Legacy & Lineage
My great-grandfather Ismail Machuca built four businesses in Concón, Chile. A barbershop. A colectivo — the shared-route taxi that moves working people around a Chilean city. A ropa americana operation, used American clothing sold out of the back of his van. And a restaurant, Don Pimpo, empanadas and seafood on the coast.
Not all at once. One after another, across a working life. Four separate times he decided to build something.
The detail that stops me is the barbershop. He didn’t open it because barbering was lucrative. He opened it so his son — my grandfather — would have a trade and a place to work. He built a business as an inheritance. Not money set aside, not a policy that pays out on a bad day. An operating thing with a door and customers, handed over while he was still alive to teach it.
That’s a different theory of legacy than the one most people are sold.
The bomberos
My grandfather Ruben took the trade and then went well past it. At eighteen he became a bombero — a volunteer firefighter. In Chile the fire service is entirely volunteer. Nobody is paid. Men run into buildings for a town that has never cut them a cheque, and they do it as a matter of civic obligation rather than employment.
He was also a miner. And my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and my great-uncle were all among the founders of the Concón fire station. Three generations of one family on the founding roster of an institution designed to pay them nothing.
Then they had to leave. The family fled Chile during the coup — first to Argentina, then to Canada. You do not found a fire station in a town and then leave that town by choice. They left because staying stopped being survivable.
In Canada he went into the trades and became a unionized boilermaker and welder. Winnipeg first, then a transfer to a Calgary plant, then shift work on shutdowns in Fort McMurray and Grande Prairie. Shutdown work is brutal and unromantic. Long rotations, cold, other people’s schedules. He did it in a country whose language he was still learning, having already lost one.
That’s why I’m in Calgary. The whole reason.
The other side
The other side of the line ran parallel. My grandfather on my dad’s side was a mechanical engineer in the Air Force during the Second World War. My father joined the Navy at eighteen. Then a bachelor of education, then a professor at SAIT, then editor at the Whitehorse Star, and somewhere in all of that, a cowboy.
He won the wild horse race at the Calgary Stampede in 1993. He also got hit in the face by a bronc in Williams Lake and had his jaw broken clean, and was transported out.
Navy, classroom, newsroom, rodeo chute. Four careers that share no skills whatsoever.
I used to think that range was scattered. I don’t anymore.
What actually carried
Look at what’s consistent across all of them. Not the industries — barbering, mining, welding, teaching, journalism, riding broncs. Those have nothing in common. What’s consistent is that every man I come from worked with his hands or his body, built something that served people other than himself, and treated a wide range of competence as normal rather than as a lack of focus.
And every one of them handed something over. The barbershop to a son. A fire station to a town. A trade to a family. A country to a generation that got easier options.
I run a short-term rental group, a marketing agency, and a crypto thesis at the same time. People occasionally suggest I should pick one. For years I assumed that was a personality defect I’d have to manage.
He didn’t run his all at once. What carried down wasn’t the juggling — it was the starting.
My great-grandfather built a barbershop, then a taxi line, then a clothing operation, then a restaurant, out of a Chilean coastal town, with far less margin for error than I have. Four separate times he backed himself with no cushion under him. That instinct came from somewhere.
The obligation runs the other direction, though, and that’s the harder half. All of them built things that outlasted their involvement. The fire station still runs. The trade got passed down. That’s the standard, and it isn’t met by accumulating assets. It’s met by building things that keep operating when you stop.
I know who I come from. Barbers, miners, volunteer firemen, welders, engineers, sailors, teachers, editors, and one man who got his jaw broken by a horse and went back.
None of them left me money. All of them left me instructions.