The Toothless Cattle Company

I wasn't always a tightwad. I didn't always stoop to pick up pennies, straighten bent paper clips or shop in thrift stores. As a kid, my grandparents gave me 10 Carson City silver dollars every Christmas and birthday and if I had all those coins now I might be in the Forbes 400, but I had to go and waste them on baseballs and bubble gum.

I mowed lawns, delivered papers, dusted furniture in my Grandpa’s furniture store and did anything to make a buck. The funny thing was, the more money I made, the more tightfisted I became. The deeper my pockets got the shorter my arms grew. I’m sure economists have a name for this phenomena.

I’ve always lived in fear of being broke. This was because my father, who was one of those Okies who migrated to California during the Depression, reminded us all the time what it felt like to not know where your next meal was coming from. To hear him tell it, the Joads in the “Grapes of Wrath” were zillionaires compared to his family. I never got to the point where I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from, but a lot of those meals consisted of a can of chili beans. My college years were especially gaseous.

When my wife and I lived in Australia, we lived in a caravan (house trailer) without cooking or bathroom facilities for $40 a week, and we budgeted another $40 for all other costs. Once a month, we’d treat ourselves to a movie at the cinema even though all they showed were Barbra Streisand movies. When we got back to the states, I vowed to never see another Barbra Streisand movie. And I haven’t.

By the time I attained my goal of becoming a rancher, we were back to living in a trailer house in a cow pasture we leased. Naturally my tightfisted ways carried over into ranching. I bought my bulls in the slaughter run and the only cows we could afford had no teeth. At one sale the auctioneer thought he was being real funny when instead of naming me as the buyer he said the purchaser was The Toothless Cattle Company. Ha, ha.

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