Giving away the cemetary

Paris Illinois main drag. The place smelled like popcorn because of the cereal factory. Anyway, we sold everything off, paid off everything and what was left was this cemetery. I found the three big cemetery chains in the state and offered it to them. They didn't want it. I offered it a couple of the churches in town. There was a Mortuary owner that wanted his church to take and he would run it for them, but the church backed out. I talked to the town newspaper (I used to read it as kid, my father had subscribed when he decided he wanted Uncle Alec to leave everything to him. It came by mail- I was the only one that read it.}

and they ran an article on their front page, telling everyone we wanted to donate the cemetery to some kind of non-profit. The only call I got was from a clown (a real professional clown) who did anti-drug shows for Illinois schools and had a retarded son that he thought keeping up the grounds was something that he could do as a livelihood. The trouble was his clown program wasn't set up a non-profit, so we couldn't get any tax benefit from just giving to him. He didn't want to pay us for it. 

We were going through the books with the State so they knew everything was up to stuff. They came back and said an audit would have be performed and, oh by the way, it was illegal to run the cemetery from California and the records couldn't leave the state. We wrote an official letter to the State of Illinois, deserting the cemetery. I shipped all the records back to a trustee that had been appointed to handle it. 

I discovered we could claim the value of it as a business loss, a max of 3K a year until the entire amount was used up. I did my share every year until my third was used up. Then a couple of years later I found out that my brother and sister never used it and neglected to tell me so I could use it. 

I shoulda given it to the clown.