Like Mother, Like Daughter <b></b>

Growing up, we watch our mothers to figure out how we shouldperceive the world. So if your mother, and your mother'smother, own businesses, the entrepreneurial spirit is oftencontagious. "I can't remember my mother articulating in somany words that I should pursue whatever I wanted to do,'says Polly Baumer, owner of Many Hands Magazine, a holistichealth quarterly in Northampton, Massachusetts. "What was muchmore evident was the impression I got from watching someoneactually [go after her dreams]. I watched her create a business andmake it happen.'

Baumer comes from what she describes as "a littletribe' of women entrepreneurs. Her mother, Margaret JaneStrong, started a business that provides art tours of Europe; hersister, Margaret Jane Mason, owns Mrs. Mason's LusciousTemptations, a candy manufacturing company in Southfield, Michigan;and most of her female cousins have dabbled in businessownership.

The matriarch of this entrepreneurial wellspring wasBaumer's grandmother, Catherine Sweet Anderson. A woman whoresisted every stereotype society wanted to squeeze her into,Anderson found her calling as a homebased business owner in the1920s. Discovering from her husband, a vice president of marketingat Pillsbury, that the company was throwing away wheat germ, shepromptly decided to collect the wheat germ, bag it, and sell it tofriends and people in the community. Eventually, Anderson sold thebusiness to a party who later sold it to the Kretschmer family,which has since become the best-known name in wheat germ. "Shewasn't hesitant about making her presence known in theworld,' Baumer says.