This week's title phrase can mean a variety of things. It can literally mean taking care of one's means of supporting self and family. Here on this blog, I've discussed businessmen and businesswomen in the family: Emily [Hoyt] Packard, who was a milliner; Nelson Reed McKee, a jeweler and watchmaker; Frank A. Packard, Bloomington, Illinois, merchant; Perry Wilmer Reed, head of the Pensacola, Florida, Chamber of Commerce; my father, Arden Packard, and his brother Jack, advertising agency owners; Oscar Merry Packard, builder and developer; Walter Hetherington Packard, builder and developer, and stockbroker.
The phrase can also mean buckling down and taking care of the serious stuff in life. Samuel Packard's religious convictions caused him to take his wife and their firstborn, a daughter, on a risky and most probably quite uncomfortable sea voyage in 1638, from their home in Suffolk, England to a hardscrabble new settlement in a wild land called Massachusetts. There was Richards Packard, who did his part in taking care of a certain dispute with England at the end of the 1700s. After that was settled, Richards began a northward migration that left him disappointed in Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire, on up into Canada, which was practically giving land away and not being terribly picky about who they were giving it to, even to those who had previously taken up arms against His Majesty, George III. The succeeding three generations of my line were born in Canada. Mathew Hale Packard, a member of that third generation, took a chance on what I call "retro-migration," going from Canada back to the U.S. He took care of other grim business from 1860 to 1865, serving in two regiments of New York cavalry. Farther west, at the same time, Charles Reed did the same in a regiment of Indiana infantry. My father took care of the business of serving in the U.S. Navy, from his education at the Naval Academy to World War II service.
They all, with their brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and all else, took care of the business of living, as best they could.
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