I’ll be the first to say it: my surname rules. It’s monosyllabic but pregnant with meaning. Perhaps one of my children will be a Senator one day and make good use of the name. I mean, for God’s sake, we’ve got a Senator Crapo, so certainly a Senator Knight would be a superb brand. God knows they’d be smarter than any of the others.
The reason I bring this up is because I’ve been provided an exhaustive history of the Knight family going back to the early 1600s. As you might guess, we hail from England, and Peter Knight landed in Jamestown, Virginia back in 1643, about a quarter of millennium before the horrible Drumpf family (whose name sucks so bad they changed it to Trump, and which fled to America because – – why else? – – they were fleeing military conscription, a proud tradition carried on through General Bonespur).
Upon examining the storied past of the Knight clan, one item jumped out at me, which was my Great Grandfather Oscar who, unknown to me until now, was remanded to the Louisiana State Hospital for the Insane.
I was naturally curious as to why – – why on Earth? – – would my ancestor be sent to such a place. Well, I managed to find out………….and it’s trading related. Naturally!
When I asked the composer of this family tree about what happened, he replied as follows:
This was PaPaw's father - he ran a saw mill and cattle farm and was doing OK - then he got into cotton futures big time - his broker sent him a telegram telling him to get out because the market was going to crash - he went to the telegraph office but a tornado had cut off the lines to town - by the time he got his selling orders in, he was wiped out - he went insane and spent the rest of this life in a sanatorium - true story!
Thus, my great grandfather was living a perfectly good life until such time as a technical problem prevented him from executed a futures trade, and he promptly lost his mind.
Somehow, now, at long last, it all makes sense.
