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

Grandparents

It could be said that in a way, great grandfather dominated my early life by way of his eldest daughter. I didn’t think of it that way at the time but looking back it is pretty clear she began telling me stories about him long before I could distinguish the words from her lavish love and care. Even though he died early leaving her to take care of ten younger siblings and a cousin as well as her bed ridden mother, he resides deep in my psyche to this day as I try and try again to be the “good and decent man” Grandma made him out to be.

She also revered the memory of her favorite sister, Jenny, the youngest who died their first Christmas after coming from Iowa to Pueblo on the train with a herd of Guernsey milk cows and a bull. From toddlerhood on she would taking me visiting Jenny’s little grave by the large old Prairie Avenue cemetery’s front corner. Each time Grandma would say, “I can still see her clear as day. We laid her out on the ironing board in her new white Christmas dress. She was so beautiful and so peaceful looking.” Kin ship was a deep and abiding lesson she was teaching me through her examples and devotions to all the graves scattered across the days of life in Pueblo County.

After her father’s death from emphysema, Grandma continued to walk two miles to the country school house on west of their little Goodnight colony to start the fire and cleanup before her considerable brood of siblings arrived and school began. She treasured those moments and memories of her Dad accompanying her on occasion and telling her the importance of education for his children. She made sure they all took schooling seriously. But, she eloped with a man who had a sixth grade education after she left high school. A man who became a lifelong learner while rebelling against the formal education of his college educated parents. He once ran away for a time with a group of gypsies after being punished for racing gypsies with his horse drawn milk wagon.

That milk wagon also caused the elopement. His parents did not approve of the fatherless waif who hitched rides while delivering cartons of eggs and bread while he delivered milk. Grandma and her brood had moved to town. “Would you say, ‘The horseman knowed her,’ or, ‘The horseman knew her?’Grandma would always interrupt this story to ask. When you gave her grammatically correct “horse manure” she would giggle and say, “No talking dirty in my house please. I swan—you young people today.” The elopement on an Indian motorcycle up Phantom Canyon to Cripple Creek and her solo ride down to Colorado Springs for Grandpa’s bail money was always a good story. No haircut from her was complete, though, without some reference to her father and his larger than life memory.

“He owned a stone quarry in Iowa and we had a white picket fence around our house. When he came back late in the evenings I would wait out front swinging on the gate. Every night he would tell me, ‘Don’t swing on the gate little one!’ Then, he would pick me up and swing me around. Quarry dust flew off of his clothes. It was the dust that made us move to Colorado for the clean air. The rock dust still killed him almost as soon as we got here.”

These hard working larger than life dirt poor farmers were the heart of my formative years. Mother’s parents were throwbacks from another era even though their own parents had been college educated and fairly successful businessmen. When I was four, Harry and Hetty (Robbe) Himes moved seven miles up North Creek past Beulah in the Wet Mountains west of Pueblo. They became dirt and dairy farmers after selling the town dairy inherited from his parents and pooling the equity with their eldest son’s savings from his time in the army. For many summers, my own parents left my younger brother and me out at this beautiful but economically marginal farm we called a ranch. Our family headed out there every holiday while a majority of weekends found us visiting and helping out as well. Wet summers Grandpa could sometimes irrigate and we cleaned and repaired ditches and worked the water. Most times, though, the CF&I water man came with water rights acquired years before and shut Grandpa’s water off. But, he couldn’t stop us swimming in that same dammed water down on the creek.

At the top of North Creek’s valley, the ranch house sat on the brow of a hill and must have been about twenty eight by thirty six feet, two stories high with no basement. It seemed large compared to the compact little homes we knew in town. The kitchen had a large wood stove, an enamel sink fed by a spring a half mile away through pipe that froze for long periods many winters, and a table covered by oil cloth next the refrigerator. The wood range went from five in the morning until last recharge and damping down at bedtime. A back porch and pantry were added on as a lean-to. The living room ran the length of the house with two sets of double hung windows and a fireplace lit only for company. The two hole outhouse sat a hundred feet behind the farmhouse and had a view down the valley through its many knotholes. The upstairs was one large room with a ceiling slanting down to storage cupboards under the eaves. There was one dormer with two windows. The wind shook the panes and blew freely around the sides of the windows in summer and winter. Two uncles and their young brides shared that space right after World War II as did my parents and other relatives on weekends. Grandma often fed thirty or more relatives on a Sunday afternoon. I have no idea where all the food came from since we only butchered once a year and had wild game but occasionally. On these Sundays people were generally pretty hungry because Grandpa had put everyone he could to work hauling and stacking hay, building fence, getting more wood in the shed, and doing the host of things on his long to do list.

Two barns and their attendant corrals framed a barnyard in a side valley coming down the hills out back—the horse barn and the milk barn. The horse barn was built into the hillside and was centered by the hay mow that ran from front to back and across the hay mow from the horse stalls and tack room was a shop large enough to drive a tractor inside. The horse stalls were open to the hay mow and after horses had stretched their necks across their mangers into the hay over a series of weeks, we began tossing ‘fork fulls’ down from the hay loft. Later, when most of the hay was gone, we hauled it from far corners of the big center room (hay mow) by setting the forks on end every few steps to rest from over sized hay piles balanced on the tines. In another time, riding a Vespa scooter across the Island of Mallorca I saw a peasant harvesting his whole field by carrying huge mounds of hay above his head on a wooden fork and resting every ten feet or so by putting the butt of the fork in the ground while the hay hung down around him. The urge to run out and help him was strong but I rode away with memories of Grandpa flooding over me.

Loose hay on a wagon came into the barn by way of horses hauling a full wagon from the fields up the hill behind the barn and parking it below a high window through which a rail ran out over the wagon. A large fork was dropped from a trip device on the rail into the hay and anchored there by side teeth that were used to hold the hay on. Then, the team was taken around to the front of the barn and hooked onto the long cable which pulled the hay up to the track and then along it until a release was pulled that let the hay drop. From time to time the younger crowd was allowed to jump into the hay from various perches and move it to the sides. It took some care not to get too buried as large wads of hay would slide down from the center hill of hay into the valleys along the walls and stalls. On occasion, the extended family’s youth would dare each other to swing out on the rail and drop down as the barn emptied over the winter months. Some of us had the air knocked out pretty badly by the fall but apparently there was enough give in the hay below so we never broke anything as far as I can recall.

Across the barnyard, the ‘milk barn’ also had a shop, a cooling room for the milk with a hand cranked cream separator, a pig sty along with a calf pen, and a set of six milking stanchions. The hallmarks, though, were two oak planked silos rising with their iron rod bands way above the roof with a fermenting silage odor most of the year and dark mysterious corners between and around them where wild barn cats held sway.

The hen house, garden, an abandoned log house used for chicks and pullets up the draw, and a log cellar set in a side hill by the house completed the home area. The wooded pastures were divided by three fences radiating from the barnyard and irrigated hay fields ran down the valley below. In wet times, two higher fields could also be hayed. Two teams of horses produced the hay and consumed a good part of it. The milk herd was hayed only in the winter but received rations of silage at each milking. Grain was mainly for chickens.

Worn out and abandoned cars, trucks, and machinery were strategically located in various areas and used for parts and occasionally resurrected. The farm was a little short of the six hundred forty acres in a section of land but the bordering national forest was several thousand acres and we used it freely. Though it had but little water and grass it was a fantastic playground and a source of wild game.

Grandpa’s classrooms were the barns, pastures, and fields. Grandma’s domain was house, chickens, garden, woodshed, scrub oak groves for wood, and chokecherry bushes. For her, mountain pastures were woodlots, wild flower gardens, and sources of occasional income from selling pine cones to tree nurseries. She kept a little ledger where thirty dollars income in a month was something to celebrate. Some months that income came solely from my younger brother’s egg route in town that competed with the egg factories just coming onto the urban fringe. Other months she led a troupe of cousins out stealing bushels of fir cones squirrels had stashed away in the forest and sold them to a middle man for a tree nursery in Denver.

One special summer camping trip we took an old horse up to the porch so my considerably overweight Grandma could be hoisted on. She then rode several miles with a group of us up to the mythical Silver Circle Park on the other side of Scraggy Peak south of the ranch. There we camped for several days and my Dad and Grandpa fished in Middle Creek. Grandma cooked the fish as well as a host of other goodies to make my mouth water today. There were some old abandoned mining cabins in the area and we saved square nails from them.

In many ways, this farmstead life resembled a timeless peasant existence close to the lifestyle of a long chain of ancestors down through eons of European and Asian history. Electricity and the radio extended the days and awareness of an outer world. Teams of horses were slowly replaced by tractors but only gradually and grudgingly. These kinfolk lived close to the bone and the small surplus was largely taken by governing bureaucracies to pay for physical and legal infrastructures and for a small military defense system. Until the time of my arrival, American governments relied on distances, weaker nations on the borders, an armed citizenry, and a stable social class system for the nation’s defense. Little did we know the tsunami of change the little farm would be riding after the middle of the century.

Grandpa taught lessons in every task we undertook. He would wake me before dawn to help with routine chores before breakfast. He would have shaken the coals and stoked the stove most mornings–except when he wanted to see if I could do it. Then came arm loads of scrub oak wood to last the morning. Next, he called the cows in as we went breath steaming down the hill in the morning coolness. Usually the cows were already coming in on their own and we closed the gate and let them in and out of the milk stations to be fed silage and hooked up with milking machines and stripped by hand. My usual job was to scoop the poop they dropped in the gutter behind them. Sometimes, if Grandpa was out mowing or irrigating late, my uncles would let me ride a cow out the door—living my rodeo dreams. At times I would have to take a stick and bring in the last balky cows. All cows had names and came with their own habits—good and bad. Ada liked people and Elsie hated us and they demonstrated their feelings with licking and kicking.

Talking knowledgably about basic principles of biology, physics, geology, and weather as we worked, Grandpa would point out instances of gravity, capillary action, osmosis, agglutination, erosion, germination, insemination, glaciations, death, decay, and regeneration. He loved figuring out how nature and machinery worked and his immersion in the moment often exasperated my uncles in their need for speed. Once, when asked a question about how batteries and generators worked, he spent the morning taking them both apart and then built a battery charger from an electric motor and a fan belt lying around. He had been meaning to do that for some time but it meant not getting hay put up that morning. Some of my cousins remember Grandpa being cranky and impatient with them. I guess I was the oldest and got the best from him as a work mate while the younger kids bonded into a play group not so useful to him or as anxious to please. To be fair about it, I was not only the oldest but was also a bully and probably jealous of my prerogatives with him. Seven to ten cousins in each others’ soup as much as we were came to rub up against both the bright and the dark sides of our respective souls as we passed through various stages of development–and not.

The first week of November when I was a junior in high school, I found myself at lunch break dumped on my back on the main hall floor at Central High looking up at a couple of classmates who were teaching me a lesson—“don’t ever bug him again.” My uncles and a bit of bull riding had made me pretty scrappy but I was rail thin and felt I was no match for these two guys. I walked out the front doors and ran three miles home. Once there I saddled up a skinny young colt that was used for my five mile paper route West of City Park and rode hard towards the mountains out Rock Springs Road. Twenty miles later he lay exhausted in belly deep snow up behind Red Rocks Dude Ranch. I hung saddle and bridle in a tree and walked five miles on to my uncle’s place on North Creek. “I done quit school,” I said. He took me up to my grandparents. About four the next morning Grandpa rousted me out to begin the day–Dad must have done the paper route for me. The revived two year old colt was feeling frisky when we went to find him that morning and gave Grandpa and me quite a chase before we caught him.

After chores and breakfast we headed out to cut a few hundred Christmas trees for a semi truck coming from Denver later that week. Grandma sent lunch with us and we came back to the barns at dark, milked the cows and fed the pigs, calves, horses, and chickens. Then we had a serving of milk toast and hit the sack. Grandma had gone down to Beulah to use a phone and call my Mom. I would not tell them why I was there, just that I was quitting school. They knew I had been in some fights and figured it had to do with that. For a spell there, several days could go by with my Grandpa and me hardly saying a word. Once he told me, “Quit throwing the trees so hard,” (into the back of the pickup or I would break the window). On the next toss the window broke. He just looked at me and shook his head and went on working. The window came out of my meager pay.

Grandma brought my school books back from town another day but I never looked at them and I never left the ranch until January. It had gotten down to thirty or more below some mornings. With no heat upstairs it was a bit frosty. Mom talked to the teachers. They were willing to work things out with me. I went back after the holidays and graduated in the class of 1959 from Pueblo Central where my mother and father and all my aunts and uncles had also all graduated. My brother two years behind me graduated from the new South High where I did my student teaching in 1964. That was the final requirement for my bachelor’s degree from Colorado State College in Greeley. I worked pipeline construction in Anchorage, Alaska for two of those college summers. My Grandpa died during those years and I seldom made it back to Pueblo. When I did, though, Grandma’s little house was my first stop.

One remaining horse was sold on graduation from CSC and financed a journey through fourteen countries in Europe. Graduate school in sociology at Boulder was financed by grading papers, pumping gas, as a night watchman, and by washing sorority dishes for food. After five years in graduate school, a group of students from courses I was teaching wound up moving with me and my wife to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. They bought me a horse and ended five years of horselessness. When I was fifty-nine I moved into Rapid City and left one last horse with friends in Nebraska. Grandma hangs on the wall astraddle the 1917 Indian motor cycle she rode on her honeymoon watching me begin each day and preparing for sleep each evening.

Shauna and Lang are in their thirties and my wife’s two daughters are in their twenties. Somehow these fragile little kids have become dynamic, well educated, successful, adaptable, resilient, adventuresome, and well traveled people. Each of our oldest has a pre-school age child. We are grandparents but I am left wondering what it means to be a grand-parent at a distance. It will be difficult to implant the ancient ones in their psyches. Whenever they come for a visit to Rapid City the grand kids love to spend hours at Old McDonald’s Farm. This was my wife’s idea which I initially resisted as too corny and artificial. But after hearing their enthusiastic reports, I too have been captured by Old McDonald’s Farm where we can watch, listen to and hold peeping fuzzy baby chicks, pet calves, goats, pigs, sheep, rabbits, puppies, and horses and take pictures of joy on grand children’s faces as they feed this tidy array of animals, get licked and knocked down, ride ponies in tethered circles, and grin from ear to ear. We smile too, as we wave goodbye to Old MacDonald’s and the chores of old.

My wife, too, had a horse growing up in Sioux Falls and she would often walk a couple of miles out to ride him on the farm where he was boarded. And, her Mother’s parents were farmers further north of Sioux Falls with more fields and more and richer topsoil but no Colorado Mountains. She has some great stories of times there, though, including some about her Grand Dad’s antics with his1930’s biplane.

The beloved ranch was sold after Grandpa’s heart attack at age fifty-five. They moved into a small suburban home in Pueblo that they never loved very much. He died after a few years but not before the home place sold in several pieces. Cousin Jay lives a couple of miles down the creek from the old place and Uncle Warren and his wife Vera live a mile down from him. Grandma survived her lifelong partner by a decade but she never ceased to mention him whenever we visited whether on her inaugural Michigan plane trip to see her first great grandchild. Or, when she was talking non-stop during a visit to see the second great grandchild on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. While visiting a Native American family at their little home on the Reservation, she was out of the car before me challenging the kids with, “I bet I can find more of those hens’ eggs than you can!” She did too. Then, in their little log cabin it was, “Oh, Daddy bought me a wood heating stove just like that. I loved it.” The act of remembering a life gone by was something they could identify with as well as her way with kids.

Life as a white collar worker raising hobby horses and dabbling in rural life while being mindful of aerobics, cholesterol, range of movement, and muscle tone has left me of sounder body and finances and more non-working occasions to play with the grandkids than my Grandparents. But, I could never buy their farm nor can I give our grandchildren the freedom to roam the hills, the clear connection between honest hard work and food on the table, the joy of watching a new calf or colt rise up steaming and ready to run kicking through the dawn. My kids and Becky’s had deep tastes of that old life as they grew up on acreages in the Sandhills and Pine Ridge country around northeast Nebraska. It hasn’t seemed to hurt them too much. They get a kick out of Old MacDonald’s too. But, like us, they moved far from home on their adventures and have sunk roots in new and vibrant places with radically different venues. None is prone to being a hick from the sticks like me.

There is great joy in watching these new little ones soaking up their emergent worlds and taking such joy in flowers, vegetables, clouds, moons, pine cones, rivers, creeks, deer, wild turkeys, birds, dogs, cats, farm animals, and the wonderful love and support they live within each day. The world is so much changed from that time on North Creek, and yet it also endures almost unchanging in its smallest and biggest parts. How we see it, how we know it, how we approach it and use it changes but so far we still have the earth, sky, fire, and water to share, to learn from and to enjoy together. These grand children will grow up without being tethered by stories and haircuts to their grandparents’ life and times. It’s a good thing, I expect, because though Mother earth endures, Bob Dylan was so right, “the times they are a changing.” Great Grandfather died young of dust in his lungs, Grandpa of hard work, my Mom ten years older of smoking, my Dad at eighty-six of dancing too long and hard at the Eagles Club. It remains to be seen what and when, but it’s not likely that any of those things will be what takes out this old Grandpa. Meanwhile, as that last great adventure waits over the hill, life goes on with deep memories of Grandma’s great grandfather stories, “Everyone came to him to get their horses trained, He even trained the Governor’s horses.” That’s what she said. But, then, everyone said she was a bit prone to exaggeration. Not, the Paul Bunyan type story, but the spice it up a bit type. <>

Dowell Caselli-Smith (©2008)

Backing Down

Backing Down

Dowell Caselli-Smith, August 31, 2008

Swimming yesterday with my wife and granddaughter in Rapid Creek I was reminded of swimming the Arkansas River out at Rock Creek Barrier Dam west of Pueblo. It was a little noted landmark long since buried under a newer and huger dam. From junior high through junior college I went there often with various friends swimming the rock channel and on one occasion jumping from the dam into the river—a terrifying thing for me.

When my Dad was a child, a flood swept his stepfather down river from Pueblo on a box car while he was working to secure trains in the rail yards. He survived but flood water invaded most down town Pueblo buildings and ruined many. It was reportedly six feet deep in old Crews Beggs’ six story department store. That disaster instigated a concrete channel between the Arkansas and downtown Pueblo as well as an unmarked but extensive Barrier Dam designed to hold back water only in cases of massive flooding five miles up from town. Even so, the river often flooded a mile wide across the bottoms west of the city water works. We went to see how much water was held by the dam one of those times and it wasn’t much. The open gap at the normal river’s edge was thirty feet wide and could hold water twenty or more feet deep there as well. Downstream it spread out more because the river banks were only a few feet high. It was easy to see how the mile wide bottoms had been created over centuries.

One day a group of West Park guys lounging on the smooth rock slabs and swimming the channel downstream by the dam began calculating and concluded the dam was eighty feet high at river’s edge. And we speculated about diving like cliff divers in Mexico and Hawaii. Don Frantz said, “I’m pretty sure we could get up there by crossing the river and walking up the bluff where it meets the top way over there. We’ll have to wear our shoes to deal with the cactus though.” Someone said there was “no way any of us would dive off that!” I said if anyone else did I would too.

Next thing I remember, Don, I and a younger guy named Leonard Skinner were looking down. I had a fear of heights and this felt very high. (In fact, taking private flying lessons a few years later, I never calmed my fears enough to relax and fly straight—near panic led to over correcting every move.) Crawling to the edge on my stomach and looking down made me dizzy. “I wonder how deep the water is? I wonder if the big whirlpool by the other side would suck you under and bang you around?” Don edged by me on his knees and said, “I’d say it was plenty deep enough.” He had seen the cliff divers in Mexico on a vacation with his folks so he had brought the whole idea up to begin with.

While we were talking, Leonard stepped between us and jumped off feet first. I almost puked. It seemed like a long time before he hit water and went under. We held our breaths waiting until he came up.

We had to do it then. I was shaking so bad it seemed I would slip and roll off the dam’s narrow rounded top. Don said, “Here goes nothing,” stood up, and jumped. I lay there shaking, watching him surface, swim to the far edge, get out and yell for me to, “Go for it.”

A person couldn’t hear over the roar of the river very well. But, I knew all too well the challenge echoing over untold generations, “Come on, don’t be a chicken.” Looking at the long, hot and dirty walk around and imagining the humiliation of swimming back to them brought on waves of shame. There were others who had stayed put with no pretension of jumping but I was in a corner with my foolish challenge, “If you do it I will,” thinking no one would do something so stupid. “Damn that kid,” I thought.

Standing up and inching to the edge, sight of the swirling water spawned thoughts of all that could go wrong. “What if I belly flopped and split my guts open? What if a rock ledge was under the muddy water? What if…” Finally, after lots of hesitation and false starts, I thought of bull riding and counted down. Trancelike, I stepped into space watching the water coming at me, clearly hearing Don yelling to get my head up before I hit the water. I did so–just in time. Swimming slowly to the edge, drained by an overload of adrenaline, I sat feeling giddy with relief. Leonard said, “Let’s do it again! I’m going to do it again.”

“That’s enough for me,” Don said. Everyone looked at me expectantly. “OK,” I said. “Just give me a minute.” Twice more I jumped. The last time I threw my head back, water hit my skull, and I saw stars. Leonard seemed addicted. He jumped in eleven times–proving beyond doubt he was bravest and craziest. He said it was, “So easy.” I never went out to the dam with him again.

Yesterday, at our friends’ place on Rapid Creek, I crawled out on a thirty foot cliff where lots of kids who sneak in jump and dive. I shook as on a long ago day. The creek was easily twelve feet deep there and we recently watched Olympic divers doing intricate flips from ten meter platforms over and over. “Safe, very safe,” I reasoned. “It’s not half as high as the dam.” Yet, I could not even do it for the entertainment of our four year old granddaughter as imagined in detail looking up from below a few short minutes before. No one yelled, “Chicken!” My wife thanked me for not jumping when I came the long way down. Our granddaughter said, “I love you grandpa.”

I guess it’s not so bad being a chicken after all. One of these days I might even accept that it was ok to back down inside myself.<>

Central Wildcat

We have been treated to a variety of subjects while reading postings to this blog. I have enjoyed reading all of it. We have read about our various experiences during the Vietnam War, about our feelings when JFK was murdered, about what we remember of 1961, and lots of good poetry. But except for a few memories of what it was like to be a member of the football team, I don’t think anyone has written anything about their thoughts and feelings about being a student at Central High School in the late 1950s, which is the one thing all of us have in common. Like all periods in our lives, some of it was joyous but some of it was hard. Many people would love to relive their high school years but for others it was the worst time of their lives. Remarkably, now as the school year begins, it will have been 50 years since we walked up those granite steps as seniors. So this seems like an appropriate time for me, and hopefully you, to write remembrances of that time.

I have a brother more than seven years older than I. Central, class of ‘52. He is my only sibling and I looked up to him. He was popular in school, had a lot of girlfriends, and loved his years at Central, and I lived those years vicariously. I was the little brother that he and his friends pretty much ignored, but they were around the house a lot and I listened to their conversations and knew that they were all having a grand time. I would pore over Joe’s annuals when he wasn’t around, reading all the things written in them by his classmates. I can still remember the names of the athletes on the football team, Nathaniel Jones, John Rivas, Chuck DiPietro and Celestino Elizondo. What magical names. I remember being enthralled and intimidated by the majesty and massiveness of the building itself when we drove by, knowing that some day I would walk the same halls that football heroes and war heroes had walked before me. My family took a trip to the State Capitol in Denver when I was ten or so, but other than that, Central High School was the most beautiful building I had ever seen. Three years I would have there, I told myself, three wonderful years. I couldn’t wait.

First I had to endure Keating, looking at the big school across the street and seeing the guys in their letter jackets and cool cars and with their girlfriends sitting close, circling the building after classes. I expected more out of myself than I achieved at Keating, but what didn’t happen was my own fault because, as I learned, things don’t always come easy, as they had up to that point. You have to do homework to get good grades, something that had been unnecessary up to then. You have to participate in order to make new friendships. And being a decent athlete at little Carlile doesn’t mean squat when you get together with the guys who can really play the games. So even though I had some good times and made some friends, I was ready to leave Keating and enter the kingdom of Central, where anything was possible.

When I became a student at the University of Colorado in 1961, after having thought that would be impossible, even to the degree of not even dreaming about it, I was in awe, and I think that feeling never really went away for the two years I was in Boulder. Holy shit, CU! The Golden Buffaloes, beautiful girls, The Hill, Sink, Tulagi and Chautaqua Park which was two blocks from our apartment. Folsom Stadium, the Glenn Miller Ballroom, the red sandstone buildings and the Flatirons. Pearl Street before the mall. I had a little bit of the same feeling while at Central. This was the school I always knew I would attend and finally I was here, with the traditions of winning teams and smart kids and venerable teachers. When I was a senior I had a car and lunch period was just prior to Miss Leddy’s journalism class. Sometimes I left campus, and I can remember sitting in my car at the A & W on Prairie, eating a burger and fries, looking at Greenhorn Mountain that seemed to be only a couple of miles away, and thinking to myself, “I am a student at the best high school in the best city in the best state in the best country in the world.” Talk about elite! Really, I thought that. I walked into journalism late, and Miss Leddy said, “Jerry must have had lunch in that little place he likes in Beulah.”

Once, in a class Mr. Ivan was teaching, he was talking about school pride. Thinking about the run-down condition of the building, Vic Keen said, “I don’t think we have that much to be proud of here.” I was dumbfounded! Not proud of Central? I’m sure my mouth fell open. Mr. Ivan went on to say that a school is not just the physical plant, but history, tradition, spirit, and the students who came before. The building was old but never seemed to be in disrepair to me, and even if it was, it was Central Goddam High School!

When I was a sophomore the basketball team made it to the state tournament, like it always seemed to do. I didn’t go but listened to the games on the radio. The next year I went to the tournament with a friend, stayed at the downtown Colorado Hotel with what seemed like half the Central student body, and got drunk for the first time in my life on vodka that we somehow acquired. But that’s another story. Hopefully one of the other participants will write it. If no one does, I will. The manager of the hotel threw all of us out the next day. But back to March of 1957, I listened to what I think was the final game, and it was close all the way. One of the Central seniors made a mistake at the end that may have cost the team the state championship. I was heartbroken. On Monday I saw that player in the hall, and he was laughing. Laughing? I was grieving and he was laughing? Maybe I have always taken sports too seriously. I even used to like to look at the dog-eared stuffed wildcat in the trophy case.

I went out for football as a sophomore. I was maybe 5 foot 10 and weighed 120 or so. A nearsighted end who was skinny and slow but could catch the ball, assuming he could see it. Since I couldn’t wear my glasses there was little likelihood of that. It was August, 125 degrees. The first day we were doing a conditioning drill that was the child’s game of leapfrog. As I squatted, a huge lineman put his hand on my back and tried to vault me but couldn’t and he pushed me down and his foot landed on my hand. I could see the indentations from his cleats on the back of my hand and it throbbed but I didn’t tell a coach because they had already said they didn’t want to hear anything from us. I lasted a few more days, then gave it up. I always regretted not sticking it out even though I probably would never have played in a game, assuming I made the team. Even today I am envious of our class seniors, who were members of a fantastic team that went all the way to the state championship game at South High in Denver and were robbed of the victory by a referee. I was at the game. Several of us drove there, cursed for the first 10 minutes after the game, then didn’t say another word all the way home. Lots of us have memories of that game.

Some bad stuff happened to me at Central, some of it in the notorious gym class that has previously been mentioned on the blog. To this day I am disgusted that a teacher would allow and even promote some of the things that happened in that class. The choice was gym or ROTC, and as I understand it the ROTC guys had their moments too. But anyone who was in that gym class remembers it to this day. Ask them. Even then, some of the inmates were allowed to run the asylum, so I can’t even imagine what high school is like now, and I am concerned for my oldest grandson who is a freshman at South. He is smaller than I was. He has started football practice. And has stuck it out.

I recall a meeting I had with my faculty advisor, who shall go unnamed. For some reason I opened up to this guy and told him about some physical problems, migraines and some other stuff. His response, “You might as well flush yourself down.” That’s what he said to a sixteen year-old. Those advisors probably had no training at all in counseling. But they should have had common sense.

All things considered though, my days at Central were happy ones. It’s hard to realize that we were only kids, a few years out of elementary school, and we didn’t really know anything. But I have so many memories of little things that happened that were fun, and people I knew. Going to the games and cheering the silly cheers, and going to the movies at the Chief, Main, or Lake, Pueblo or Mesa drive-ins. Dragging Main and going to the A & W or BK, both on Elizabeth. Having lunch in the cafeteria with my geeky friends who all became successful. Acting in the junior class play and getting to know the other kids in the play during our many rehearsals, and having crushes on both Diane and Regina. Playing intramural basketball on the infamous team known as the Intellectuals. Playing poker in Ray Keen’s basement. Many of those students we knew then are gone now, and all of us realize that our best years are past. Since the invention of e-mail I have reconnected with several classmates and I think I know them better now than I did then. That is certainly true of Jeff Arnold, whom I barely knew before. I had friends at Central who are still my friends to this day, and next month we will fly to California for a reunion with two of them, Mike McNair and Gerry Perko, and with another member of our class who became my good friend the next year at Pueblo College, Robert Pardun.

I was always proud to have gone to Central. Maybe it wasn’t the best high school in the best city in the best state in the best country in the world. But it sure as hell was the best high school in Pueblo, Colorado.

I was away from Pueblo for 29 years before returning here to live in 1995. When you meet someone new here the same old question is still asked. “Where did you go to school?” It’s not your college they are asking about, that doesn’t mean a thing. “Central,” I say. “Class of ‘59.”

Jerry Miller

Some Thoughts on PJC 1950-1961

This article first appeared in the July 2008 issue of The Pueblo Lore, the monthly magazine of the Pueblo County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with the permission of the author and the Historical Society.

My father, Mr. H. M. Pardun, moved the family to Pueblo in 1946 where he had a job with the Veteran’s Administration. During the early 1950’s he took a job as the Director of Student Personnel at Pueblo Junior College and worked there until he retired in about 1974 as the acting president of the school. My father settled into the college easily and became the person who helped students define their goals and then what they had to do to reach them. I remember that he was very happy when one of the faculty members nicknamed him “Pard” and it stuck. Having been saddled with the name Horace Milton he was happy to have a name that he could use. He was a great fan of cowboy stories on the level of Zane Grey and Pard sounded like a nickname for Partner, a western term of friendship.

After being hired by P.J.C. much of his, and his family’s, life revolved around it. On occasion the Bridge Club and the Faculty Wives met at our house. When the car needed brakes the automotive department students did the work. If he needed something welded the industrial shop students did it. PJC had a theater department that produced several children’s plays every year and students from across the city were bussed to PJC to attend. At that time PJC hosted the only live theater in Pueblo and I remember seeing Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” and Shakespeare’s “King Lear” at PJC.

Then there were the football and basketball games. PJC never excelled in football but made up for it on the basketball courts. In the early fifties many of the players were older students returning to school on the GI Bill. They were scrappy players who made up for their lack of height by their aggressiveness. Over the years coach Harry Simmons turned the basketball team into a powerhouse that eventually won the US basketball competition for two-year schools in 1961.

My father had strong beliefs about the value of education, equal treatment for everyone regardless of race or gender, and the importance of the Bill of Rights to the functioning of the United States. When he heard faculty members stumbling over Spanish surnames he began taking Spanish classes to learn to pronounce those names correctly.

We lived in Euclid street, a gravel street between the cemetery and the state fair grounds. This neighborhood was made up of working class families who worked at the CF&I, retired people, a man who made and raced stock cars in his spare time, a prostitute, several black families, the owner of La Tolteca Tortillaria and several families who had deaf parents. One of these families was the Brammells and Mr. Brammell was a janitor at PJC. My father was proud of the fact that Pueblo was the kind of town where the head of personnel could live next door to the janitor and their kids could play together.

When I graduated from Central High in 1959 there was no question where I would go to school. My father considered the first two years of college at PJC to be the equivalent of any other school around. During that time PJC consisted of the Administration Building and another building across from it, a Vocational Technical Building and a bunch of Quonset huts, one of which was the cafeteria. The second year I ws there a real “student union” was built.

I left PJC for the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1961. PJC was on the verge of becoming a four year school and was moving to a new campus northeast of town. In the process all of the technical part of the college, the machine and welding shops etc, were left behind. My father considered this a mistake because he felt that knowing how to do those things had value in and of itself. When my father died his children created a scholarship for students who were of Hispanic background.

Robert Pardun

Puzzle

During our time at Central I held a general feeling of good will towards nearly all fellow students. I admit those who wore skirts baffled me, but I can’t remember disliking anyone. If you had asked me then, I would have said that I knew most of my classmates. Now, I’m getting to know at least a little about dozens of folks who were mostly just names to me a half-century ago. I know I knew precious few then.

I think Dave Mihalick and I were together in John Armstrong’s physics class but we didn’t spend much time together other than that. I lost track of him after high school until the fall of 1966 when I went to work in the Tube Mill office of Industrial Engineering at CF&I. It may have been a puzzle that started our real friendship. Whatever caused it, I’m grateful.

Dave was a graduate of Colorado School of Mines and had worked at Electric Boat, the company that made nuclear submarines in Connecticut. I was a college dropout who had gotten drafted and got out of the army Valentines Day of 1966. I got a 90 day temporary job when I got home and then went to summer school. Several important things happened that summer, one was that I discovered that I needed to earn some money, so I went back to CF&I.

Probably before I got my first paycheck, Dave brought a puzzle to work. The fourth sentence starts “The monkey’s mother is twice as old as the monkey was when the monkey’s mother was one-half as old as old as the monkey will be when the monkey is three times as old . . .”

I remember spending way too much time working on it, periodically looking around to see if I was just about to be fired. I finally finished it with a mixture of relief and accomplishment.

Less than a year later I got married, and then returned to college at CU. Though Dave and I occasionally talked about a very small joint stock investment that we’d started, we almost lost contact again, even when we lived a few blocks apart and our daughters worked on a joint science project in middle school. Dave thought to reward them for the successful completion of the project so he took them to the Belvedere to celebrate. He generously offered to let them order whatever they wanted and was chagrined when they both choose lobster. He claims to be still making payments on that dinner. Whether the science project had anything to do with it, Dave’s daughter, Salem, is a pharmacist and my daughter, Hillary, is a doctor.

Dave also remembers that he was ”walking home from church one Sunday morning when a runner ran past me shouting, ‘What is the age of the monkey’s mother’s son?’  I thought ‘What in the hell!!’ Then after a moment’s reflection, I said to myself, ‘That must be Jeff’.  And, of course, it was.”

I’d see Dave at least every five years at reunions and at one, perhaps the 30 year, we talked about the puzzle. Dave mailed it to me. I frankly don’t remember if I was able to do it. Then just a few days ago Dave was talking to his grandson about puzzles and found the old monkey and his mother problem. He sent it to me again. I’d forgotten how to do it again. I thought I’d be able to write a few equations, but I gave up and used trial and error. I got the answers though, probably faster than the first time. I admit that I was driven because I didn’t want such obvious proof of mental decline.

Dave generously answers my questions from time to time and we did collaborate on the successful search for Regina, but I want to make it clear that Dave and his wife Joan did nearly all the work on that. The recent puzzle episode was just an affirmation of what has become a rewarding relationship.

If you’d like to see the puzzle, email Dave at jmiha2428@aol.com or me. If you want to share a hard one, send it to him. I’ve fooled myself into thinking I’m still OK.

Jeff Arnold

Once

The day was calm with autumn cold

Leaves fell, to cover -

The ground red with gold.

The image and thought are fragile,

But, I remember it.

We walked, talking lightly,

Sharing beauty and the nature of things.

The day was close to its end

The sun pushed its last rays

Through clouds, pink, gray.

It was as we have never,

Will never see.

The hours grew bringing night

To cover us in shadow.

Closer.

We stood finding solace, each in the other

You became frightened feeling harm near.

Turning, withdrawing, closing, Morning Glory.

Once, never again.

Gunther Hill (David Sabosky)

Pikes Peak at Dusk

One cloud in the midsummer west blazes

in the dusk above the silhouette of hills.

The dome of Pikes Peak at the northern end

of the softened skyline surprises me.

It is not now the awesome snowcapped giant

that catches first light

and lifts the heart as well as eye

on winter mornings.

Nor does it seem close as Pike thought it was

when he decided, twenty miles

and two centuries from here,

that the summit was a short walk away.

I know that darkening knob

is a long day’s climb on a good trail that

starts two days march from Pike’s departure point

Greenhorn marks the southern end

of this apparent range gentled by dusk.

The hills seem to drop away

from both sides to the very river

Pike was supposed to be following.

There is no hint, from here, of the great gorge

cut narrow and a thousand feet deep

through solid rock by that river

crashing now with spring melt.

It is quiet here. The world seems to slip

into a promised evening peace.

I know the mountain and river

will rise again next morning.

Jeff Arnold

A Story Poem

Long days ago

upon ice and snow

the moving box rolled.

Bound for a town

set far from the old

were boxes with treasures

as precious as gold.

Cradling the treasures

tied fast with string

each brown box now loaded

with treasures secured -

‘til all could be placed

inside the new space.

For twenty-four only,

the moving box, lonely,

sat solid in place –

fit well in its space –

asleep for the night

while awaiting morn’s light.

Shadows of evil

stole through the dark

searching for outlets

for talons to gain

while causing great pain.

When morning light broke

she arose and spoke

a pleasant good day

before breaking away

to drive the orange van

to the new space.

Soon there were tears

wetting her face

as police were phoned

to the lot where truck was

but no longer called home.

All was now gone.

Years of straight living

of loving and giving

of laughing and crying

of losing those dying

were stolen away.

The evil had conquered

By stealing that day

a moving box full

of her every day.

Photos and memories;

files and poems;

every possession

that made home her own.

Of course you wonder WHY. You wonder whether you could have done something more to have made the van safer during the night. The police tell you that you did everything right, but you aren’t feeling that you did. You purchased the “Safe Move” that UHAUL offers persons who rent moving vans from them. It isn’t insurance, but will cover any eventuality of van and cargo loss during the move while your renters insurance is not in effect – except for theft. Who would have guessed that everything you owned that was packed in your rented van parked in a secure spot in front of your daughter’s lake front home for only one night – only for seven unattended hours – would be stolen? What would the thieves want with your sparse furnishings and personal clothing, photos, files, writings, and mementos?

The wrecked van was recovered three days later about 80 miles away. My padlock was still in place; unable to cut it off the thieves used a crowbar to break into the overhead door of the vehicle in order to access the items inside. The van was completely emptied. I have no reason to expect to recover any of my possessions. I have accepted this reality.

I wasn’t certain that I wanted to talk of this incident; I did not wish to be the recipient of misunderstandings regarding my free-spirit life style. Then, I thought, “Who in the heck do I think I am? I live in the world and this is a reality of living in the world. Maybe someone else can benefit from my experience.” My family has been wonderful in supporting me through this loss. The daughter and son-in-law where I slept the night of the theft have supplied me with everything I need to be comfortable until I can recover. .

It is my belief that every event in life happens for a reason, and that there is a lesson from each challenge in life. I am certain that I will be learning from this incident for some time…after all, I was an insurance investigator for the State of Arizona. I feel a responsibility to tell as many persons as I can that they must make certain their cargos are covered for ALL eventualities of loss during a move.

I offer the following reflection that was born from this incident.

HOPE

Each day the sun rises

To offer grand bounty

Awake in the universe.

That same globe sets

For those who are blind -

Who choose to not see -

Who choose to not live.

Challenges race daily

To break our resistance –

To weaken our spirit –

To destroy our goals.

Perhaps smiles will fade

As furrows appear

While we ponder options

To break or to grow.

If not an asset

Each walk is a chore.

If we do not soar

We create a lie

That shrieks we must die

In compost of pain,

While eyes one time blinded

See light beyond light -

No filters shadow

The truths beyond truth.

To smile from a knowing

Within turbulent swirls

Creates fertile ground

Where wisdom abounds

Within she who rebuts

Good over ill.

Each day the sun rises.

Each day is renewed.

Bounteous options bring hope.

Mary Jane Huckleberry © 2008

David Glick Conclusion

DAVID GLICK, PRIVATE DICK

The Case of the Missing Momma

 

Conclusion

 

     It didn’t take a genius to understand that Arnold was the key to this mystery.  Find Arnold and you find Katrina’s mother Laurina, or find out what happened to her.  If she is dead Arnold either killed her or knows who did.  It seemed to me that finding him shouldn’t be that big of a deal.  Lawyers can’t easily disappear, assuming they continue to practice law. 

     The next morning I wandered over to Perko’s office about 9:00.  His secretary, Ruth Ann, told me to just go in.  I flirted with Ruth Ann sometimes, and she had done some internet stuff for me as a favor.  I went into Perko’s office and found him there with his feet on the desk, a huge coffee mug within reach.  He was reading the Denver Post sports page. 

     “Well David!  And how did you make out with the new client, if the question isn’t too personal?”  He didn’t take his feet off the desk and barely looked away from the newspaper.  He was wearing an ugly tie, short-sleeved shirt and suspenders.

     “I don’t make out with clients, Perko.  At least I haven’t yet, but who knows, she could be an exception.  Something I need to ask you about.  Do you remember a local shyster name of Arnold, maybe twenty years ago?”

     Perko told me that Conrad Arnold disappeared shortly after Perko started practicing in town.  There was a lot of local gossip and the consensus was that a woman was involved.  Arnold had a couple of partners, Strand and Speken, and he really put them in a bind when he left. They had to take over all the clients he was working with and that made for a mess.  Strand left town long ago but Speken, who was retired, still lived here.  Arnold’s wife was still in town as well.  Perko said that she never believed that Arnold ran out on her.  She thought the mafia had killed him.  I was beginning to notice a pattern.

     “Anything to that?” I asked Perko.  “Any chance the mob whacked Arnold?”

     “Hell, Dave, there’s no mob presence in this town and there hasn’t been for as long as I’ve been here, and that’s 1985.  Maybe in the old days, but a long time ago.  She’s kidding herself.  I don’t know the reason Arnold disappeared himself but I would bet my Bojon butt that’s what he did.  Where he got to, who knows?  But that’s what that little sweetie is paying you to find out, right?”

     I found a number for Arnold’s wife and called her.  There was a long pause after I told her that I wanted to meet her to talk about her husband but curiosity won out and she agreed to see me that afternoon.  I returned the call of an insurance company manager I had done some work for a few months ago.  He had a disability claim he was suspicious about and he wanted me to tail the guy to determine just how disabled he was.  Back problems, is what the claim was about.  I told him I would do it tomorrow because I was busy today.  When it was close to noon I drove over to the Pass Key Drive In and picked up a couple of Pass Key specials with fries and drove back to Vito’s.  I put the sack on some newspaper on the floor of the car because I knew the grease from the sausage would leak through the waxed paper the sandwiches were wrapped in and through the brown sack too.

     When he saw me walk through the door Vito popped the cap on a Pabst for me and a Bud for himself and we ate at the bar.  There weren’t any customers yet.  Sinatra’s voice came over the jukebox.  Love and Marriage.

     “I really don’t like that song,” Vito said.

     “Why not?”

     “It’s not the man’s kind of song.  Not a ballad, not a saloon song.  It’s a cute piece of crap.  But it plays more than any other song.”

     “Why don’t you remove it from the jukebox?”

     “Scared to.”

     After we finished eating I used a toothpick I had grabbed at Pass Key to dislodge a bit of sausage and I asked Vito about the Pueblo mafia.  He told me stuff his father, uncles Calogero and Vincenzo, and even his grandfather had told him.  Most of the Pueblo Italians came from Sicily.  They left the old country at the end of the 19^th Century and the beginning of the 20^th to work in the smelters and the steel mill.  Some of them brought the old ways with them.  Prohibition became the law in Colorado in 1919, a year before the rest of the country.  Pueblo was a city with a lot of single men whose women hadn’t been brought over from Europe yet, and many of them were drinkers.  Bootlegging took off like a rocket and rival gangs fought each other for the action.  When the Volstead Act was repealed in 1933, all of that ended and things calmed down, but when World War II started everything heated up again and the town was wide open.  There was an Air Base near town and and Army Camp forty miles away.  These guys, along with the steelworkers, had money to spend and prostitution and gambling took much of it.  The mafia controlled vice in the city and paid off the law.  This lasted until the middle 1960’s when the citizens demanded and got change from local politicians.  The old mafiosi retired and died off.  They didn’t want their sons to have the lives they did and the sons went to college or into the mill.  By 1975 it was all over.

     “Anybody telling you the mafia did murder in 1987, well, it just didn’t happen, Dave.  Any of those guys still alive by then, they were old, and anyway, what reason would they have to do it?  Nah, you’re getting bad info.  Look someplace else.”

     It hadn’t sounded right to me from the get-go, and after talking to Perko and Vito I was pretty sure that it wasn’t the mob that had killed or chased off Arnold and Laurina.  Maybe Arnold’s wife thought that her husband had been murdered by the mob or maybe it was just a smokescreen on her part.  You know what?  People are duplicitous.  I’m not certain what that word means but I think I do, and I like saying it.

     The Arnold house was on the north end of the city, on Greenwood, a perfectly named street.  The trees planted more than a hundred years ago, when people counted on shade instead of AC to cool their homes, were close to a hundred feet tall.  The houses were large and had front porches, but I didn’t see any people sitting on them.  The one I was looking for was on a corner with a big lot and when I pressed the doorbell it emitted an annoying buzz. The door was open and a little yapping mutt ran up to the screen door.  I don’t mind a big woofer but these little pooches no bigger than a doberman’s turd drive me up the wall.  I learned a long time ago that if you growl gruff and loud at these mini-dogs they will shut up and back away, and that’s what I did.  That little bastard acted like he had just seen Cujo and he did a u-turn and took off for the rear of the house.  Just then Mrs. Arnold came to the door and looked me over up and down.  I don’t think she liked what she saw.  She was maybe a little hard of hearing.  She hadn’t heard the growl.

     “What did you do to my dog?” 

     “Animals sense that I represent danger.  They fear me.”

     She was a stout woman, probably about 70, who looked like she was capable of kicking my butt and the expression on her face indicated she wouldn’t mind doing it.  She didn’t have a good first impression of me.  That’s not unusual.  She left me standing with the screen door between us long enough for me to use a line I had been saving for years.

     “Can I come in?  I feel like a fly out here.”  It was from an old movie with Robert Mitchum based on a Raymond Chandler novel.  Maybe Farewell My Lovely.  I’ve always loved private eye movies.  None of them are even close to being real but I still like them. 

     She finally let me in and went to the back of the house to let the dog out without telling me where she was going.  It gave me a chance to look around.  The living room was just off the foyer where I was standing.  I walked over to a bookcase and looked at some of the pictures.  There was one of the Arnolds on their wedding day and some others of the two of them, but no pictures of children.  Conrad Arnold was a tall, good looking guy, at least when these pictures were taken.  In the pictures of the two of them together he wasn’t smiling.  Mrs. Arnold came back into the room and asked me to sit down but didn’t offer me any refreshment.  She didn’t seem like the small-talk type so I got down to it.

     “As I told you on the phone, I’d like to ask a few questions about your husband.”

     “My deceased husband.”

     “Your deceased husband?”

     “Conrad died in 1987.”

     “I wasn’t aware of that.  My condolences.  What happened to him?”

     “He was murdered.”

     “Murdered!  That’s terrible!  How was he killed?”

     “I don’t know.  The body was never found.”

     “Who was convicted of the crime?”

     “Nobody.  The crime is still unsolved.”

     I paused and gave her a long look.  She didn’t blink.  “Mrs. Arnold, if there was no body and if no one was convicted of killing him, how can you be so certain he was murdered?”

     “Because it’s the only thing that makes sense.  Conrad loved me with all his heart.  He would never have left me voluntarily.  If he had been kidnapped there would have been a ransom demand.  If he had amnesia he would have eventually shown up.  He had to have been killed.

     “Is there a chance he left you for another woman?”

     “None.  He knew that if he did I would have found him, reached my hand down his throat and pulled his lungs out.”

     “So you are saying that his motivations for staying were love and fear?”

     “Exactly.  In that order.”

     “What about his car?  Did it disappear with him?”

     “No.  They found it in the parking lot near his office where he always parked.”

     “What about his clothes, belongings?”

     There was a small hesitation before she didn’t answer the question.  “You told me you are a private investigator, but who hired you?  Why are you asking these questions so many years after Conrad’s death?”

     “Naturally, I can’t reveal my client’s name, but I can tell you it is someone who is trying to locate a loved one, and who believes Mr. Arnold’s disappearance and the other person’s disappearance are linked.”

     “The family of that slut.”

     “Which slut is that?”

     “The slut who worked for Conrad.  The one some people said he had a fling with.”

     “He didn’t, though?”

     “He assuredly didn’t!  Conrad loved me.”

     “I have one other question.  Who do you think murdered Conrad?”

     “It was the mafia.  He had defended some of those animals in prior years.  They may not have been happy with his representation.  Or maybe they thought he charged them too much.  Those people know how to dispose of bodies so they are never found.  Yes.  It was the mafia.”

     A few minutes later I stood up to leave.  Mrs. Arnold put her hand on my arm at the door and squeezed my bicep.  It hurt.

     “If you find out what happened to him, or even if you find out he’s still alive, you must tell me.”

     “I’m sorry.  You’re not my client.  But I promise you that I will speak to my client, and if my client agrees, I’ll tell you what I found.”

     After speaking to Perko, Vito, and Mrs. Arnold I now had a theory about Conrad Arnold’s disappearance.  It was not original.  It was the same theory everyone with the exception of Mrs. Arnold had, and I wasn’t sure about her either.  Conrad started getting some action on the side.  He and Laurina fell in love.  She left town without telling anyone, he left two weeks later.  They met up wherever it was they planned to meet, possibly changed identities, and lived happily ever after.  Or didn’t.  But I had no doubt that they were together after they left Pueblo.  I did, however want to talk to Conrad’s former law partner, Dowell Speken.  If he had another take I wanted to hear it.

 

*

 

     Speken lived on the other side of town, but it only took 15 minutes to drive there.  It was another neighborhood with tall trees and old, well-kept houses. Probably it had been the best part of town fifty years earlier.  I hadn’t called ahead and I drove up to the house listed in the phone book.  It was on Ditmer, a brick ranch with a large picture window.  A man came to the door even before I rang the bell.  When I told him who I was he let me in without asking questions.  His bald head was fringed with black hair mixed with gray.  His eyes were black but friendly.  A woman was in the kitchen watching a small TV while she did something with food.  She didn’t look in.

     “Mr. Speken, I have been hired to locate someone, and I believe that Conrad Arnold has information that will help me. I’d like to ask a few questions about him.”

     “Who are you trying to find?”

     “I can’t tell you that.  It’s confidential client information.”

     “Is it Laurina’s family?”

     I paused just long enough for him to know that he had scored a bullseye, then told him again that I couldn’t tell him.

     “So those kids grew up and want to know what happened to their mother.  That’s understandable, since she left the poor children without explanation.  What’s your theory?”

     “I’ve heard rumors that the mafia killed them both.”

     “That’s bullshit and I think you know it.”

     “Some people think Arnold and Laurina ran off with each other.  What do you think?”

     “Mr. Glick, Conrad and Jeanine had an unhappy marriage.  That’s not unusual.  But Conrad was afraid of Jeanine.  He thought that if he asked her for a divorce she would kill him.  Whether she was capable of that, I don’t know, I didn’t know her that well, but Conrad thought so and that’s all that matters.  When Laurina came to work for us there was an immediate attraction, even though Conrad was many years older.  Everyone in the office knew they were having an affair.  When Laurina stopped coming to work we asked Conrad where she was but didn’t get an answer.  Two weeks later, when he didn’t show up at the office and Jeanine didn’t know where he was, we all figured it out immediately.  I never heard from him again, and that surprised me, as he had an interest in the partnership practice and I assumed he would ask for his money.”

     “Did Jeanine get the proceeds from his share?’

     “Yes.  She had him declared dead three years later.  She got his share and she had inherited some family money and she has done all right for herself.”

     “Since there was no evidence of foul play, I would think it would have been difficult to have Conrad declared dead.”

     “Not if you play bridge with the judge’s wife every Tuesday.”

     “What about life insurance?  Wouldn’t the insurance company have searched hard for him before they paid out?”

     “Mr. Glick, insurance companies look only at the bottom line.  If the policy was for a million they would move heaven and earth looking for Conrad before they paid the policy.  If it was $100,000, they might think it more cost effective to just pay off.”

     I finally asked the most important question, the only one I really cared about being answered.

     “Where would you look for Conrad and Laurina if you wanted to find them?”

     There was a long pause while he stared at me and thought about his answer.  “I don’t know if is wise to find them after all this time.  I know Laurina’s kids want answers, but they very well might not like what they learn.”

     “I appreciate what you are saying, Mr. Speken, but with all due respect, I don’t think that you have the right to make that decision for them.  If they want to find out what happened to their mother, whether they want to meet with her or not, they should have that knowledge.”

     There was another long, thoughtful pause, and then the elderly man rubbed his face with his stubby fingers and said, “I would look in Idaho.  Conrad grew up there and spoke fondly of it.”

     “Wouldn’t Jeanine have looked for him there?”

     “Jeanine never looked for Conrad.  If he was with another woman, I don’t think she wanted to find him.  She would have been humiliated.  She felt she was better off thinking of him as dead.”

 

*

 

     I planned to surveil the disability applicant for my insurance company client the next day.  I went by my office after I left Speken.  By the time I got there Perko’s door was closed and it was dark inside.  I wrote out a note to his secretary, Ruth Ann, asking her to see if she could find out anything about Conrad Arnold or Laurina in Idaho by checking out the Internet.  I wrote that I would buy her dinner at Giacomo’s if she got me good information.  I slipped it under the door, knowing she would get there before Perko and he wouldn’t see it. 

     The next morning I was sitting in my car four houses down from a two-bedroom frame house that was more brown than white because most of the paint had peeled off.  I had a 16 ounce cup of coffee from Solar Roast on Main Street in my hand and both the Pueblo Chieftain and Denver Post on the seat next to me.  I got there at 8:00 to follow the guy who had applied for disability that my client the insurance company wanted checked out.  One thing about surveillance – it gives you time to think.  I had no doubt now that Conrad and Laurina had run off together.  She must have left town, probably didn’t go far, maybe just up the road 40 miles to Colorado Springs, might have stayed with a friend for a couple of weeks, then picked Conrad up and they traveled to wherever they had planned to go.  The cops certainly figured this out immediately and didn’t look for them as they hadn’t committed a crime.  Mrs. Arnold knew too, although she is still pretending that she doesn’t.  Only Laurina’s parents were taken in by the silly ruse, and probably only because they couldn’t believe that Laurina could leave like that.  When they hired the private investigator and he started snooping around word got back to Laurina somehow, and she sent the threatening note that ended the search for her.  We all suffer our demons, but what had latched on to Laurina that would cause her to leave her kids and let them and her parents think she had died?  To never contact them as they grew up.  Did she wonder about them?  Did she ever come back and wait outside their home, hoping for a glimpse?  Or did she just forget them?  Was it simply a case of falling so hard in love with Arnold that she was willing to give up everything, even her kids?  Or was it something darker, a depression so hurtful that she was afraid that if she didn’t leave she would cause them more harm than she did by leaving.  There is no limit on the things people will do to get what they want, or to run from what is chasing them.  There were a couple of cases in Seattle that still give me nightmares.  In 1995 a mother took her two little kids down to the pier.  She tied both of them to herself, then she tied a cinder block to the three of them and jumped off.  In the other case, a guy had a fling with a woman he worked with and fell hard for her.  He had a wife and three kids.  He knew that paying child support would ruin him financially and he took out insurance policies on his whole family and one night when he was supposed to be on a business trip he set the house on fire.  The wife burned up trying to save the kids.  She threw two of them out of a second floor bedroom window but they were so burned that they died anyway.  I was first on the scene and saw her throw them out and helped the firemen douse the flames and heard them screaming while their skin came off.  There is nothing you can imagine that humans aren’t capable of doing.  So Laurina leaving her kids to think she was murdered isn’t that big a stretch. 

     At 9:45 I saw the door to the little house open and a man using a cane came out and walked to the Chevy parked in the carport.  Even from where I was sitting I could see the hurt on his face.  I snapped a couple of pictures and followed him to a physical therapy clinic.  He came out after about thirty minutes and drove back home and hobbled in the house.  I stuck around until 4:00 and he never came back out.  Not everybody filing for disability is a phony son of a bitch.

     There was a manila envelope on the floor when I opened my office door.  When I took out the contents there was a note on top from Ruth Ann that read, “Pick me up Saturday night at 6.  Get a haircut.”  She had found Conrad and Laurina in Lewiston, Idaho on the Washington border.  In the envelope there were newspaper articles about Conrad selling his insurance agency and retiring, about Laurina doing volunteer work for Meals on Wheels, and them celebrating their wedding anniversary.  There were pictures.  It was them.  Ruth Ann had copied documents about their house from the county assessor and other public records she had found.  I read it all, then read it again.  There was a phone listing for Conrad.  I dialed the number.  An elderly man answered and I asked for Laurina.  He asked who was calling and I told him never mind who’s calling, just put her on.  When she said hello I just ran with it.

     “Mrs. Arnold my name is Glick.  I’m a private investigator from Pueblo.  I was hired by your daughter to locate you and I guess I have.”

     There was a long pause before she said anything.

     “What do you want?”

     “I don’t want a damned thing and I don’t know if Katrina does either, but I would like to know if you will agree to talk with her or meet with her if that is what she wants.”

     “No.”

     “That’s it?  You haul ass, make your kids think you are dead, never contact them, and now that they are grown you won’t even speak to them?”

     “What possible good would it do now?  What would we say to each other?  I doubt Katrina would throw her arms around me and hug me, do you?  I think it would be best if it all stays in the past, for her and the other two to get on with their lives and leave me to mine.  It’s been too long and too much has happened.  They will never forgive me.  Tell me what you want.  Tell me how much you will take to tell her you can’t find me.  I’m willing to pay a reasonable amount.”

     “I don’t operate that way.  I don’t sell out my clients.  I’m going to tell her where you are and she can decide for herself what to do next.  If I were her I would write you off and forget you, but that decision is up to her.”

     I hung up and called Katrina and told her I had some information and would come by her house at 7:00.  Then I looked for used computers in the classifieds. 

     This is a strange town.  The way it works here, your parents either live on the south side or the north side, the two parts of town divided by the Arkansas River.  If you grow up on the north side, if you stay in town (and many people do) when you become an adult you live on the north side.  Same for the south-siders.  Except for high school sports there is no antagonism or competitiveness between the two sides.  I’ve asked a few people why it’s like this.  Nobody knows.  When I moved here I rented a 70 year-old bungalow on the south side.  Katrina lives in a similar house.  When I walked up to the door, the sun not down and the heat of the day not subsided, I could see Katrina through the open door.  She was sitting on the couch watching television.  I knocked lightly and she turned off the TV and came toward me.  She was wearing shorts, a sleeveless top and sandals and she was gorgeous.  She invited me in and I made a point of sitting on the couch next to her.  I opened the brown envelope and showed her the pages Ruth Ann had printed and waited while she read them.  When she was done I broke the news that I had spoken to Laurina and she had no wish to meet with her.  We were only a couple of feet apart and when her tears spilled out of those beautiful eyes I moved over and held her while she sobbed.  After a couple of minutes she got up and was gone for a little while, then came back and she was composed.  She didn’t sit and she thanked me for all I had done.  I asked her what she planned to do and she said she didn’t know yet, she wanted to think about it, it had all come together so fast.  I got up, took her little hand and wished her well, kissed her on the cheek, and left.

     I do my best thinking when I am driving, and so I drove through the shady streets of twilight and then total darkness.  I knew that although I had fantasized about a relationship with Katrina she had no similar thoughts about me.  Her mother had left her for an older man.  Wouldn’t that fact alone preclude her from wanting anything to do with me?  In our two meetings she had never given any clue that she wanted anything from me except a business relationship.  I had to respect that.  Still, the memory of holding her sweet form, of smelling again that certain perfume…  But what the hell.  It wasn’t to be.

     In this business, mostly there aren’t happy endings.  The information you supply clients sometimes ends marriages, sometimes puts people in jail.  The worst part is that every once in a while you don’t know the ending.  Did Katrina ever call her mother?  Did they meet, reconcile?  Or did she try to forget Laurina and go on with her life?  I wish I knew.  I forgot about my promise to Mrs. Arnold to ask Katrina if it was OK to let her know where Conrad was.  I didn’t owe her anything and I honestly didn’t think she really wanted to know.  Conrad had been dead to her for a long time.

     I ended up at Vito’s Bar and Grill.  From outside I could hear Sinatra’s voice, Night and Day.  It was Friday night and many of the after work crowd had stuck around and the joint was busy and loud.  There was an empty stool to the left of the doorway and as I moved toward it I noticed a guy sitting alone at the end of the bar.  He was wearing an old-fashioned cloth cap, a cigarette between his brown fingers.  There was a small tumbler of beer in front of him but Vito serves beer in mugs.  The guy was looking at me with an angry expression on his dark features.  I don’t know if he didn’t approve of me, of the people in the bar in general, or of the 21^st Century.  He looked hazily familiar.  Vito was serving a customer at the other end and I waved my arms to get his attention, then pointed back to where the stranger was sitting.  I could read Vito’s lips ask, “what?” and he held his hands out in a gesture that said the same thing.  When I looked back to the left the stool at the end was empty.  No glass on the bar, no pack of Luckies and Ronson lighter that had been there before.  Only a thin line of smoke that quickly dissipated in the night air.

     Vito Bucchinfuso is the best friend I have in this town.  At least once a week we have a late breakfast together before he opens, and frequently on Monday when the joint is closed he invites me to dinner with his wife and kids.  I stop by Vito’s for a beer when I have a chance, but I honestly would rather not.  I’ve been in some tight spots over the years and I have never backed down when things were tough.  I just don’t like to go up against what I don’t understand.  That includes the Sicilian sitting at the end of the bar that night.  Who was that guy?

 

 

Jerr Miller