With the recent passing of Allentown icon Lee Iacocca, I was struck by the impact an entrepreneur can make on a city, a country, a world. You see, Lido, as my dad liked to call him, spent his childhood in typical early 20th century humble beginnings, the same neighborhood my dad grew up in.

Around Seventh and Allen streets in downtown Allentown, it was the kind of neighborhood filled with hard-working parents hoping their children would have a better life than their post-war, post-Depression world. Life wasn’t about fun or leisure in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, it was about survival. It was about hustling a living with little or no safety net.