Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
My grandfather and his brother owned a grocery store, hotel, and a bunch of commercial property during the Depression. They gave credit to people who needed it and did quite well for themselves. Acquired a whole lot of assets on the cheap.
Then they sued each other, one became an alcoholic and gave all of his money to his mistress while the other one, my grandfather, sold off a ton of land in the 60s. Much of that land is now prime fracking property, and another huge parcel sat where a highway was built in the 70s. I went to school with the kid whose family bought it and made a fortune selling pieces of it along the new highway.
My mother and her brother sued each other over my grandmother's estate and haven't spoken in 20 years.
"Right place, right time" only works if you've smart family. Mine fucked it up quite spectacularly. And I doubt they're alone in that incompetence. My grandfather no doubt rolls in his grave.
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You really just want the people who piss it away to have a good time doing it.
A storied ancestor of mine was one of the lithographers on Audobon's prints, built a smaller printing empire before the civil war, and then managed to both fight in the civil war (reading his own obituary at one point) and print maps of battles (after they were over) making another fortune during the war. After the war, his wife died in one of the periodic fires that flattened large sections of Brooklyn, he married a woman much much younger than him and spent all his money partying with his war comrades, various NY politicians, and his young wife, and on various Scottish causes. He frittered it all away before he died, but it sounds like he had a blast. When one of his maps or prints surfaces now and then it fetches a small fortune, but there are only a couple left in the family.
