Connections

Say the CU Buffs are playing the hated Huskers, and in the first quarter the Buffs attempt but miss an easy field goal.  The Huskers go on to win the game 31 to 30.  Some fans will say, “If we only had made that field goal we would have beaten the miserable, black-hearted Huskers.”  Well, maybe, but not necessarily, because if the field goal had been successful, everything that happened after would have been changed. The plays that would have been run after would not have been run, at least not in the same order or place on the field.  Nothing about the game would have been the same if the field goal had been made, and the final score or the winner could not be determined.  Anything that happens during a game changes everything that happens after.

On a cold March Saturday night in 1964 I was at the HiFi Club with my friend Jerry Donnelly.  We didn’t go to the HiFi as much then as we did when we were, say, 18 or 19, but we were there that night.  There was a group of four girls I didn’t know sitting at a table together, talking and laughing.  One of them was a cute redhead, squinting through the smoke.  I asked her to dance, and we danced together three or four times during the evening.  The rock and roll band was so loud that we barely said anything to each other.  When it neared closing time at midnight and the band stopped playing I knew that if I didn’t approach her I would never see her again.  She and her friends got up hurriedly and prepared to leave.  I went up to her, told her my name and asked her for a date.  She looked at me with the fish eye  and I desperately said I was trustworthy and not a creep and apparently I convinced her and she agreed to go out with me.  I wrote down her name and number.  The four girls were students at St. Mary School of Nursing and had to be in their dorm by midnight and would be punished by the scary nun who ran the school if they were late.  They were anxious to leave.  A few nights later I picked up the young lady at her dorm, nicknamed The Alamo because of the adobe-style architecture, and we went to a movie.  She later told me she wasn’t sure I would show up.   Eighteen months after that Jackie McMahon of Osawotomie, Kansas, became my wife.

Had both of us not decided to go to the HiFi that night (Jackie rarely did) we would have never known the other even existed.  Had I not asked her out, and if she had not agreed, both our lives would have been completely different.  Both of us would have married someone else and  possibly would have had unhappy marriages, although obviously, what would have happened in our lives is impossible to predict.  But we did meet that night, married and had two children.  Otherwise, those two children would never have existed.  Nor would the six grandchildren we have today have existed.  But the children Jackie and I may have had with other spouses, had we not married, would have existed but do not.  So the extensions of our seemingly random and inconsequential actions that night will reverberate and echo through generations, and those echoes will continue, fainter and fainter, for as long as our line populates the earth.  My great-great grandchildren will not even know my name and will have no way of knowing that they would not be alive had I not decided to drink beer and try to meet girls at the HiFi Club in Pueblo, Colorado in 1964.  Unless, as is unlikely, they read this.

Likewise, events that happened generations past effected my existence.  I have little knowledge of my ancestors past my grandparents.  Since all of my grandparents immigrated to America looking for a better life, I assume they and their parents and grandparents lived difficult lives in Sicily and Austria.  What random and accidental events occurred with them that resulted in, from my point of view, my being born?  How did my great-grandfathers meet my great-grandmothers?  Certainly not in an establishment with any similarity to the HiFi Club, but how?  That is why I have limited interest in genealogy.  It allows you to learn the facts, but not the stories.  I want to know the stories.

All of us have friends who, if we think about it, had big influences on our own lives.  Friends I had in high school and before are still my friends.  I knew Jerry Donnelly because he lived on the same block I did.  But if his parents hadn’t decided to move there when he was a little boy I would not have known him, and my life would have been changed and diminished.

It was uncharacteristic for me, a shy boy with no acting talent, to try out for the junior class play, but I did, and met friends Ray Keen, Ralph Speken and Jerry Tucker.  They all, to one degree or other, altered the way I thought about other people and myself.  I don’t remember how I met my good friends Mike McNair and Gerry Perko, maybe just because they sat near me in a Keating or Central classroom, but if it hadn’t been for them and Robert Pardun I would not have attended CU, and that had a huge impact on my life.  So chance meetings that resulted in long friendships have changed my life.  We are all connected, and we seldom think about or even know how what we do effects other people, our family, friends, and sometimes others not nearly so close to us.

Some of the bad things that happen to us in life are offset by the bad things that don’t happen to us.  In my life there have been several occasions when the car I was in collided with another one, and I have thought that if I had started my trip 10 minutes or even one minute sooner or later, then my car and the other one wouldn’t have arrived at the same place at the same time and the accident would never have happened.  But what I will never know about are the collisions that could have happened, and possibly could have been much worse, but didn’t, because the timing was different.

My birthday is September 24.  If you count back nine months from then, that date is December 24, 1940.  So was I conceived after a Christmas Eve party, celebrating the holiday and the beginning of a return to prosperity after the depression, fueled partly by a nation gearing up for war?   All of us are alive because our parents made love at a particular time.  If conception had occurred a day earlier or a day later, the resulting child would have been someone else, not us.  That is the tenuous fact of our existence.  One has to wonder, though, how different would the world have been if the parents of some of the famous or infamous people in history had not decided to have sex on the particular night that produced those offspring.  If Hitler’s mother had a headache that night back in 1888, would World War II have occurred?  Certainly conditions for war were present anyway, but would 50 million have died if a leader like Hitler had not been alive to be the catalyst?  50 million!

When I was in college, a well-meaning English instructor unwisely told me that with more education, experience, and practice, I could make a living as a writer of fiction.  She correctly divined that my major, Business, was not a good match for me.  Women know more things than men do, but sometimes they don’t know what they know.  Learning to write would mean staying in school for a couple more years, probably out of state.  If I had done it, whether or not I became a writer, my life would have been so changed that I can’t even imagine it.  But I was a year away from graduation and I didn’t have any money.  I couldn’t ask my parents, who didn’t have much either, to continue to pay for my education. And, honestly, I was tired of school and wanted to begin a life of independence.  So I passed on whatever slim chance I may have had to become a writer.  There were times that I wished I had given it a try, but reflecting on it now, I know I could not have had a life better than the one I had, even if I beat the long odds and became a successful writer.  And I would not have met Jackie.

There are some who think that all of life has been planned for us, that we meet and marry our spouses, have certain careers, make enemies and friends, make good or bad decisions, because it is meant to be.  That wars, birth, accidents, illness and death are all pre-ordained.  Often when a person dies unexpectedly you hear someone say, “it was her time.”  I don’t believe any of that.  I think our existence and lives are all a mysterious, unpredictable, haphazard accident.  I am not saying we have no control.  I am saying that events out of our control change our lives constantly.

Thinking about this now, and I don’t know why I am, makes me realize how lucky I was to have decided to drink beer and listen to rock and roll in that Pueblo dive so many years ago, because I think the life I have had is a good one.  And I think how lucky my kids and grandkids are too for that night at the HiFi.

Jerry Miller

Huerfano Canyon

We came to explore.

We knew so little that it hardly mattered

which way we went.

The isolation of the canyon we’d be in

made locking the car seem unnecessary

though anyone could have driven

the dozen miles of quiet gravel road we’d come.

Jerry looked from the rim at the big view

and spotted a road I hadn’t seen,

a nearly perfect progression

of sulfur-colored flat rocks climbing up

the right hand side of a canyon

otherwise unmarked by human hand.

We wanted to go up that road when we could

but the river seemed too deep and fast

to cross that day.

We descended another road,

mostly dirt washed away and washing,

strewn with fallen rimrock,

found a way across the side canyon

and downstream on the left hand side.

It looked like we’d be pinched between

rock and river but pushed through to

sun-revealed shallow water.

We took off our shoes and socks,

rolled up our pants and soon crossed

to where I’d thought we couldn’t go.

We started upstream looking for our road,

found elk tracks, wild roses, a single outcrop

of white rock contrasting with green juniper,

but no sign that man had been before us.

We climbed to a grassy bench

close to where the road should have been.

There was no sign of road

or place where road could have been built.

It was time to go back so we did,

retracing our steps where we could.

Near the top of our last road I looked

for the sandstone fragment, striated with rose,

I’d meant to keep as memento.

I’d left it on the large rock where I’d found it

but missed seeing it on the way back.

From canyon rim near the car

we looked for our road

but couldn’t see it anywhere.

Worse, there was nowhere we’d been

where sane men would have built a road.

We were left with a choice of mysteries.

Was Jerry standing in the one spot,

the one light, from which a secret was revealed?

Did we want to see a road badly enough

that we did?

I think it unlikely that I will ever know

why we saw but couldn’t find,

even if I walk that golden road some day.

I will go again to look for possibilities

and realities, but expect to find

nothing more wonderful than the cutting

of hundreds of feet of sandstone

by water moving through eons,

the making of soil, grass, flowers, trees,

and friends being there, trying to understand.

Jeff Arnold

Jerry Miller with Cedarwood Canyon behind and below him, Huerfano Canyon to his left.

Remembering Lordo

This memory of Bob Naylor is over fifty years old so please forgive me if you were there and remember it differently. During our junior year at Central we all had to take a class in public speaking. I was assigned to Miss De Angelo’s class. The basic assignment was to prepare a five-minute speech to be delivered to the class.

Five minutes was a long time to talk and hold the audience’s attention and I struggled to put together something that had to do with atomic structure and how molecules were formed. I delivered my speech and received a grade of “passed but very boring.” Even I agreed with the verdict.

When it came time for Bob Naylor, aka Lordo, to give his speech he showed up in class with a portable turntable and a stack of records. His speech was “The History of Jazz” and he started off talking about the origins of Jazz in New Orleans. Whenever he felt like he needed to demonstrate something he would put the appropriate record on the record player and play a few minutes of music for us. Needless to say Bob was not having any difficulty filling five minutes. In fact he was only about half done when class adjourned. He came to the next class prepared to continue. I remember him playing some Bebop with Charlie Parker and saying, “That was so good lets play another cut. This time with Miles Davis.”

When he was finally finished Miss De Angelo asked him if there was anything special he did to make the music more enjoyable. He responded that he and his friends just went over to the basement of his house, smoked a few cigarettes and went up where the music was. This seemed like a strange response but I got a bit more insight into what he was saying when I walked past the playground where Bob and a group of friends were doing basketball lay-ups. They were chanting, “She grows pot around her tw**, marijuana” and putting the ball through the hoop on the last word.

Bob’s speech opened my eyes and ears to a kind of music I had always loved but never knew what it was called. When I was about five I remember sitting on the floor in front of our huge radio listening to “Rhapsody in Blue” and being stunned by how beautiful it was. Within a year or so of Bob’s speech I had my own portable record player and a stack of records by jazz greats like George Shearing, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Paul Desmond and Ornette Coleman . When I was a senior I would start my math homework at 11PM so that I could listen to a jazz station in Denver that played Ahmad Jamal’s “Poinciana” at the beginning of every show.

Lordo went to the University of Colorado (see Jerry Miller’s story of the maraschino cherry wine) and the last I heard of him he had been busted when he got caught smoking pot in a hotel janitors’ closet. I recently heard that he died in 1991. If he were alive today I’d thank him for turning me on to a kind of music I never get tired of. Thanks Lordo. It was a great speech and a fine gift.

Robert Pardun

Lordo and the Homemade Cherry Wine

911 ½ 9th Street. After 48 years I can still remember the address of the apartment my friends and I shared in Boulder during the fall semester of 1961. It was located within walking distance of CU, near the top of a hill and just past the old Columbia Cemetery, and a few blocks from Chautaqua. There were big oak trees along the street and they dropped huge piles of leaves. It was a two-bedroom in the basement of a bungalow owned by two elderly sisters who lived upstairs and sometimes brought us cake and pies. All the furniture seemed to be as old as the house, which was built in 1913. It was probably worth $10,000. Today it is assessed at $900,000. We paid rent of $25 per month each and agreed to shovel the sidewalks when it snowed, and it seemed like it snowed every week from late September to Christmas. We had a kitchen, living room, and bathroom. It was a dark little bunker but we decorated it with some of our own stuff and it suited us. Pardun (nicknamed Pardos) had brought a record player but we only had a few records, and we played Bruebeck’s Time Out and the soundtrack from West Side Story. To this day if I hear one of those songs I can sing all the lyrics. We didn’t have TV. We played many games of Hearts in that apartment, and I was reminded of it when I read Stephen King’s book, Hearts in Atlantis.

Mike “Dude” McNair and I shared a bedroom and Pardun and Perko had the other. It was communal living, with rotating duties; vacuuming, washing dishes, and cleaning the bathroom. We grocery shopped together at Safeway and divided the cost. I resented the grapefruit juice Pardun liked and he probably didn’t like it that I drank more than my share of the milk, but all of us got along pretty well. We designated Saturday as housecleaning day, and that lasted for a good two weeks. Dude did most of the cooking as he was the only one who knew how, and he was a good cook. Pardun did the snow shoveling because he liked it.

We had our own entrance in the back. Once all of us except Dude went home for the weekend, and on Saturday night he got back late and (guess why) couldn’t get his key to work, and he kicked open the door. He claimed he could hear the old ladies rolling out of bed when he did.

Dude had a night job at a restaurant downtown on Pearl Street. I don’t know how they used them, but they went through a lot of maraschino cherries at this restaurant. The cherries came in wide-mouth two-gallon jars. There was a lot of cherry juice left in the jars and Dude mentioned to the rest of us that he thought we could make wine out of it. Perko and Pardos were enthusiastic about it, but I had doubts as to whether these novices could brew up anything worth drinking. One night Dude brought home two jars of cherry juice and they put in yeast, I think, and covered the tops with cloth. After a certain length of time, I forget how long, they decided it was wine. Somehow Bob Naylor became involved and he was invited to join us in sampling it on a Saturday night. Naylor had been my friend since 7th grade, and all of us knew him.

My exposure to wine up to that time consisted of Shake Em Up, sort of a wine cooler, and Vino Fino, a dark table wine that we bought for under a buck a gallon and drank during poker games in my parents’ basement in Pueblo. Price was the only consideration when you selected Vino Fino. For a long time after I wouldn’t drink wine because I thought it would taste like Vino Fino. Of course, at that time I had just turned 20 years old and was not legally old enough to drink anything except beer.

The homemade cherry wine was hideous, sweet and cloudy, and it tasted like cough medicine, and I drank half a glass and went into the kitchen to make popcorn. That was back when you popped it in a frying pan. We had a gas stove that had previously cost me my eyelashes and a little hair but that’s another story. The other four congratulated each other on the manufacture of such a fine vintage, drank several glasses, and ate a hell of a lot of popcorn.

Lordo (Naylor’s nickname from his days in a Central gang) was living in a dorm and decided that rather than stagger back to campus he would spend the night on our couch, which was fine with us. We gave him a blanket and pillow. In the morning Lordo was gone but on the carpet by the couch he had left a puddle of puke consisting entirely of cherry wine and popcorn. A fine reward for our hospitality. Needless to say, we were quite pissed off and got into an argument about who was going to clean it up. All of us refused, and so nobody did. After about a week it had completely dried and I vacuumed it, sucking up most but not all of the popcorn which had by then partially adhered to the carpet.

A couple of weeks later Perko and I were drinking beer at The Sink. It was a weeknight and pretty quiet. I think some of you recall The Sink. That’s the only time I remember Perko drinking enough to semi-lose control. Close to midnight he said we should go to Lordo’s dorm and chastise him about his decision to barf and run.

“You don’t do that. You don’t drink your friends’ wine and eat their popcorn and then heave on the floor and take off. You make a mess, you clean it up. This wasn’t right, what he did.”

All right, I admit that quote is bogus. I don’t remember what Perko said. But he could have said something like that.

Perko’s idea sounded OK to me although I figured we had very little chance of actually seeing Lordo, first of all because I doubted whether Perko really knew which dorm Lordo lived in, and even if he did, whether we could find him. We left The Sink, walked a half block, crossed Broadway and we were on the university campus. It had snowed, of course. We entered the dorm Perko said was the right one and it was very quiet inside. There was a long hall and nobody around and we didn’t know which room Naylor had. Perko started walking down the hall and loudly calling, “Lordoooo. Lordoooo.” We got no response at first, but then a guy came out of a room and told us he was the student manager of the dorm and we needed to get the hell out of there now or he was going to call the campus police. Now the campus police at CU were not just security, they had authority to arrest, so this was no small deal if they showed up. Perko asked the student manager (they had another title, I forget it) if he knew Lordo, and the guy repeated his earlier request quite forcefully. He did not inquire as to Lordo’s unusual name. We left.

Walking back we passed a women’s dorm and there was a light in a second floor window. In those days (I love that term!) girls could stay out until midnight on the weekend, but had to be in their rooms by 10:00, I think it was, on weeknights. Every dorm and boarding house had a “house mother” who made sure they were in on time. Boys, (men) however, were free to prowl anywhere they pleased for all hours. It would have made more sense to let the girls out and lock the guys up.

Perko made a snowball and threw it at the lighted window. He missed, but he was close enough that some of the girls heard the sound, saw us down below, and opened their windows. They were in their jammies and they looked really cute. They taunted us regarding our snowball-throwing ability, and we lobbed a few more at them but then we saw a campus police car heading our way. When we started to leave the girls yelled for us to stay but we thought it best that we depart, and so we did.

Our living arrangement came apart just before Christmas when a couple of us who were actually concerned about their GPAs realized that they were having too much fun time and too little study time, and their semester grades might contain a B or two instead of all As, and we sort of self destructed. The next semester three of us lived in the same rooming house, but it wasn’t the same as before. Dude’s brothers, John and Doyle also lived in the rooming house, along with two other guys. One, a student, got on our nerves and as a bad joke we told him we were going to shoot him. Doyle worked in the university drama department and had access to props, including guns and blanks. One day the guy came home and Doyle and I met him with revolvers, then opened fire with the guns loaded with blanks. He turned and ran a few steps before he realized that he would be dead if we were shooting bullets. Doyle and I thought it was pretty funny. All of us had grown up with guns but were still careless with them.

By the time fall came again Dude was married and the other three all lived in different places. Just before graduation I got kicked out of my apartment and slept on Pardos’s couch for a few nights. All of us stayed friends and we still correspond and gather occasionally. A lot was going on all the time back then, some of it pretty crazy stuff to us, but it was nothing to what happened on campuses just a few years later.

All these years later, though, I think the four of us, and maybe some other people too, are still asking the same question.

Where is Lordo?

Jerry Miller

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

Memories of Pueblo Food

Jeff’s recent article about Pueblo’s B & K Drive-in got me thinking about Pueblo and food–the two go hand in hand in my mind.  I have lots of memories of really good eating throughout the world, but the majority involve growing up and eating in Pueblo.  I want to share them here in hopes others will verify the soundness of my recall and to see if they evoke thoughts of great food from other readers who’ll remind us about Pueblo culinary experiences I’ve now forgotten.

It would be really hard to create a top-ten list if I had to rank the best eateries (or drinkeries, if that is a word) from the fifties and sixties in Pueblo.  But not so hard at all to include them in one big list without a rank.  So that’s my goal, starting with a couple of places closest to home.

I grew up on the corner of 4th Street and Corona, a mere stone’s throw from Ben’s Hickory Pit BBQ, the logical starting point of my walk down memory lane.  There were a couple of owners while I lived there with different motifs, but similar food, if memory serves me.  I can remember it being very much a cowboy place early on, complete with country and western bands to serenade you while you ate.  I can’t picture the owner, but I’m sure many of you readers will remember him.  I believe he sold out to the owner that was there for most of my childhood who replaced the cowboy band with a Hammond organ that I believe his wife played.  This “Ben,” and I think that was indeed his name, served up the food I most recall.

He was blond or red headed, only mildly friendly, but his entrees were out of this world.  He had the standard fare of all types of BBQ meats, all of which were wonderful and hickory smoked on the premises.  There were large and tasty french fries or potato salad to go along with meals.  But the two really unique items I recall–and I’d give anything for the recipe of–were the hickory burger and the BBQ sauce he had out in bowls or dispensers.  The hickory burger was a concoction of the leftovers from all the meats I believe, probably the dark outer parts that Ben thought that people might not want on the dinner plate.  He mixed these meat scraps with a delicious BBQ sauce, lopped it on a bun, and, if you had probably 15 or 20 cents, you could have one as you sat up at the counter.  But the real treat was dishing out the BBQ sauce that was placed on the counter or table.  It was laced with large chunks of mild, sweet onions and had a flavor unlike anything I’d had before or since.  If I’d only realized that Ben’s was not a permanent fixture in Pueblo, as most restaurants aren’t, I would have begged, cajoled, or stolen his recipe when I was a kid.  Like a one-of-a-kind family photo that burns up in a house fire, that recipe is gone, and I’m the sadder for the loss.  As I continue you’ll realize this was only the first of many such recipes whose loss I bemoan.

Next on my walk to Carlile, and a frequent stopping point after school, or possibly at lunch for Jerry Miller and myself, was the Barrel.  Shaped like a huge wooden keg, it had a counter like most of the restaurants of that era, and some tables too.  The two most prominent memories are the unique and delicious hamburger and the great pinball machines.  Looking back I realize it wasn’t some great, secret family recipe that made the burger so good, it was simply using consistently fresh products.  The iceberg lettuce was cut quite thinly giving it a consistency and flavor that were unique, especially when combined with the tasty mustard.  There might have been tomato and pickles, too, but they have faded from memory if so.  It was the lettuce and mustard and the burger cut in half laying in that basket that I remember–it was great.

My first encounter with a true pinball wizard was watching Jerry Miller attack the Barrel’s machines.  He had a talent that few could match.  He could be gentle and methodical as he carefully guided the ball to the proper location.  Or he could be a raving madman trying to keep the machine just one or two millimeters away from that fatal tilt sign showing up to prematurely end the game.  On almost every day we visited he racked up free game after game, always making me envious.  You’d think that watching the master at work like this I would have learned his techniques, but I never did.  It would be so much fun to have a movie of us wolfing down a delicious burger and then tackling the pinball machine.  But, alas, no such movie exists.  I play the movie in my mind only, and surely have embellished it well beyond reality–but that’s our prerogative when we don’t make real movies.

Across the street was Logan’s Drugstore, not a place remembered for the food, but rather for the great fountain drinks.  It was literally out of the old movies in its soda fountain décor: the counter, the stools you could sit on and spin around to see those behind you, and the various spigots from which the delectable drinks were made.  The floats, shakes, and malts brought me there as often as I could afford it, and remain branded in my memories for their great flavor.

Moving east to the Mesa Junction there are a couple of great memories there also.  First recollection: the Mesa Snack Bar, famous for its great hamburgers topped with grilled onions.  This was my brother’s favorite food in the entire world.  For his birthday he didn’t want cake or ice cream, he wanted a dozen Mesa Snack hamburgers, and he somehow managed to eat them all.  The paper bag would come home soaked in grease, but that made them all the better for him.  But I can’t blame him, I loved those burgers too, and still love to grill up onions and put them on anything to enhance the flavor.  Now my burgers are veggie style, but the grilled onions make them tastier too.

Moving west now I’d stop at Sambo’s, not a restaurant, but a candy store.  This was on the way to or from the movies at the Junction, so it was a favorite stopping place.  My two strongest memories involved the luscious taffy that you could watch being made from the front window and the parched corn.  I don’t know how Sambo did it, but that parched corn was wonderful, deliciously browned, slightly crunchy and somewhat salty, for a unique flavor.  Later I discovered Corn Nuts, the major commercial parched corn, which was good, but it didn’t hold a candle to Sambo’s parched corn.

As  you headed back home, somewhat satiated from a delicious burger with grilled onion and a few handfuls of parched corn, what could be better than a malt to top it off?  Voila, there was the Mesa Dairy Bar (or some similar name, I don’t recall it for sure now) just a couple blocks from Sambo’s as you headed west.  Their malts, banana splits, sundaes and shakes were to die for using the current vernacular.  Many a trip home from the movies or walking home from Keating or Central brought us in there for a tasty treat.

Getting a driver’s license opened a whole new world of food for us.  Perhaps no better than what I’ve described, but new and different tastes to complement the ones we had grown up with.  The memories include many great flavors, but perhaps none better than the SOB (sausage on a bun) at the Joker Drive-in.  Imagine today driving up, rolling down your window, telling the car hop to bring you an SOB and a Coors.  Ah, those were the days.  Was a D.U.I even around then?  If so, we didn’t know it and didn’t care.  The Coors was good, but the SOB was GRRRRRate.  Once again here’s a recipe I would pay dearly for.  Surely a franchise selling SOBs couldn’t miss, and I’d like to be the owner.  The slightly tangy tomato sauce, the tasty sausage on a soft bun made for a flavor I’ve never tasted again, and apparently never will.  But I can dream.

The Joker was not too far south of the B & K where Jeff and I worked, and it had some memorable food too.  Mainly this was my first taste of an onion ring, and they really were good.  It was hard to eat fries after digging into my first B & K rings accompanied by a delicious root beer float.  My rather meager wages, to a great extent, went right back the B & K as I satisfied my constant need for onion rings and floats.

You can’t talk about food in Pueblo without mentioning the zesty Mexican fare.  Our number one favorite location by far was Ramirez’s Restaurant near the CF&I.  More nights than I can count would start with a few brews at some club and end up at Ramirez’s for a spicy and delicious combination plate. Or, vice versa, starting the evening at Ramirez’s and then on to some club–either way was just great.  Every single item on that combination plate was as good as it gets–at least in my memory–and we couldn’t get enough.  If I ate Mexican food that late at night now there aren’t enough Rolaids in Wal-Mart to get me through the night, but not a problem for someone under age 20 back then.  We could eat the spiciest salsa and green chili they could provide.  I also remember buying the huge commercial-sized jalapenos cans in the 70s, getting some friends together, and eating a dozen or more at a time washed down with beer in frosty mugs.  It hurts to even think of that now, but it was fun then.

And I’ll end my reverie at the location where I spent many an evening, Ianne’s.  Icy cold pitchers of beer, great bands and dancing, and grinders with a flavor unmatched anywhere else I’ve eaten.  Not a bad place to stop for an evening’s entertainment or to stop my story.

I’m sure I’ve missed some places that will stand out in others’ minds, and maybe a few that I’ll realize I should have highlighted.  But now I’m hungry and need to get out in the kitchen to try to concoct something that will be even close to the delightful tastes that Pueblo’s finest offered us who were fortunate enough to grow up there in the 50s and 60s.  Who says you can’t go back home?  That’s what memories are for.

Jerry Donnelly

B K Drive Inn

When I graduated from Central, I tried to pretend that a three-year routine wasn’t ending. In spite of poor grades, I had been accepted to the Colorado School of Mines. That acceptance was my excuse for not figuring out what I should do with my life.

I got a job for 64 cents an hour at the BK Drive Inn on Highland and Lake. I was told that was the “break-in rate.” The regular minimum wage was 80 cents an hour. I learned how to make a malted milk, something that seemed anachronistic even then. You could get a malt or a milkshake at A&W, but you could get a malted milk only at BK. By regular testing I found out how many root beer mugs I could hold in one hand. I could fill and order for four, sometimes five, root beers without shutting off the tap. Though the bosses weren’t pleased with me at first, I became a good employee.

Occasionally Mrs. Vickers was the boss when we closed. After we were nearly through cleaning up, she’d play songs from the 40’s and pre-Elvis 50’s on the juke box and some of the crew would dance, often with her. Her husband was an extreme capitalist who would have paid us 40 cents an hour, or nothing, if he could have gotten away with it. He did charge the car hops for broken and stolen mugs, even if they didn’t break them or a customer drove off when the car hop was nowhere near. I don’t know whether he would have been angrier at the idea of paying a few extra cents for his employees to dance, or the fact that his wife was dancing.

Once Mrs. Vickers asked me if I wanted to dance when she noticed that I hadn’t asked anyone else. I declined, though I wanted to very much, but not as much as I’ve wished, in retrospect, that I had accepted. Those moments come in life, and when they pass, they are gone forever. I’m sure I would have enjoyed the dancing once I got over the awkwardness of the situation, but I wonder if I haven’t enjoyed the yearning I’ve relived over the years far more.

Jeff Arnold

A Christmas Memory

When I was a child my parents, brother and I, as well as many other relatives, usually had Christmas dinner at the home of my Uncle Dave Buccambuso and my Aunt Pauline. It was a pretty big two-story house, not actually part of the Goat Hill neighborhood but very near to it. Many of the Pueblo Sicilians who grew up on Goat Hill also lived there, or nearby, when they became adults.

Sometime during the morning the men would leave while the women were cooking dinner, and would return before dinner was to be served. One year, I was probably about fourteen, it was determined that I was old enough to accompany the men. We went to the homes of other relatives who lived nearby and were welcomed with hugs and lots of people talking at the same time. The houses were all very warm from the ovens as well as the furnaces, and of course there were wonderful cooking smells in all of them. We probably went to about four houses, and at each one we were offered Italian pastries and the whiskey bottle came out and shots were poured and the men held up their glasses and said, “Salute,” which is the Italian word for “health”, before downing the shots. At a couple of the houses I was given half-shots and I tried to pour them down like the men did but the fiery stuff burned my throat and made my eyes water. It wasn’t until a long time later that I realized that my relatives were not just celebrating Christmas, but also their prosperity, although they weren’t prosperous. But coming from where they and their parents had been, from great hardship and destitution, from steel mill and smelter work that paid little for much labor, they were prosperous. The Great Depression and World War II were over, they had jobs or, as some of them did, income from operating gambling establishments, and they had houses. They had survived, and that is the right word, the poverty of their childhoods, and they were almost middle-class, although I’m not sure that term had been invented. They were doing fine, and they were enjoying life, and they were taking pleasure in each other’s company. Everyone shouted Merry Christmas when we left each house and headed for another, and finally after the last one back to where we started. When we returned the women began to serve the dinner, a big turkey, ham, gravy, and fried cardoon. Later there would be pizzelles, potica, and powdered sugar and frosted Italian cookies.

That was a long time ago and, as far as I know, the Christmas visit tradition died a long time ago. That’s too bad, but still, in my family, on Christmas day, when our family gathers for dinner, the whiskey bottle still comes out, shots are poured and a toast is given, and even some of the women partake, which never would have happened in the Christmases of my memory.

Salute!

Merry Christmas

Jerry Miller

Keka

Keka was the most interesting dog I ever had. I was married when we got her. We first saw her as a puppy. She was to be a wedding gift to Gail, my wife’s friend from junior high. Gail’s sister must have wanted a puppy, that puppy, for herself, thought the gift was better than anything else she could think of. The puppy was adorable and grew to be a beautiful dog, but she was a husky, a traveler. The sister couldn’t have known that Gail’s husband was a little bit crazy even then or that he fiercely disliked the idea of someone picking a dog for him.

We rented Gail and Tom the house we’d bought, with great financial contortions, the last weeks of the college semester before we went away to summer jobs in Telluride. Before we got back in late August, we’d acquired our first dog, an English Setter named Dirksen with curly hair on the very top of his head. He was named for the Senator from Illinois and once you thought about it, the resemblance was uncanny.

Dirksen had grown up while my wife’s brother and his wife lived in a mountain house west of Denver. The first time I met my future sister-in-law, Dirksen showed off by propping a hot dog in a vertical position between his outstretched front paws as he lay on the floor. The dog then proceeded to almost daintily eat the hot dog in small bites from the top down.

Sometime after that Dave and Ali moved to town and Dirksen’s nocturnal ramblings began to cause problems. When they came to see us in Telluride, they left the dog with us. Our boss approved enthusiastically.

Judy and I came back to Boulder after an amazing summer. We had our dog, and were almost immediately offered another, about six months old at the time. We accepted. Gradually it came out that Keka was not a welcome member of Gail and Tom’s new family. As she grew, she was alternately allowed to wander, then chained for days to the tree in the front yard. The house had no fences. We heard a story that Keka had been seen in both Boulder and Nederland, at least a dozen miles up into the mountains, on the same day. If it was true I suspect she got a ride part or all of the way.

We didn’t exactly allow Keka to wander, but we didn’t build a fence. If either of us walked with her, she’d explore but returned to us frequently. Once she got to the east side of Boulder, and in conjunction with a Black Lab, killed a sheep. Keka was caught and we paid. She made no attempt to evade the sheep’s owner. She probably thought she’d done a good thing. We blamed it on the Lab at the time.

After nearly two years in Boulder, Judy, pregnant by then, and I moved to an old homestead cabin two miles south of Bigelow Divide about forty miles west and south of Pueblo. We had both graduated from CU, saved money, and gave ourselves a summer off. It was a wonderful time for me – I wasn’t pregnant – but if I’d had it to do over again, I would have tried in early summer to get a job starting in September before we settled in to the marvelous old cabin.

By that summer, 1970, I was running regularly and took the dogs with me. Our landlord had 400 acres and was our nearest neighbor to the north, about a mile-and-a-half away. Baver-Li Lodge, about a mile-and-a-half to the south, was another place we could go to make an occasional phone call. The two places were on different phone systems.

In most ways it was a paradise for the dogs. We liked it so well that we decided to rent it year round, and the rent dropped from $50 to $30 per month. After what seemed like a lot of job searching, I got back on with CF&I in the Industrial Engineering Department. I commuted for quite awhile, but Judy was alone all day so we moved to town but kept the cabin.

At that time neither Pueblo hospital would allow husbands in the delivery room, and we didn’t know for sure where we’d end up at the end of the summer so Judy chose a team of obstetricians in Denver. Our daughter was born December 7 of that year. We moved back to the hills the next summer. We used to say that our daughter’s first word was Moo. Cows did come close to the window near where her crib was.

We stayed in that cabin three summers so I’m not sure which event occurred which summer. During one of them Keka killed three or four half grown raccoons. A little creek came near the cabin and a few willows grew along the bank. Usually dogs don’t have much chance against raccoons in water, but these were not adults and the water wasn’t deep.

Keka was involved with lots of animals. Once when we were walking up on a grassy hill above the cabin we came on a badger. Keka didn’t exactly attack but she got close enough that I was worried. She didn’t get hurt, but neither did the badger. Porcupines were another matter. She’d gotten into one in Boulder and had spines coming through the bottom of her mouth and tongue. We had a vet come to the house, sedate her and pull them out. When that happened again in the hills, Judy drove Keka to town to a vet. After that she mostly left porcupines alone,

Then there were cats and skunks. She killed several of each in her lifetime. While we were living in the cabin, she set off for an unusually long adventure. We were made aware of it when our landlord came down to tell us that he’d gotten a call from the Billington Ranch, nine miles away by road, where a dog answering the description had killed some chickens and a cat.

I hope I had a better excuse than cowardice, but Judy was the one who went to investigate. Mrs. Donley was gracious, wouldn’t take any money for the chickens and pretended to not mind about the cat. I’m not sure why but that was the last time Keka killed a farm animal.

Her first skunk kill came later. We had moved to Rye and Keka went with me when I went out for a run. We were coming down Bartlett Trail when we came upon a skunk going the same way. Keka left the trail instantly, passed me and as neatly, but not odorlessly, as something like that can be done, dispatched the skunk.

If you’ve ever been close to a skunk when it sprayed, you know what it feels like. In my experience it’s not so much a smell as an overpowering shock that goes way beyond smell. Keka’s first skunk kill started us on our journey through various folk remedies. I can tell you that tomato juice doesn’t work, vinegar doesn’t work. Leaving the dog outside for six week and not getting too close almost does.

I will tell one more skunk story that doesn’t involve killing. When we still lived in Boulder, we answered a knock on the front door one evening. Our neighbor who lived all of 50 yards away was in his pajamas with his car idling in the street in front of our house. He came to complain that the dogs were bothering the skunks under his old garage, which had no foundation and the smell was bothering him. I’m sure we brought the dogs in the house, and tried to keep from laughing.

Let me interject that I know I was not a responsible dog owner in those days. I don’t approve of allowing dogs to wander, especially those who are known to kill other animals. We lived in pretty remote places and I certainly didn’t expect the encounters I’ve described.

Keka mellowed as she got older, but sometime after September of 1976 when we moved to a house on Dittmer, she killed a skunk in City Park a half-mile or so from our house. Luckily we had a fenced back yard. We probably tried the same failed skunk spray cures. Keka never minded cold weather and stayed outside until we could tolerate her.

I have lots more Keka stories but this may be too long already. She was my companion on many runs and some cross country ski trips. She was always gentle with people, including our daughter from the time she was a newborn on. Keka died at the age of 14. She had gotten deaf and crossed the street in front of our house to chase a squirrel. She didn’t hear the car that killed her.

Jeff Arnold