My grandfather McPherson who was one of the founding partners of Tumac Lumber in Portland in 1959 died in 1994. I was close to him and spent many evenings in my 20’s playing a few holes of golf or barbequeing with him. Sometimes we would just sip screwdrivers on his back patio overlooking his rose patch and hole#3 on the Charbeanu green nine.
When he passed away my uncle Tom and my Mom set up a small family business with some of the inheritance we received, money built on the trading business of Tumac. There were 7 or 8 of us and we called it MAC Clan Investments. Originally we invested in stocks like Willamette industries.
A few years later there was an opportunity to roll that money into a family farm in Colusa that my dad’s uncle Bill had run for over fifty years. It was an old prune orchard which was still producing. We all agreed to reinvest the funds and grandpas old Tumac money went to work for Sunsweet prunes.
Several years later a federal farm bill came along with an incentive which allowed us to remove the prune orchard and pay off our loan. After the prunes were gone we crop shared row crops with a local farmer. Lima beans were our primary go to crop. The great recession hit in 2008 and Colusa milling could not get a reasonable price for our dried and bagged beans. We held them in storage. Same was true in 2009 and our pile grew.
Later that year my dad called to share that finally we had a buyer. When the receipt came through it showed Tumac as the broker. Yes the same Tumac that my grandfather started 50 years prior. And that is how money comes back around to work, I think my grandfather would have liked that!