253 F. 357 | 9th Cir. | 1918
The question which this appeal presents is whether the court below erred in confirming the master’s report and adjudging that the appellant A. L. Brown was not chiefly engaged in farming or the tillage of the soil on December 28, 1917, the daté of the alleged act of bankruptcy, for which his creditors by their petition sought to have him adjudged bankrupt. Brown was a citizen of Seattle, a lawyer, and the president of the Amos Brown Estate, a corporation, in which he and his mother and sisters owned all the shares; the estate consisting of city property of the value of $2,350,000. As such president he received a salary of $3,000 per an
“In closing this letter I want to impress you with the fact that for the past several years I have been educating the farmers for many miles around in the raising and furnishing me with more and better products; I agreeing to take it all. They are now demanding that I still furnish them a market for their products. As a manufacturing plant I have been buying for a long time about 95 per cent, of the farm i>roducts we sold. We have daily calls for hundreds of dollars worth of Brown Farm Products, which we cannot furnish (no capital to purchase the raw products with).”
It is true that Brown testified that he did not mean by his letter that he had been buying 95 per cent, of the farm products which he sold, but that he meant he'had only “enough stuff to fill 5 per cent, of the orders we were then getting.” (But the explanation does not seem to explain the language of the letter. At the close of the year 1917, Brown’s debts exceeded $1,000,000, and his accounts payable were about $49,000. He had borrowed from the Amos Brown Estate about $500,000, and he owed to various banks and other creditors for loans $424,000. He testified that the money obtained on the most of these loans went to the AmOs Brown Estate.
The judgment is affirmed.