This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell all kinds of stories here on this show.

And one of our favorites is what we like to call our American Dreamer series.

And always that series is brought to us by the great folks at Job Creators Network,

advocating for small businesses and working hard to help them turn their small businesses into bigger ones.

Today's story is about Jim Keys, the former CEO of 7-Eleven and Blockbuster.

Here's Jim with his story.

So, wow, it's an interesting, I think an interesting American tale.

In many ways, I guess you could say I am the classic definition of the American dream,

because I grew up in a challenging environment.

Too many children, not enough money, three-room house, six children, two parents all squeezed

into this one building literally with no running water

and no modern conveniences like a thermostat. We had a wood burning stove that would stop burning in the middle of the night if someone didn't get up to replenish the wood and it would get so cold in the house that literally the galvanized buckets that we used for water.

We had an outdoor pump would freeze over.

And we'd have to break the ice to get to the water in the morning

if it wasn't cold enough to freeze the whole bucket during the night.

Cleanest freshest water in the world. Literally

that was the environment that I grew up in, which interestingly never occurred to me

was a situation of poverty. Until one day I believe the church came with a basket of food. And I remember asking my mother at the time, why are they

giving us this food? And she said, well, we need it. We're, you know, we're kind of poor. And I

still remember trying to understand why they would think we were poor because I didn't feel like we were poor,

never did. But that situation is tough on any family in any situation. So my mother at the time I was

...