Sancho Panza responded to yesterday's post: Golden Flake legal proceedings
So, if you can hang around for another 18 months, your birthday gift could be a whopping $25M mount of greens, after tax... minus whatever you've been living on and the accrued interest.... not bad for just having a blood link.... I mean, did you ever work for that company and help it flourish? In a World ruled by the Ocasio-Cortez' Wealth Police, such thing could never happen, inheritance would probably be abolished as a manifestation of privilege and decadence!. Are you voting for Trump in November? I bet a lot of the characters in this sweet story, might just do that.... they would definitely not vote for Bernie's proletariat paradise....... oink 
A true lover of wisdom has hands too busy to hold on to anything! He learns by doing and every pebble in the path becomes her teacher!
Oink!
I replied:
Yes, $25 million after taxes is what I rough-calculated. What I have been living on and the accrued interest is a loan against a different inheritance of $1,000,000, which became vested in me and the my father's other three children at his death and will be paid to his children at his widow's death, or to our estates if we die before her.
An odd feeling, actually, that I will get that much money if I simply live long enough. Am amazed to have lived this long. Under our divorce decree, my second wife is entitled to 1/5th of it. Will give my daughters and their husbands chunks of it, and will give enough to a few people who stuck with me, despite me, for them to be financially comfortable. Will hang onto the rest and dispense what's left in my last will and testament. As things now stand.
Yes, I worked for Golden Flake. Starting maybe age 13, during the summers, in the manufacturing plant and warehouse. After I could drive, I rode with route salesmen soon to go on vacation, and ran their routes when they went on vacation. I also continued working summers in the warehouse. Through college. One summer, I striped the blazing hot asphalt parking lot in front of the company offices for a change of pace from working in the warehouse.
After clerking for the federal judge, I went to work for Golden Flake full time. I did it, because my physical health was horrible, I felt at risk, and working at Golden Flake seemed a lot safer than trying to practice law.
I did a lot of traveling, ran a vacation route in north Alabama, spent six months building a new route in Louisville, a small Mississippi town about 30 miles south of Starkville, where my older daughter and her husband live.
One day a week back then, I drove the route truck up to Starkville and serviced accounts there, including the college's Student Union restaurant and concession. There was a small neighborhood establishment in a black neighborhood, which served real fried cracklin's and that was the first and only time I ever ate them. I worked Louisville once a week, and spoked out the other week days to other small towns within 30 miles, or so. For six months, I drove to Louisville from Birmingham every Sunday evening and back to Birmingham on Friday evening. 185 miles one-way. Mostly. All but a few miles two-lane.
I met and made some good friends in Louisville, and then in Jackson after I was pulled from the Louisville route to open a new route serving Jitney Jungle grocery stores in Jackson. I was courting the son of that grocery chain's founder. A very interesting man, that son of the boss. But it was darn lonely in Mississippi, and I can't say I liked it, but it did match what I later read William Faulkner said: "In order to understand the world, you first need to understand a place like Mississippi." Same could be said about Alabama and Key West.
But I digress from my time at Golden Flake.
After the Mississippi baptism in the company that is the most important thing, you are expected to die for it, I worked out of the home office. Did all sorts of things. Purchasing. Wrote operations manuals for cooking corn chips and fried pork skins and popcorn. Ran the marketing and advertising department. Rode a week at a time with division and regional sales managers in Alabama and nearby states. Befriended sons of owners of other key accounts. Was a regional sales manager for a little while, until the company sales manager realized I was not suited for that and took my advice to give the job to the division sales manager I had said should have gotten the job to begin with. He proved me dead on the money.
I was dying inside, wishing I had not chickened out of practicing law. My gut was always angry. My marriage was falling apart, and I was doing plenty to cause that. After four years, I told my father I was resigning to practice law. Grown men, who had worked at Golden Flake all their adult lives, came into my office, or called me on the telephone from the field, begging me to stay. I was their and the company's hope. They knew I was different, as well as the son of the boss.
I had new ideas, which turned out to work if they were tried. I went against the status quo. I pissed off some of the old men in management. I felt the rank and file workers were the heart and soul of the company, and management was not nearly as important as it believed.
But I had to leave, otherwise I would have died. It was very hard on me, and on my father. It was a mistake that I even tried it. Perhaps it would have gone differently if I had cut my own path practicing law, and then had gone to work for Golden Flake? I'll never know.
Here's the deal Amigo I only met and got to know online.
So far in my meandering life of jousting windmills and not, I made an F in capitalism. But I made an A in starving writer of one-of-a-kind, boat-rocking non-fiction, fiction, poetry, soul-drawing and blogging, and in Key West and Florida Keys redneck mystic politicking and resistance-fighting, shooting off my mouth more than I sometimes should, or maybe not.
That's an interesting epitaph. To which must be added to round out the poetry, irony, karma, humor, as you please: but for inheritances from my father and his father, there would have been none of that. You and I never would have met. I probably would be dead. My daughters would not have been put to try to explain their daddy from another planet to anyone, because he died before realizing he really was from another planet.
As for the presidential circus this year, at this juncture, I don't yet see a Democrat still in that diminishing ring that gets my vote. You can't be serious asking me if I will vote for Trump. I imagine many of my father's former employees will vote for him. And voted for him in 2016. I have a number of friends who voted for him and will vote for him again, and again and again, if given that chance. I been a thinking perhaps Trump having the Iranian super hero killed was a covert get Trump more votes stunt, and perhaps Iran's "fierce" missile counterstrike, which inflicted no human casualties and little property damage, was a feint and the real counterstrike lies ahead.
Oink!
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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