Picture this: getting up every morning and going to work by seven a.m.; working all day, until seven p.m.; being on your feet all day; carrying clothes and dealing with customers. Imagine doing all that, six days a week…for fifty years. Imagine doing all that when your fingers are so ridden with arthritis that they are permanently crooked. Imagine doing all that at the age of seventy-nine. Imagine doing all that…with cancer. This is the life of Leo Rubin.

Leo has been in business for fifty years, in the same place. He has seen everyone come through from hall of fame football players to mobsters. He has cleaned the clothes of three generations of children in some families. When I was ten, Leo told me I would work for him someday. When I moved back to Chicago in eighth grade, that day came. I was hired at two dollars an hour, cash. My job consisted of hanging up the clothes, bagging them and delivering some of them. Over the five years I’ve worked there, my job description has significantly changed. At times, now, I run the store entirely by myself.

This drastic change was not my choice, nor Leo’s. Last year, Leo developed bladder cancer. For a short time, he was all but incapacitated. He could not walk very well, and he was very tired. This was painful for me to see this happen. He was always active; he never sat down. In the four years I had been working there until this point, he had never been sick. I mean no colds, nothing. Everyday he was there. Now he was here, but in a supervisory role. And it is hard for him as well. He noticeably

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