Reply #18: 60 Years ago, my great-grandparents owned the largest...

[UdoKier]

poultry ranch in the country. They had a huge house and all the finery on a 500 acre ranch with dozens of chicken houses and a sizeable staff. They shipped white leghorn baby chicks to farmers all over the country. By the 60's they were old, their kids didn't keep the business up, and they couldn't compete with the factory farms that fed their animals literal pellets of garbage. It was closed in the early 70s when I was a kid.

My dad had a decent middle class job as a bureaucrat with the government, and now I'm scraping by as a Japanese translator. Not too good, I guess.

But at least I have moved on and made my own life. Many of my family are still back in that little Texas town, fighting endlessly in court over the sale of the ranch land. Those people make me sick. They cling to an empire they had nothing to do with building.