The first 18 months we were here, we lost every penny we had.

Leonard McDonald and his wife, Patricia, wanted a better life for their children. Violence in Northern Ireland and limited opportunities for young people persuaded them to leave a successful life in Belfast for a chance in Southern California. Nearly 10 years later, the family is alive and well and successful in Thousand Oaks, but it wasn’t easy.

When I went to the American Consulate, he told me that under no circumstances could we live in America, it would be impossible to get in.

After I visited him four or five times, he said my only hope was to find a company that is already exporting 51% of their total production to America. They qualify to have a full-time representative in America working for them for four years. It’s called a trade visa. I found a shoe company. They sent me here with no salary, no pay, no anything but a case full of samples. But that qualified me to get into the United States.

I came over here with 36 shoes and a wife, a 7-week-old baby, a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old. My job qualified me to get in, but it didn’t qualify me to make money. I can tell you, I didn’t make a cent. But I said, “If I get in, I’ll do anything to live in America.”

California to me was palm trees and beaches and literally money on the streets. We bought a house, and I started trying to sell shoes. We got a rude awakening. The first 18 months we were here, we lost every penny we had. We were $30,000 in debt with the Visa card.

I started cleaning windows. I’d just go to the door and say, “I live up the street, and I’m out of a job. Can I clean your windows? I’ll do a good job.” I worked a 90-pound jackhammer for six months digging holes for Jacuzzis. I used to go down to Westwood outside the federal building from 3 o’clock to 6 and sell mechanical birds. You wind them up, and they fly. I bought them for two dollars and sold them for five. It was a good stand. I could sell a hundred a day.

I didn’t have a lot of pride. There is nothing I wouldn’t have done that was legal for my family. As I look back on it, that was my strength.

Once I was working three jobs. I was working Howard Johnson’s all night. I was selling insurance all day, and every other night, I was making emery boards from 6 o’clock at night to 2 o’clock in the morning. One morning at 10 o’clock, the guy who was training me to sell insurance was sitting in one chair, and I was sitting in the other, and I fell off the chair asleep when he was talking to me. That’s what I call tired.

As soon as we got the all-clear from immigration and I knew we were staying, I went all-out to establish a business for myself. I had tried shoes and failed, and I’d looked at so many other things. I was sitting in McDonald’s on Kanan Road thinking, “What am I going to do here in America?” and the crystal business came into my head. I was aware of the factory having been there in Ireland for many years, but it had always been a failure. The crystal in my opinion was sensational. It was run by a parish priest who established the factory to put kids back to work, and he didn’t want to make a profit.

So when I was sitting at McDonald’s I said to myself, “If I can get one-on-one with customers and tell them the story of Father Eustace, show them the crystal, give them a comparison then and there and give them the price, I think we have a chance of doing business.” We took our first order in August of 1982, a $14,000 order on borrowed money that we sold in a small showroom with a few shelves and mirrors. We did $300,000 in the first year, and they made me sole distributor for the United States of America for the life of the company. It’s growing now with stores across the United States. We’ll have more than 30 stores by December.

It’s a big change from cleaning windows and things like that. Now I have two Mercedes cars and I fly Concorde. But I still live in the same house. I remember when I was selling insurance, I was afraid the man who was training me would stop at McDonald’s, because I didn’t have money to buy a Coke.