Fatherhood Quote by Quincy Jones

Jones slips a whole Chicago origin story into a few plainspoken lines, and the understatement is the point. He opens with the sturdy dignity of craft: a father who builds things, "a very good carpenter". It’s an American compliment that signals pride without performance. Then the sentence tilts: that same carpenter "worked for the Jones boys". The name coincidence is almost comic, but Jones immediately clarifies it away - "not family members" - as if anticipating the listener’s need to sort myth from genealogy. He’s controlling the narrative before it gets romanticized.

What replaces romance is a blunt lesson about how power actually operated in mid-century urban life. "They started the policy racket in Chicago" lands like a door shutting: the informal economy, the numbers game, the organized hustle. By pairing that with "the five and dime store", Jones compresses legality and illegality into the same neighborhood ledger. These men weren’t just criminals; they were entrepreneurs in a city where the boundary between a storefront and a racket could be thin, and where money moved through whoever could organize it.

The subtext is about proximity. Quincy Jones isn’t claiming gangster lineage; he’s describing the atmosphere he grew up breathing - working-class respectability adjacent to shadow capital. It’s also a subtle class critique: a "very good" tradesman still depends on whoever controls the jobs. Coming from a musician who later navigated gatekeepers, labels, and celebrity ecosystems, the anecdote reads like an early tutorial in networks: talent matters, but infrastructure - and who owns it - matters more.