Like I said earlier, Dad was a very private man. So a lot of what I know of his YMB (years before Mom) was picked up in driblets of conversation over a great many years. Probably some errors, but he will correct me on those in Heaven.

After leaving Missouri the family ended up in the area around Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak. I imagine this to be sometime around 1920. Not really sure what my grandfather did in that area, but Dad was certainly in school. They moved to the plains of eastern Colorado shortly there-after. At various times living in or near the small farming towns of Rocky Ford, Ordway and La Junta. I believe La Junta was the last one of the three. Grampa was a farmer and life could not have been easy for the family. I know that Dad had to quit school at the age of twelve to start earning a living. His first job was driving a mule team hauling gravel for a road project. From there, the next thing I am aware of was that he was hired in his late teens to work on the CB&Q RR (that's the Chicago Burlington & Quincy). His first job there was with a friend standing on the top of refrigerator cars and lowering big blocks of ice into the cars! Hot back breaking work in the summer. From there he went to working as a telegraph lineman for the railroad. In the early 1930's he went to work for the J C Penny Company (I think in Pueblo, Colorado) and learned the retail business, which was his livelihood for the majority of his adult life.

You know as children, we absolutely know that our parents are the most boring and have never done anything remotely exciting or interesting. You also know that usually we are completely wrong in this assumption. Had the wonderful and somewhat unique opportunity to listen to my father and a long lost friend of his reminisce about the "old days"! I would give anything to go back and listen to that conversation as an adult.

That's when I found out that dad used to drive bootleg hootch from the La Junta area down to Trinidad, Colorado! If I remember correctly, Dad would drive one time and his friend (whose name I can't remember) would ride shotgun (in the literal sense of the word).....the next outing the roles would be reversed.

One of the stories that I loved the most and Dad repeated it to me several years later, was the families first car.

I don't know the year, but when Grampa decided it was time to move to a motorized vehicle, they hitched a ride with a neighbor on his farm wagon and Grampa, Dad and one of the younger boys rode into Pueblo to the Ford dealer. I believe it was a Model A they bought, however could have been a T. None had ever driven a car before but, they managed to get it all the way to the farm! Now being farmers they were well equipted with a desire to know how things work. That was in large part because they knew that sooner or later that thing would have to be fixed!

Grampa's solution to this was to have them take the Ford apart.....all the way apart...Dad said that when they were done that there were "no two things attached to each other" Picture an entire old Ford laying in literaly hundreds or thousand of pieces on blankets in the front yard. Engine, transmission, enterior, wheels, chasis.......everything! Then they put it back to gether again! The whole process took about a week, and when they were done, they had a bucket of assort nuts, bolts and whatnot that they had no idea where they went. Dad would grin and say "But that Ford still ran like a top, so I guess they weren't that important."