis came in the early 1970s, the business suffered.
I came to the U.S. in 1994 to learn English and go to business school, but I took only a few business courses at the State University of New York at Albany and didn't finish.
When I came into the mobile phone business, I was really the upstart who pretty much took the business, not quite by storm, but really made an impact on it quite early on. But it was from a position, really, of feeling that I was a last mover.
I had no choice but to work hard. I was a straight-A student, went to college, and I loved business. I never thought I was going to be a singer myself. It came accidentally.
And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball's profitability by 'running the game like a business.'
