My Neighborhood

The prostitute that lived kitty-corner across the vacant lot from my house was an accepted part of the neighborhood. I don’t know her history or how long she had been there but she had a nice house with a fenced in yard and a couple of small dogs to make sure that the neighborhood kids stayed on the outside of the fence. Her business was her business and if anyone opposed it they kept it to themselves. It wasn’t like she had men coming and going at all hours of the day and night. The occasional John usually parked a block or so away and then walked over. They would be there for a half an hour or so and then they would leave. The policeman on the beat that included my neighborhood dropped in periodically to see how she was. I don’t know who paid whom but she never seemed busy enough to warrant her paying a bribe unless they just traded services.

She was just another part of my neighborhood that had enough other characters living in it to provide her some cover. There were several families on welfare and two families with deaf parents. The husband and wife of one of these families would have arguments that turned into shouting matches. Their hands would fly as they signed to each other. When the husband turned his back on his wife he couldn’t “hear” what she was saying and it would make her even madder. There were two black families and a “Mexican” family along with the German, Russian and Slovak families, most of whom worked at the CF&I.

Then there was the World War I vet who had been in the invasion of Vladivostok during the Russian Revolution. When I was growing up, he raised red worms to sell to fishermen. He had large bins full of dirt and household garbage and worms. The worms would eat the garbage and reproduce rapidly, creating excellent compost and thousands of worms The used soil was taken to his front yard and used to grow vegetables and flowers. He had a yellow tomcat that we all called Geronimo. He was covered with scars and the ends of his ears were frayed from all the fights he had been in.

The neighbor across the alley built and raced “stock cars.” The stock car track , west of the corner of Bay State and Northern, was within walking distance. Many weekend nights my dad would take us to see the stock car races including the “powder puff derby” where the drivers were women and the “demolition derby” where the last car moving won the prize. As if to balance this strange mixture, there was a young girl who was preparing to become a nun.

Across the street from my house there were three vacant lots that had been converted into a baseball diamond. There was a pitcher’s mound, home plate with a tall backstop and three bases. The outfield included the dirt streets at the corner of Euclid and Mesa. A good hit into right field could go into the yard of the prostitute and that always led to a certain amount of pleading as we tried to convince her to give the ball back. Sooner or later she always returned it but quite often it was the next day and then only after giving us a good lecture about respecting her privacy and not trying to retrieve it ourselves by going over the fence. If we acted contrite enough she would give it back. If we had an old ball we would dig it out and play with it. Otherwise we just had to wait until she felt sorry for us and gave us the ball back.

When I was in college the woman decided to share her house with another woman and it wasn’t long before the police arrived and arrested them both for running a house of prostitution. That was against the law, while living alone and entertaining guests was legal. The other woman moved out and the neighborhood went back to normal. By the time I graduated from high school, houses had been built on the baseball field and I had no reason to know what she was doing. I lost track of her completely when I went away to college and my parents sold the house on Euclid.

Looking back I appreciate the “live and let live” attitude that prevailed in Pueblo while I was growing up. It brings to mind Henry David Thoreau who wrote in 1854: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music that he hears however measured or far away.”

Robert Pardun

Movies

When I was five or six years old, my sister, Barbara, and I walked over to the corner of Beulah and Northern to catch a trolley going downtown. The trolley stop was across the street from a gas station that had the rich smell of old oil poured on the ground to “settle the dust” and kitty-corner across from the entrance to the cemetery. I must have been five or six years old because I remember that when I sat down my feet didn’t reach all the way to the floor. My memory is that the trolley ran on tracks instead of being an electric powered bus and that periodically it would stop because it lost contact with the overhead electric line. When that happened the driver would get out with a long stick and put the connector in place and we would go on.

The route took us to “five corners,” where Matt Dillon had a gas station. He was a WWII vet with one arm missing. After my parents bought a car they went there for gas most of the time. Just before we got to the Fourth Street Bridge we went past a place that sold corn dogs. I remember going there because the idea of a deep-fried breaded hot-dog was new. I have a very clear picture in my mind of a McDonalds somewhere near the south end of the Fourth Street Bridge but, both of my Pueblo sources, Jeff Arnold and Jerry Miller, have convinced me it isn’t true. Memory is always tricky but why would anyone remember a non-existing McDonalds? In general I have a very good memory but things like this make me wonder if my mind, like the computer HAL in “2001 A Space Odyssey” gets out of control with an agenda all its own. On the other hand the fact that I remember anything after 50 years is amazing to me.

Most of my early knowledge of the city came from riding on the trolley.  My neighbor, Russell Ducey, once told me that he wanted to be a bus driver when he grew up so that he could see the whole city and get paid for it. Below the bridge along the river there were vegetable gardens tended by Asians. I heard that they might have been Japanese prisoners of war but by the early fifties the gardens were gone and I never found out any more about them.

On the other side of the bridge we passed first the hamburger place that sold thick tasty four-inch diameter burgers with lots of lettuce tomato and onion on the side. Across the street was the Canton Café where my family ate on occasion. One night after many rounds of pool a group of us went to the Canton for a mid-evening snack. The Canton Café didn’t have desserts so I asked if I could have a bowl of rice with hot milk, sugar and cinnamon on it. The waiter looked at me like I was crazy and said they didn’t and wouldn’t make it. So I ordered a bowl of rice and a glass of milk, mixed them together with sugar and had dessert while the waiter looked the other way. .

As I remember there were three theaters downtown, the Colorado, the Chief and the Main, another on the Mesa, called the Uptown and two in Bessemer–the Avalon and the Clyne. We usually went to the Colorado Theater for the Saturday matinee because for fourteen cents we got, previews of coming attractions, sometimes an episode from a Superman serial, anywhere from three to ten animated cartoons and a double feature. We also got a newsreel that covered current events. This was before television and the movie theater was the only place where we could see the news. For an extra nickel I got a box of Milk Duds to eat during the movie. After they were gone the box became a noisemaker that made a loud whistling noise when I blew into one end.

On this trip Barbara and I were going all the way downtown to the Colorado Theater for the Saturday Matinee to see the comedy “Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein.” This may have been my first movie in a theater and although it was billed as a comedy it scared the heck out of me. I sat riveted to the screen and held onto my seat for dear life as Frankenstein almost got Abbott over and over again. This was all too intense for a five year old with a good imagination and that night I couldn’t fall asleep. The door to the unfinished basement was in my bedroom and I checked to make sure that the latch was locked. But I could imagine what might come through that door if I closed my eyes. After an hour or so I took my pillow in hand and crept into my parents’ bed. Boogeymen didn’t attack adults so I was safe.

When drive-ins came to Pueblo my family would pile into the car and drive out to the Mesa Drive-In to see movies about Francis the talking mule, or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies. On the way home we’d stop at the fruit stand to pick a watermelon floating in a horse tank full of water and blocks of ice. The owner always plugged the one we picked so we could taste it before we bought it for a nickel a pound. When the cantaloupes from Rocky Ford got to be a nickel a piece we’d buy several of those also. Then, we’d pull off the road by the CF&I to watch them pour slag. We weren’t too hard to entertain in those days. As I got older I took my parents 1940’s Mercury for an occasional date to the drive-in. I remember asking a cute girl from Centennial to go see “Psycho” with me hoping that during the scary parts she would jump into my arms for protection but it all happened so fast that we both just sat there stunned. When the gang of four-Perko, McNair, Miller and I, got tired of shooting pool or going to the dump to shoot rats we would get some beer and go to the drive-in. One evening we stopped by the liquor store and got a bottle of white port, a six-pack of orange pop and a bag of crushed ice. We mixed them all together into what was called “shake-em-up” and drove out to the Mesa for an evening at the movies. I don’t know how that combination works but it was the only time in my life that I actually saw triple. It’s a good thing there was a double feature so that we had time to sober up a little before driving home. The Drive-In was always a good place to have a little privacy with your girlfriend. One day my parents asked what movies I’d seen the evening before and since I hadn’t gone to the drive-in to see the movie I couldn’t remember. Now we have high definition TVs and access to thousands of movies on disc. But going to the drive-in with your family or your friends and then stopping at the CF&I to watch the rail cars slowly tilt over until the white hot slag poured out and ran down the hill was something you’ll never see in the comfort of your living room no matter how big your TV screen is.

Robert Pardun