05/03/2026
My great-grandmother kept a rat in the kitchen.
In a cage. Right there next to the stove.
Also horses. Dogs. Cats. Squirrels. Birds.
And during the Great Depression, when her husband went to work in a factory and four daughters needed to be fed, she turned every last one of those pets into a business.
No marketing plan. No pitch deck. Just a Brownie camera, a pony that performed tricks, and a combination so specific and so unusual that opportunity eventually came knocking on her door.
Two children's book authors sought her out. Fox Movietone News filmed her farm for a national newsreel.
She never called it entrepreneurship. She called it her animals.
I've spent my entire life surrounded by photos, stories, and articles about Bessie Crawford Watson, my great-grandmother, a woman I never met. She passed away 18 months before I was born.
Recently I tracked down the raw Fox Movietone footage from that day on her farm. I'd never heard her voice before.
I sent the footage to my mother, who is 87 years old. She went quiet. Then she said: "I had forgotten what she sounded like."
I wrote about Bessie today; her story, her animals, and the entrepreneurial framework she built without knowing she built it. And what I think she passed down to me, whether through DNA or something harder to name.
Keep rocking.
She Kept a Rat in the Kitchen. She Kept a Business Running Too. Â My mother told me the story when I was young enough to think it was completely normal. Her grandmother, my great-grandmother, kept a pet rat. Not outside. Not in the barn. In the kitchen. In a big cage, right there in th
