AN ENTREPRENEUR’S BEGINNING
The Value of Free Enterprise
By Joe Ricketts
I grew up with awareness of both the mis-
ery and the possibility of life. My mother
was raised in the 1920s and ’30s on a farm
in Manley, Nebraska, in a family that was
not only one of the most successful farm
families, but also one of the prominent
families of the community. They were
Catholic, and in those days in their church
the people who gave the most money
got the first pew, and the second biggest
donors got the next pew, and so on. My
grandfather’s family had the first pew in
their church. They bought a new car every
few years. Their house was big for its time,
with a pillar on each side of the front
door, as compared to my father’s family,
who lived at that time in a log cabin. They
covered it with siding so it looked like a
regular house, but it was still a log cabin.
Growing up in the 1920s, my mother’s
family was not wealthy, but they lived well
as proud and prominent members of the
community.
One day my grandfather bought a new
bull, a major purchase for a cattle farmer,
and the family threw a big party. The
kitchen tables were brought out into the
Joe Ricketts’ home town of Nebraska City,
Nebraska, circa 1940s.
yard and laden with all kinds of food.
There was a lot of competition among
the farmers over who could produce the
most from an acre of land, display the best
animals, grow their crops in the straight-
est lines and other tests of agricultural
achievement.
People were invited to come to this
party to admire the new prize bull. It was
like their own private county fair. There
were games—my aunt used to tell me how
guests would place bets on the number of
eggs they could balance on a bull’s back
before the eggs started falling off—and
other kinds of fun that we don’t think
about anymore. Sometime after the party,
it was discovered that the new bull was
diseased. It might have had tuberculosis
or hoof-and-mouth, a deadly infection
that could spread through a community
and ruin all the farmers around. This was
before science understood the transmis-
sion of the disease, so to make sure it
would not pass beyond my grandfather’s
farm, his entire herd had to be destroyed.
Once the vet made his diagnosis, my
grandfather had no more say in the mat-
ter. The state sent men to dig an enormous
hole, drive the animals in, slaughter them
all and fill the hole with dirt.
Because his entire herd had been
destroyed, my grandfather did not have
enough income to make the payment
on his farm loan, and over time, as he
missed more payments, the extended fam-
ily defaulted on all the loans that had
supported the family’s farms. By now, the
Depression had begun. This was before
welfare or social security was established,
and so my grandparents became paupers.
They lost it all.
My grandfather heard there were jobs
at the packinghouse in Nebraska City,
so he moved his family there. They left
without any assets, and when they arrived,
they rented the cheapest home they could
find, one with dirt floors. My aunt was
so embarrassed to have her boyfriend
see where she lived that when he picked
her up, she asked him to meet her at the
corner.
My grandfather’s plan was to get a
factory job because that was the work
available to a man with no skills except
farming. The packinghouse was tough,
dirty work. Today those places are clean,
somewhat like hospitals, but back then
there was blood and guts and feces lying
all over. He tried, but he couldn’t bring
himself to go to work in the packinghouse
like a boy. His life’s goal had been to
become a big cattleman, and before he’d
lost his farm, he’d had a big sign on the
side of his barn with his name and the
phrase “and sons.” That cattle herd had
been the worldly representation of all his
success and his legacy. Losing it destroyed
him. He suffered a breakdown and never
www.MoAF.org | Fall 2019 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 15