Maybe my biggest mistake?

I have told you before that my family should own much of California by now after opening a hardware store and bank in the heart of the Gold Rush.

The next generation ran them both into the ground, but property remained, probably acquired from indebted miners. My family quarreled over what to do with it for decades. Hmm, centuries, actually!

Once when I was 2 years old, they gathered to make a deal. I got ahold of the papers and promptly tore them up!

My mother was tired of the endless family bickering. She would give her share away to relatives, but when someone died, she would just inherit it back.

With such a background, you can understand why I wanted to get rid of her house in the same area (Placerville),  after she died during the bottom of the 2008 Great Recession. Others told me to hold on to it until the market rose again. But I sold it anyway. I did not want to be a landlord from 3,000 miles away in Washington, D.C. A California house sold for $200,000? Bet you don’t hear of that anymore!

I had toyed with buying land when I lived in Las Vegas in 1969 and 1970, knowing that it would be valuable some day. But I never got around to it.

Now you know where I am coming from as I tell you about my grandfather, Fred W. Gee, who carefully saved box tops from Fresh cereal in the 1930s.

The deal was: Turn them in to Sunset magazine and you could get a deed for valuable land left by centuries of settlers. My grandfather did that.

Sometime in the 1950s, my father decided to go looking for this land as he packed the family into the car for one of our long Sunday drives.

After a drive of maybe two hours, we found it! It was on the side of a steep hill with no roads, miles from civilization, somewhere north of the Russian River. (I don’t remember how large the parcel was.)

“Worthless,” my father declared, and we went home disappointed.

About 40 years later, after my father died, my mother got a letter asking about this same land. A woman was building something nearby and needed her property.

I agreed to take this project over.

So, like a genius, I told the lady she could have it for free if she would give my mother a subscription to Sunset magazine.

I have always wondered about that property. 

What if . . . ? I still don’t know.

Now I live on a 400-acre plot nowhere near the Gold Rush that has been owned by the same family since 1820. No paperwork, no deals for me!