Grandpa Bought a Chicken Farm - Oct. 28, 2024

1939 -  post-Depression in Endicott NY, with ten years as a new dentist he’d saved $5,000 to invest and saw the advertisement in the local paper:

Chicken Farm for Sale

Mix of Rhode Island Reds and Leghorns

Excellent layers

Profit in the first year!

He bought that bunch of cluckers with high hopes, having been raised on a chicken farm but three years later the operation went belly up.  He lost it all.

The other investment option he weighed at the time was a fledgling company called International Business Machines otherwise known as IBM.

I still wonder what places I could have gone, trips I could have taken, when I might have retired, where I might be living now with a different set of friends in a part of town looking down on blue-collared humanity if he’d chosen differently.

But would I still be here with you writing every day, trying to shorten the distance between us?