When My Grandfather Took a Train Trip With a Bull (opens in new tab)

My grandfather Klaas Zijlstra (1905-1993) was a farmer and cattle raiser. He grew up in Fryslân and always wanted to be a farmhand it seems (his father was a housepainter). There was ambition too, from leaving school at 12 and moving out on his 16th, he sought out farmers to work for that had a reputation in cattle raising. In his early twenties he had a choice of job offers to run a cattle farm in Argentina and to run a cattle farm in Twente, in the eastern part of the Netherlands. His mothe...