West Theater

I find it kind of sad really, that 40 years ago I went to the West Theater to see a movie. Today, in 2010, it is still the town theater. Same building! Across the street from the Palace Drug I wrote about last week. This week they are showing Alice in Wonderland with Johnny Depp. Ironically, I probably went and saw the original Alice in Wonderland there.

Actually I can't remember any of the movies I went to see there except one. I don't remember the name, but it was a horror movie. A man was buried alive in a casket and he was scratching and pounding when he woke up. I think I had bad dreams for a month. I can't remember who took me, or why Mom even let me go. She probably didn't know. OK, which one of you older siblings took me to that scary movie?

Does it even have a parking lot? What a mess it must be. Craig has changed so little in some ways. Maybe it's cool that it's kept it's old town feel, but I can't help thinking...'it is sad'. A town frozen in time.

Craig Daily Press

One year the local Craig newspaper had a contest. The paper was called "Craig Daily Press" and still prints today. My best friend Andy and I would faithfully play the contest every week. It required a little bit of leg work, but two bored kids in small town USA were up for the task.

The newspaper would include semi-hidden clues within the advertisement's inside the newspaper. The clue would be some little phrase that obviously was not part of the original ad. The reader, or contest players, had to find all the little clues and fill out the contest sheet and then take it to one of merchants located in town and drop off the entry. There was one contest per week, but you could put an entry at each participating business.

Andy and I faithfully played the game. We would find all the clues, fill out the form and then ride our bikes all over town to each of the merchants and drop an entry into each of the boxes. There was one at Cook Chevrolet, and one at Coast to Coast. I can't remember them all, but we made the rounds and we never missed a week

Finally our diligence paid off and I won the contest one week. I won $80 in merchant bucks. I didn't get $80 cash, but I got $80 worth of vouchers that could be used at participating merchants in town. My poor single mother, God bless her, would not let me just spend the money on whatever I wanted. She insisted that I buy some useful stuff with my bounty. I remember we went and bought some clothes at the town Department Store. Perhaps at Hesteads. I remember we bought some clothes at a store on Yampa Avenue in downtown Craig. Funny, I can't remember what I bought with that money except for 2 shirts. One a yellow gold striped shirt, and the other a blue striped shirt. I was wearing one of those shirts in one of my elementary school class photo's. I can't remember any toys or fun stuff I got. All I can recall is the shirts.

Eighty dollars was a lot of money in those days. And for a 10 year old boy it was a fortune. I think about it now, and I should have probably split it with Andy since we both worked on the weekly entry's as a team. Not sure why I didn't. Sorry Andy. I got my picture in the paper too. The headline read: "Poor kid makes it big!" Not really, but it was the truth.

I remember on Sundays the Denver Sunday paper was available. Not sure it was the Rocky Mountain News of the Denver Post. Of course in those days, the little town closed up on Sundays. But people could get the paper in front of the Palace Drug Store on the corner of Yampa Avenue and Victory Way. The store was closed, and they didn't have newspaper machines like now days. The papers were just sitting on the sidewalk under the awning with a weight on them. Next to the papers was a coffee can. People would grab a paper and put their money for the paper in the coffee can. People were honest in those days I guess, cause that is how we got the Sunday paper when we were in Craig. I remember getting marshmallow sundae's at the Palace Drug too. That was a real treat. The Palace was one of those old fashioned drug stores with a refreshment counter inside. I guess they weren't old fashioned then...it was normal. Anyway, it was a real treat to go get a marshmallow Sundae. Maybe that's where the rest of my $80 went?!


Here I am wearing one of the shirts I bought with my big winnings.




Look at that mop...and those ears...and those big teeth...and all those freckles...and...

Wow, people really DO read my blog!

I came home last night to find a new 'friend request' on my Facebook page. Expecting it to be someone from work or a family member that had recently discovered FB; I was pleasantly (no pun intended) surprised to find out the friend request was from a childhood friend named Andy Pleasant. I had not seen or heard of Andy since the end of 5th grade in Craig Colorado.

My family moved away from Craig and eventually Andy moved away as well, and as addresses changed we lost contact. Neither of us ever really knew what happened to the other. I had written a story about Andy on the blog last fall and had mentioned him in a couple of other spots in the blog. He was my best friend, so many of my Craig memories would no doubt involve him. I actually have a couple of more stories I intended to write, but had not got to them yet.

I found it even more surprising how it all came to be that Andy discovered my existence, and then sent me the friend request. I knew some of my family checked the blog from time to time, so I figured I had about 4 readers. Other than an occassional errant web surfer, I doubted that anyone else visited the blog, let alone anyone that might have a connection to Andy.

Shock as it was, it seems that one of Andy's employees found the blog and told him about it. After reading it, I assume he saw the Facebook Badge I have posted on the page and went to my Facebook page, signed himself up, and sent me the 'friend request'. We will have some catching up to do, it's been over 40 years since we knew each other.

Even more surprising, I went back to the original Andy blog post to reread it and see what I had actually said. I was surprised to find that someone named Joyce had seen the post and had sent me his name, location, and even a website for his business. Since her comment was posted some time after I had written the blog post, I didn't even know it was there.

So, I've had two people read the blog that knew Andy, or knew of his whereabouts. It makes me wonder who else may have dropped in to visit. If you're out there reading, and you know me or someone I have talked about, feel free to make a comment. You never know what the end result might be.

Anyway, it is exciting to make contact with an old friend. I spent a lot of time with Andy and his family when we were kids, it will be interesting to catch up.

Thanks to all you readers out there (all 6 of you?). I guess I will blog on...

Grandpa Art

Under construction

Knez Gulch

I was so young that I really don't remember much about my very first years in Craig. I was born in California, but try not to hold that against me. I don't remember anything about the baby years that transpired prior to my arrival in Craig; which I'm sure is quite normal. At some point, when I was less than 5 years old, the family moved back to Colorado. I believe it was my first time to live in Colorado. The older siblings had lived in Colorado before, but not me. My sister Lynn had been born in Craig a few years earlier.

We moved into a house that was south of Craig and it was there that I began my Colorado years. Sadly, I don't remember a lot of details about the time when we lived south of town (I was only 4, cut me some slack). The house was located south of town, across the Yampa river, then east along a county road, past the little bitty airport, and then right on another county road. The house was set off to the right shortly after the turn and was on the private lane that went back to the Morton's house. I remember one of the houses was surrounded by huge trees,though I'm not sure if it was our house or the Morton's. There was a circle type driveway that went all the way around the house, and both houses were surrounded by fields. Outside of the fields were the sage covered mountains that ran to the south and east of the property. The house we lived in is no longer there; it was torn down at some point, and except for a gate next to the road, you'd probably never know it ever existed by the look of it today.

I don't know the name of the county road. Of course, at age 4, one does not really pay attention to the road signs. It was the road that went up to the Knez place. I don't really know what it was called so I just call it the Knez Gulch Road. The Knez (Keh-nez)family was the main family that we knew that lived up there. So, it's no wonder that in my little 4 year old mind, it was the Knez Road. Even today, there are Knez home owners up that road. In my mind, I pictured that road going up into the mountains to a beautiful home surrounded by trees and mountainous terrain. However on my last visit, I drove up there to discover it was just a winding road up a dry sage brush filled gulch. Nothing mountainous or beautiful about it.

The Morton's were very nice to us. I believe they were our landlords as well as our friends. Addie was a cook at the school district and remained friends with my mother long after we moved out of the house. Addie's husbands name was Roscoe I believe, and I seem to remember him as a very skinny old man. He must have been pretty sharp though, because they later sold that property, but he held onto the mineral rights. Later his estate became very wealthy because of that decision. We, on the other hand, did not!

What do I remember about the house south of town? I remember that it had a secret room. It was an old 2 story farm house. Behind one of the built in drawers I believe was a small room. My older siblings found it by accident I think. If you pulled the bottom drawer and crawled through the opening, you were in a small room. I'd like to say it was a panic room, but I don't think they had them in those days. Nevertheless, the kids loved to play in their secret room.

I, being the youngest, was probably not allowed to play it the secret room. I'm sure it was reserved for the 'big kids'. That brings me to another one of my strongest memories of the house south of town. I remember that all the older kids would get up and go to school and I could not go. I was too young! I distinctly remember wishing that I was old enough to go to school. I wanted so much to get on that bus like all the other kids instead of staying home with no other kids to play with. Just little ole me, all by my kidself, all day long. To make it worse, I was born in October and I just missed the cutoff to be able to go to school when I was 5 years old. So, I had to wait another whole year, until I was almost 6, before I could start the big K with Mrs. Rudd at Sunset Elementary. Later,after I began attending school, I recanted all my dreams of wishing I could go to school.

Like most 5 year olds, I loved to run around outside and explore. Trickling down the Knez Gulch was a little stream bed that usually had a little water flowing through it. There seemed to be a lot of water snakes near the water and I was often catching them and playing with the water snakes. One day, my older teenage brother Jim and I went for a hike on the hill east of our house. It was a rather large hill that inclined a couple of hundred feet above the road and it was covered in sage brush. No trees, just sagebrush. As we were walking, I came upon a snake. Fun! I loved to play with water snakes. The problem was that it was not a water snake! Fortunately, Jim was close to me, and I distinctly remember him grabbing me by the shoulder and hurling me backward. I guess he didn't want me to pick up that rattlesnake. We spent a great deal of time after that trying to kill the snake. I was the rock finder. I would run around looking for a good size rock and take it to Jim who would throw it at the snakes head to try and kill it. At one point my direction of travel back to Jim was leading straight toward the snake. Jim started yelling at me to go back and come around the other way. Eventually, we must have won the battle and killed the snake. Jim hauled it home and cut the rattler off. Jim had that rattle for a long time stored in a little magic box. It was one of those wooden boxes that had hidden compartments covered by sliding sides and sliding top pieces. Once assembled, one could hardly tell it had any pieces; it just looked like a solid box. I wonder what ever happened to that box?

The old house was old and drafty. Definaltly not the Ritz. One winter when it was extremely cold and the temperature was well below zero for many days, Dad decided to put the chickens down in the cellar under the house so they would not freeze to death. The interesting part was that when you looked through the cracks in the kitchen floor....you could see and hear the chickens clucking down there. Burrrr.

That's about all I can remember about the old house south of town. I'm sure my older brother and sisters can remember a lot more about the details than I could. Here is a picture of me about that age. I think this picture was taken at that same old house south of town. I'm not sure how long we lived there or why we moved. But the next place we lived was certainly not bigger and better.


Standing next to the Knez Gulch Road. That's Rattlesnake Mountain behind me.

Breeze Elementary School

Take a journey with me, if you will. A journey back in time to Craig, Colorado; the year is 1967. It was time for me to start the 5th grade. I had begun my school years at the newer Sunset Elementary on the West side of our small little town. Sunset had newer buildings, a huge playground area; it was a well designed modern (for it's day) educational facility. Sunset Elementary was all I knew of schools. I had attended Kindergarten through the fourth grade at good ole' Sunset Elementary. We moved to a different part of town during the summer between my fourth and fifth grade years of schooling. We moved to an old house on Yampa Street in the center of Craig, and that meant I would be changing schools.

There is good news and bad news in this scenario. I would be attending Breeze Elementary School. The good news was that it was only about one block to school. No more riding the bus, just slip out the back door, cross the alley, kitty corner through a neighbors yard, cross the street and wall-ahh...I was at school. The bad new was that Breeze Elementary was located in a very old school building, and my teacher would be Mrs. Potter.

When I say it was an old building, we're talking OLD. Like maybe it was the first school ever built in Craig. It was a large square 2 story brick building. The entrances were in the middle of the building, with hallways in the middle of the building, and classrooms on the North and South sides of the hallway. In the middle of the hallway were the stairs, which seemed like a giant staircase in my memory bank. I can picture them rising North up to a platform at the half way point; that platform running back to the West, and then another flight of stairs back to the South and eventually one would reach the 2nd story of the old school. My classroom was on the South side of the 2nd story. A very large classroom where I would experience the joys of 5th grade learning. Breeze Elementary had the old radiator heating. I remember the stench of it the first time they cranked on, and the crackling noises they made as the heat filled them during the cold Colorado winter. I can't help but think of the Movie 'Sixth Sense' when I reminisce about Breeze Elementary. That large hallway and staircase reminds me of the scene where he looks to his left and sees the 3 bodies hanging from the rafters. That was the feel of Breeze Elementary. Breeze also had a fire escape for evacuation purposes. It was not the traditional staircase on the side of the building, it was the slide on the side of the building. Yes, a large metal tube, probably 3 to 4 feet in diameter and about 30-40 feet in length. Students would climb into the tube and slide to the safety of the ground below. I loved fire drills at Breeze Elementary! WEEEEEeeeeee.

Breeze Elementary had a gymnasium as well. I believe it had been a High School or Junior high at one time; and now it was being used to relieve some of the overcrowding at the other Elementary schools. The gymnasium was a typical older school gym. There really was no sideline or seating area. There was just a big basketball court in the middle with a stage on the south side of the gymnasium. That was the year I learned how to determine which was my left hand and which hand was my right hand. It had never been that important to know which hand was the right and which was the left prior to 5th grade. But in PE class, in the gym, the instructor would make us do exercises and we had to know which hand was right or left for certain calisthenics. We were always facing the stage for the exercises, and so I knew that the East side of the Gym was my left hand and the West side of the gym was my right. After that, for years, if I was trying to determine my left from my right, I would picture myself in that gym, facing that stage, and knew that 'this hand' was my left hand because I was facing the stage. Determination by Association I guess.

The lunchroom was on the West side of the school. I don't remember much about the lunch room itself, but I remember what happened inside the lunch room. They had a rule that we had to eat everything on our tray if we had eaten the hot lunch. There was no throwing food away! I, like most 5th grade boys did not like vegetables that well. Actually, not at all! But mostly, I really hated the peas. I could not force myself to eat those nasty old green pellets. So, I ingeniously devised a plan to drink my milk and stuff the peas into the milk carton, and then throw the peas away with the milk carton. It worked to! I can't remember ever getting caught disposing of my peas. So it was bye bye peas. Yaaaay... 'cause peas are yucky!

My 5th grade teacher was Mrs. Potter. Ugly, old hag of a teacher who was nothing but mean. I can still see her face, with that big old mole on it. Why couldn't I have gotten the other 5th grade teacher like my friend Andy got? It just wasn't fair! Mrs. Potter yelled at us, made us work, work, work. Classroom wise, I hated that year. But, when it was all said and done and the year was over, I could honestly look back and say "I learned more that year, than I ever had before". Mrs. Potter may have been a mean old hag, but she taught us a lot of good stuff.

When the weather was nice enough, our PE class would go outside and kitty-corner from the northeast corner of the school was a vacant lot where we have our PE class. I remember that we played flag football for a while. I remember that they had tryouts for the position of Quarterback. Each student would throw passes at receivers, and surprising enough I was chosen as one of the quarterbacks. I think I was more lucky than I was good, but nevertheless, I made the final cut. Something about those practices makes me think of my friend CoCo Cliften...though I can't remember why.

Today, Breeze Elementary School is gone. It is just a City Park with grass and a few trees. The radiators no longer creak or stench. The clatter of the lunch room trays is silent. I can no longer tell my left hand from my right hand, 'cause the stage is gone. The Breeze is now silent.

Well, there you have it. My exciting year of education at Breeze Elementary. I learned a lot, I had some new experiences, and I survived that scary old building and that scary old teacher. I learned how to tell my left from my right, and I learned the 'art of deception' regarding pea disposal anyway. The year was nearly complete. I recall that on the last day of school on a sunny springtime day, we went for a little field trip. It was the last week of school, where everyday you just do fun stuff. I can't even remember where we were going for the field trip. I remember it was very sunny. I remember a long line of kids walking down the sidewalk. I remember holding the hand of my 5th grade girlfriend Edie as we walked. It was my first awkward attempt at a PDA.

We moved away from Colorado that summer.

I never saw Edie again.

The Good Old Days

I had just worked a stressful 10 hour shift in a 911 dispatch center. I had spent the day answering emergency phone calls and dispatching police, fire, and paramedics to those in need. Now, with my work day complete, it was time to unwind while I made the drive home. On a normal commute day, it takes me about 30 minutes to make the drive from the workplace to my home. Most of the drive would just be non-eventful, boring, interstate driving.

So, there I was vegetating on the interstate; pretty much driving in auto-pilot mode. I was basically just driving down the road, not really looking at other cars or other drivers, just taking my place in a long line of other commuters making the same tedious drive home. I didn't have the radio on, I was just enjoying the quiet drive home in the solitude of my little car. After 10 hours of answering phones, I am usually suffering from acute noise fatigue; so unless I really need a traffic report, I generally keep the radio off.

I was startled out of my vegetative trance by an older style 60's pick up truck that made an unusual shift in his traffic lane ahead of me. When you're driving on the interstate, it is the unexpected that catches your attention as the other drivers are really just one more ant in a long line of worker ants headed back to their little anthills. I studied the truck for a moment, since it's erratic behavior had ejected me from my migratory trance. Seeing the truck reminded of a friend I knew years ago whose dad had driven a similar truck. It took me back to my younger days, and made me wish I still had my old pick up.

Next, there was the usual irritated driver response where I wondered, 'What the heck is that driver doing up there...he's obviously not paying attention to the road'! My eyes proceeded up and over the tailgate to peek inside the cab of the truck as it traveled down the highway. Inside the truck there appeared to be a male driving the pick up. Next to him a female. The two of them appeared to be the only persons in the vehicle. What I found most interesting, and what prompted me to write this little blog entry, was the fact that the female was sitting in the middle of the bench seat, right next to the driver. Well, that explains the distraction that no doubt caused his errant traffic deviation.

Seeing the two of them snuggled up to each other really made me stop and think about the good old days. In our modern world, almost every car purchased these days has bucket seats in the forward part of the vehicle. Even trucks and SUV's usually have bucket seats. Or maybe, I'm just old, and married, or have too many children to think about such things. Still, I remember the old days when I was dating and that special girl would slide across the seat and snuggle up next to me, and off we would go. For us guys who drove a stick shift, it was quite convenient for our right hand to rest on the thigh of our sweetheart in-between shifting gears. Then, during a 'young love' conversation, she could turn and plant an affectionate kiss on the drivers cheek...or neck. Whoa, I think I just made an errant lane change.

I remember one of my college friends came home from a date one evening complaining about a traffic citation he had received while driving with his date. Officially, he was cited for 'inattentive driving'. My friend said the officer thought he was paying too much attention to his passenger, and not enough attention to the road.

I think about those days and it makes me smile...and it makes me happy inside. It's such a good feeling to have someone snuggle up next to you, sit in the middle of the seat, grab your arm, look up at your face, and just enjoy being in your company.

Today, I don't even have a car with a bench seat. Car makers these days are striving to make the most comfortable cars possible...you know...the cars with the contour seats that mold around our big butts. Perhaps they have missed the most obvious accessory of all...the girlfriend who sits right next to you!

I heard an old joke a long time ago, where a married couple was driving down the road, reminiscing about the topic of this blog discussion. The wife saying "Remember when we were young and I would sit in the middle of the seat and snuggle up next to you?, I wonder when and why we quit riding like that?" The husband just looked over at his wife and said: "Well, I haven't moved!"

Yes, Good times! And although I don't have any vehicles that have a bench seat. And, although my wife and I never had a car with bench seats while we were dating..And, although, I don't foresee any bench seats in my future...still a little part of me wants to go rent an old pick up with a bench seat, grab the wife and go for a little ride. She can snuggle up next to me in the middle of the seat...real close. I can shift the old pick up into high gear and rest my hand on her thigh, and she can look up at me with that 'I love you forever' look in her eye and give me a soft little kiss on the cheek. And...

Clint! Clint! CLINT! Wake up you're snoring again!