“The only cash I had left consisted of one Dutch dollar and a shilling in copper ,” writes Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography, recalling his first day in Philadelphia, where he ended up in 1723 as a 17-year-old runaway from his father and older brother.

He rebelled against his family and left it behind in Boston to follow a dream in Philadelphia with a very “unlikely beginning,” he concedes in his book.

The lanky teenager came to make it big in a city where he became a universal man as well as a founding father of an extraordinary nation born here.

Dressed in his “working clothes,” “filthy,” hungry, armed only with “some shirt or stocking” in his pocket, plus 2 rolls of bread, “one roll under each arm," Benjamin Franklin described his arrival in a autobiography he started to write when he was already 65, published next to a drawing of him walking down Market Street, done at the time and now preserved for posterity as the only image of the early Franklin, the lanky teenager who came to make it big in a city where he became a universal man as well as a founding father of an extraordinary nation born here.

He disembarked somewhere near Penn’s Landing and headed down Market Street, in direction to his improbable destiny in a city populated by total strangers to him.

First, he became a printing entrepreneur; second, a newspaper publisher; then, a civic causes advocate; much later as a diplomat; and, finally, as the all-around statesman whose signature, the only among all the Founding Fathers, appears on the three fundamental documents that gave birth to the United States of America:

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Peace Treaty with England.

He only found the time to "search for his lost time", and write his own autobiography, at age 65.

He only found the time to "search for his lost time", and write his own autobiography, at age 65.

But before that, and pressed by poverty when young, he learned first to be an entrepreneur— that noble profession of the self-made man, the unique training ground where he probably picked up the hard disciplines that proved handy later in his exceptional career.

As such we remember him here, while reading once again the book “Ben Franklin, America’s Original Entrepreneur,” his autobiography amusingly adapted by professor Blaine McCormick from Baylor University.

Franklin, the Entrepreneur, the common sense and practical man, the gentleman in business as he was in politics, is a memory we would like to always evoke.

Specially at this Father's Day, as it is fair to recognize the most prominent of our Founding Fathers— a local soul who grew to become universal, although his remains are buried here, for us to never forget his example, on the corner of Market and Arch Streets.