David Lubin Author:Olivia Rossetti Agresti Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI PIONEER TEARS IN CALIFORNIA : THE UPBUILDING OF A BUSINESS The following account of David Lubin's start as a business man and merchant is taken... more » from notes of the story as he told it me some years ago in Rome: In 1874 I was traveling in the East for a firm, selling lamps, copper kettles, and other specialties in hardware, when I received one day in New York a letter from my half- brother, Harris Weinstock, who was then living in San Francisco. He told me of an opening there, and urged me to come on and join him in a dry-goods store he was starting mainly with some insurance money my sister had come into. I decided to put my savings into the venture and go into business with him. Our capital all told did not exceed six hundred dollars. We opened a store down town, on Washington Street, then in a good business quarter, doing a fair class of trade for those days, though before long the Chinese began to come in and gradually swamped the neighborhood. Those were times of big prices on the Pacific Coast, of rapid fortunes, and big failures. It was the custom to ask tremendous sums and then sell for what you could get — eighty- five dollars for a suit of clothes, say, and then sell it for four. No change under "two bits" was spoken of, and a "bit" was 12£ cents. Coppers were not taken; to offer them was looked upon as an insult. Trade was done in those days by standing at the door of your store and inviting in customers — sailors and miners formed a goodly percentage of the motley population — and then you would "soak" them for all they were worth. It was the old-world, old-time system of barter, handed down from an immemorial past. It was a matter of bargaining and haggling over prices between salesman and customer,in which the latter was very generally worsted. T...« less