Ch. 1 Before There Were Cowboys

Heretofore there has always been in the history of the world a comparatively unoccupied land westward, into which the crowded countries of the East have poured their surplus populations.

- Josiah Strong (1847-1916)

Westward, ever westward.

- Henry Wells (1805-1878)

Long before there was a “cowboy mystique” … nearly 100 years before, in fact, there was a growing sense of frontier America—a land of unknown and interminable boundaries, a land to be conquered, subjugated, tamed and wrestled into the rough civilization of a largely white and Anglo-Saxon culture. It was one more frontier to be breached, one long stretch of land to separate frontiersmen from aristocratic Europe. Freedom of religion played a minor part, perhaps. More so it was a desire to be free to do what one pleased with the land, with the slaves who worked the land, with the women who framed the family, the children who worked the fields—without criticism, without being looked down upon, without class and hierarchy. Only the frontier allowed such promise of primitive equality before Nature and before God. So the Americans marched ever westward.

It was in this time before the Civil War exposed the failings of an “every man for himself” philosophy of expansion and exploitation that my own ancestors, Peter McFarlane and George Malcoum Brown were born in two distant regions of the newly organized North America. 

The McFarlanes were Scottish immigrant farmers who, forced off of their lands in Argyll and Moray in Scotland in the 1700’s, came west to settle on Prince Edward Island, still a part of the British Empire but distinctly more independent than the ancient kingdom’s African and Asian prizes. Peter Barclay McFarlane, my great-great grandfather, was born on May 9, 1848 in the small town of Bedeque, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Peter was one of 13 children born to ___ and ___ McFarlane. He likely attended school only through the eighth grade, and then went back to work on the family farm until age 18, when he was apprenticed to John McCallum’s carpentry shop in Bedeque. Not long after, at age 20, Peter emigrated down to the Boston area, and there joined his brothers and four cousins in a bold venture west—to the gold towns of Colorado—to seek their fortunes.[1]

Peter arrived in Central City, Colorado sometime between May and September of 1869—about ten years after gold had been discovered in Clear Creek and started the Colorado Gold Rush. The “red-haired, freckle-faced” youth arrived in Central City as its population just reached ___ and its ___ mines were yet to reach their peak production.

The Browns were of rugged and independent Scots-Irish descent; distrusting of both Yankees and Brits alike. George Malcoum Brown, Tandy’s father, was born in 1855 in Gloster, Georgia and eventually married Anna Walker Brooks, who was 13 years younger, but who died at age 46, while George lived until 75 years of age. They had ___ children. These were times of testing for the new Republic. Slavery was hotly debated and the South increasingly unrepentant. Gold would be discovered in early 1948 at Sutter’s Mill in California, and frontier-minded America hurtled westward in search of fortune and redemption.  President James Polk, belligerent and aggressive, drove American to a manufactured war with Mexico and succeeded in lopping off half of the unfortunate state’s territory in a painless war; followed by further grabs of the Oregon Territory and the Gadsen “Purchase” in 1853. Not since Jefferson’s artful deal with the beleaguered Napoleon in 1804 had the territory of the United States blossomed so generously. Between 1848 and 1853, the size of the US nearly doubled though its population to fill this empty space hardly moved a million or so souls. The Homestead Act of 1863, coupled with the rush for gold in California in 1849 and Colorado in 1859, triggered a new movement westward—even while the flames of civil war loomed close and fiercely in the homeland.

If you look back 100 years before my birth in 1952, you would have found an America nearing a crossroads. In the first half-century of her existence, she had fought in one war to ensure her independence (1812) and in another to expand her presence on the continent—fighting and buying her way into vast new tracts of territory and establishing hegemony “from sea to shining sea.” It was also an America that had just begun to absorb millions of immigrants from Europe, having already imported nearly 4 million Africans in chains, displaced or killed a million indigenous persons and almost unconsciously incorporated nearly two million Spanish-speaking locals who happened to be living on land usurped by the newly aggressive nation. In 1850, the official resident population of the U.S. was 23.2 million, of which 3.2 million were slaves. Of the official population, less than 2% of the population lived west of the Mississippi River; and most of those lived in the more fertile plantation areas of east Texas.[2] Indeed, the 1850 census shows California with a population of about 93,000—only slightly more than the state of Delaware. The great West was indeed a wide-open and scarcely populated territory about which little was known, but much expected.
 

[1]According to H.W. Axford’s very comprehensive biography of Peter McFarlane (Gilpin County Gold), Peter left Canada sometime in 1868 to strike out on his own in Gloucester, MA. It was not uncommon for young men too low on the genealogical pecking order to be in line for land inheritance to leave the family farm and pursue other professions. Once in the US, plans were hatched with his older brother, William, and cousins William and Peter Barclay, William Price and Eugene Lackey; to head out to Denver. 

[2] The 1850 census shows Texas with a population of 212,592; more than half of the total population of the western U.S. that was then estimated at about 392,000. It is unknown what percentage of the Texas population count included slaves, but a rough estimate would be about 80,000 to 90,000

In that fateful spring (of 1880) when 16-yeqr old Charlie Russell first arrived in Montana Territory, he came with the desire, and for the express purpose, of “being a cowboy.” Not a real cowboy, you understand … Rather, it was to be part of a romantic dream, to relive a kind of life that had passed into history a quarter of a century earlier.[1]

-  Ginger Renner, C.M. Russell’s West (1987)

The Oklahoma Land Rush

About mid-century in Europe, just as America began to seriously power her westward expansion toward the Pacific, German farmers were reeling from years of civil strife and oppression by ruling landowners. Between 18__ and 18__, over 5 million German, Swiss and Scandinavian farmers made their way to the US, closely followed by over __ million Irish peasant farmers fleeing the potato famine and the oppressive English land laws. While the Irish mainly kept to their enclaves in the cities of the eastern seaboard, the Germans, Swiss and Swedes made their way toward the interior—looking to farm on lands similar to the ones they left in the Old World. Up until 19__, when the immigration of Hispanics overtook them, the single largest immigrant group in the US were of German descent.

The Brookharts (undoubtedly “Burkhardt” or some variation in German) settled first in Pennsylvania but then rapidly moved west, probably in concert with the great opening of farmlands under the Homestead Act of 1862, to settle in Iowa. After a generation or two, younger sons, like young Harry (or Henry?) Brookhart, were forced to look even further west for their own lands as the older brothers took title to family lands. It was in that way that Harry, at age ___, found himself in the line-up a few miles northwest of present-day Oklahoma City on September 16, 1893 with 100,000 or so other land seekers waiting to rush westward to claim plots in the Cherokee Strip.

Primogeniture was not embedded in law or custom in the United States, as it was in Europe. Alexis de Tocqueville argued that because generations of first sons had not been able to secure long-standing claims to land and the concentration of power and wealth that pervaded Europe’s estate traditions, American families had not developed an attachment to place and patrimony that tended to root population.[2] Instead, the open westward frontier beckoned to each new generation an opportunity to do better than the generation before. That opportunity beckoned to Donald Brookhart. But there was also a strong “push” westward. The US was gripped in a severe economic depression—the Panic of 1893—and the government, to satisfy its white electorate and in part to continue to punish the “civilized” tribes (the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek and Seminoles who had sided with the Confederacy, was about to push the tribes off of lands just given to them after the Civil War. 

The 100,000 families lined up with wagons, horses, carriages or on foot were not all going to be successful. Only 42,000 parcels were available to the 100,000 assembled. Hence the cheating that went on—“sooners” who snuck out the nights before and claimed land ahead of the rush as opposed to the rule-abiding “boomers” who waited for the cannons to fire. 

It is not clear whether Donald succeeded in finding a plot in the Oklahoma Panhandle, or whether he just wandered over into southeastern Colorado and claimed a plot near Las Animas. In whatever way, he managed to get his stake on a small ranch in the mid-1890s and set up a new home for his family. 

[1] Cattle populations in the North and East were decimated in the push to feed the armies of the Civil War. So, after the war, cattlemen saw the “free grass” of the southern plains (and later the northern plains) beckon them to repopulate cattle herds and feed the growing reunited country. The open grasslands were decimated of the competing bison herds between 1880 and 1890 – partly to make way for cattle and partly as a weapon in the Indian Wars. Longhorn cattle, which were hardy and tough, were preferred, and did well on the long drive from Texas to railheads in Abilene or Dodge City. The Golden Age of the Chisholm Trail and the Texas cowboy was from 1865-1885. The introduction of fencing and property grabs in the mid-80s through the 90s spelled the end of the long cattle drives. Still, up until the disastrous blizzards of 1886-87, droughts and recession; the cattle business was lucrative. Foreign and US investors saw returns of 30% or more in the good years.

[2]Kathleen Neils Conzen, A Saga of Families, Ch. 9, p. 320 of The Oxford History of the American West (1994). See also Alan Bogue, An Agricultural Empire, Ch. 8, p. 284 about the reasons for westward migration and the Mormon chorus “Some may push and some may pull.”

Tandy Brown

Tandy Parks Brown was born 24 years after the end of the Civil War (December 4, 1889) in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in a small farming community called Grayson, about 37 miles northeast of Atlanta. Even with more than two decades passing, the wounds of Sherman’s march and the burning of Atlanta would have been fresh in the memories of his parents and grandparents. While Tandy was not an obviously biased man, his tendencies toward prejudice were on par with his generation. He was inclined to the “N-word” and to defaming “damn Yankees”, but was roundly disciplined by his wife, Grace, if he was wont to display his prejudices in front of the children.

Tandy was the second of what would eventually be seven children in the Brown household. His father, George Brown, was a teacher; and his mother, Anna Walker Brooks, was a homemaker. Not unusually for the time, Tandy left home at the age of 17 and went off on his own—in this case to Chicago to join the Army. He lied about his age, since in those days (1907); you needed parental permission to join the Army before age 21. He was mustered in at Columbus, Ohio and then sent to Fort Crook, Nebraska for drills. In July 1907, 5 months after enlisting, he was off with Company K, 30th Infantry, for the Philippines. 

The United States had engaged with an aged Spanish Empire over its possession of Cuba in 1898; ostensibly triggered by the bombing of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor (“Remember the Maine1’), but fomented by a typically American predilection to join rebellions for regime change – in this case the rebellion of Cuban nationalists to throw off the yoke of Spanish colonialism. It was a short-lived conflict (April 21 to August 13, 1898) and resulted in the ceding of Spanish possessions in the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico) and the Pacific (Philippines and Guam) to U.S. control through the Treaty of Paris, albeit with a payment to Spain from the U.S. of $20 million, The “splendid little war” as Ambassador John Hay wrote to his friend Theodore Roosevelt in 1898 [3]The war was significant primarily in the sense that it presaged the arrival of the United States of America on the world stage. Recovering from the recession of 1893 and enjoying unprecedented growth and prosperity in the last decade of the nineteenth century and into the roaring ‘20’s, America began its long gestation into the world’s policeman. 

The Filipinos, as well as the Cubans, were as unhappy with colonial domination by the Americans as they were with the Spanish. By 1899, Filipino revolutionaries began a decade-long insurgency against America’s rule. The war was unpopular in the U.S., but, as with eerily similar conflicts in more recent years (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan), the U.S. government continued its attempt to suppress the independence movement until the surrender of the Filipino leader Aguinaldo in 1913. Disgust with the war and its costs, Americans adopted a strongly isolationist bent in the early decades of the twentieth century, as evidenced by the very strong reluctance to enter the First World War.

Tandy’s unit boarded the Union Pacific Railroad on July 1, 1907 and traveled across the west to San Francisco, there boarding the USAT “Sherman” across the Pacific (it took over 30 days) to Manila. The Philippine Insurrection was considered “over” in 1902, so Tandy’s unit was considered an “Army of Occupation”. However, the fierce Moros were still fighting fiercely on many of the Philippine Islands, so the theater was still a dangerous place. However, Tandy avoided serious conflict during the two years of his deployment, but did contract malaria. He returned to the U.S. in 1909 and was released in 1910 and returned home to Georgia. But that was not the end of Tandy’s military career.

On March 7, 1911, Tandy rejoined the US Army and was assigned to Company F of the 4thField Artillery in San Antonio, Texas. He was discharged, honorably and with “excellent” and “retainable” ratings on March 6, 1914. Somewhere in that time period, Tandy was stationed at Fort Russell in Cheyenne, since he met and married Grace in 1912. I remember some story telling amongst my aunts and uncles about Tandy serving under General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing during his pursuit of Pancho Villa in Mexico. It might have made sense in view of the San Antonio posting, but Pershing didn’t go after Pancho Villa until 1916, a full two years after Tandy’s discharge in Cheyenne. A more likely association with the famous General would have been in the Philippines, where “Blackjack” served in leadership roles from 1899 to 1903; and again, a commander and governor from 1906 to 1913.

Mary Davis Parker

Grace’s mother, Mary Elizabeth “Mollie” Parker, was one of a family of seven children born to James Davis, a schoolteacher and sometimes physician, and Caledonia Hall, purportedly a second-generation Cherokee Indian. Mollie was reputedly a “spirited” young woman who craved adventure, including romantic adventure, and as luck would have it, Grace was born out of wedlock. Premature and unwanted, Grace was lucky to survive her first few months, especially since Mollie refused to nurse the little premier. A wet nurse was called in, and by pure grit and fighting spirit, Grace survived. Sometime after Grace’s birth, Mollie met and married William N. Parker, a surveyor for the Union Pacific Railroad. Will led survey parties to Oklahoma and beyond, and brought his small family with him in a covered wagon. Mollie was the cook, and little Grace relished the adventures of the still very wild west—including Indian raids when Will wandered on to Indian lands without permission. In late 1899 or early 1900, a second child, Edna, was born to Mollie and Will. Will continued to move his family around with him on surveying jobs, now with a 7-year-old and a new infant in tow. Mollie was less than thrilled with this lifestyle, and it eventually proved fatal for little Edna, who contracted pneumonia and died on a surveying trip west. Mollie, already tired of the lifestyle and hardships, divorced Will shortly after Edna’s death and moved back to Arkansas with Grace—but only long enough to put Grace with her grandmother Caledonia before picking up with her sister Lena and taking off to Colorado to seek out fortune and adventure. Grace was left to be sent from relative to relative, like an indentured servant, to care for newborns, do laundry, cleaning and cooking. It was a hard time for a practically motherless 7-year-old. Kindness was rare. Constant reminders of her ‘illegitimate” birth and her lowly station in life, as well as the burdens of reflected shame coming from Mollie’s own cantankerousness left Grace a very sad girl. The sadness was compounded by ill health resulting from severe allergies and constant ear infections. 

Meanwhile, Mollie and Lena were carrying on in Colorado and Texas like modern-day gangsters. In addition to working in legitimate, and perhaps not so legitimate, hotel jobs, the ladies had also created a highly successful and highly illegal whisky bootlegging operation—moving home distilled whiskey from Texas homesteaders to bars, saloons and brothels in Colorado and Wyoming. They had cleverly devised a scheme of bottling the booze in bottles, corking them and slapping on counterfeit revenue stamps and then running them up the roads to Denver and Colorado Springs. The law finally caught up with them around 1905, and they were run out of Texas and out of the business. Mollie was able to arrange to live on a friend’s farm in Ault, Colorado and find work in Fort Collins, and so sent for Grace to come out to Colorado when she was about 12 years old. It was the one lucky bread Grace had been waiting for. In Colorado, she was able to go to school and get some relief from the drudgery of serving labor. Despite the mother’s indiscretions and wildness, Grace was taken care of and loved. In her later teen years, probably around 1908, Mollie and Grace moved to Cheyenne (probably after the end of Mollie’s second marriage to a man named Carpenter) and Mollie took a job cooking at the Louie Manewal Restaurant and Hotel and at several more hotels in Cheyenne. Sometime after settling in Cheyenne, Mollie met and married her third husband (that we know of), Charles Eidam. To all of the Tandy and Grace children, and to the generations since, Mary Elizabeth “Mollie” Parker was hereafter always referred to as “Grandma Eidam” In 1925, Grandma and Grandpa Eidam bought the famous Metropolitan Hotel in Cheyenne. 

From its purchase in 1925 to its eventual demise in the 1940s, the Metropolitan carried a reputation of a comfortable, though seedy wayfarer’s hotel favored by railroad men, cowboys and salesmen. Its third floor was reportedly reserved for “sporting ladies” and their guests who desired a more discreet and upscale location for carnal meetings than the somewhat downtrodden Modern Rooms Hotel just across the street. Tunnels were reported dug below ground to allow politicians and lobbyists from the nearby state capitol to discreetly pay visits to the ladies at the Metropolitan. How much of all of this is true can be debated, but the tales from older Brown sisters who were delegated to help clean rooms at the hotel, and the admissions and history of Grandma Eidam herself, leave little doubt among descendants that Grandma Eidam was in fact the “Madame Eidam” of Cheyenne during those wild the first decades of the twentieth century, years when Cheyenne basked in the light of the Union Pacific Railway, one of the railroad “boom towns” of the early twentieth century, and often referred to a “hell on wheels” by passengers flowing westward from the East to California and the Pacific Coast. Grace would tell her daughters later that she respected the hard work and care of her mother, but she was privately mortified by her public behavior. Grace’s children, on the other hand, were privately overjoyed with Grandma Eidam’s hutzpah and it was a source of hilarious laughter whenever the siblings gathered to tell old stories.

[3]Bethell, John; “A Splendid Little War”: Harvard and the Commencement of a New World Order; Harvard Magazine; Dec. 5, 2008.

In December of 1948, Mao Zedong, born in the same year as Charles’ father, Tandy, was closing in on the port city of Qingdao, China, the last stronghold of the Chinese Nationalists who had been fighting a losing resistance against the uprising of the Chinese Communist Party ever since the end of World War II. The United States was tacitly supporting the Kuomintang as part of its overall policy of resistance to communist gains around the world, and had garrisoned the 1st Marine Division in China to give limited support to the ROC as it tried to resist Mao’s inevitable march. However, by mid-December it was obvious that Nationalists had neither the resolve nor the resources to continue to resist. As Chiang Kai-Shek raided the antiquities of Beijing and loaded them on planes to Taiwan, the 1st Marine Division received orders on December 16, 1948 to pack what they could and destroy what they could not and be ready to evacuate on December 20, 1948. Charles and his comrades stacked what could be taken with them on C-46 transports, and then flew—Marines on one side, and Chinese war brides and children on the other—out of Qingdao and back to the U.S. The Marines were the last to be evacuated as Mao moved though Tientsin and through Qingdao and southward to control all of Mainland China by the end of 1949.

At the same time, nearly 6,400 miles away in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a winter storm was brewing the likes of which had not been seen since 1887. The intermountain west had been lulled into another period of complacency since the “Great Die Up” of 1887. Yes, winters could be hard and cold in Wyoming, and summers hot and dry, but nothing had happened in over 50 years to make anyone think that a disaster of the scale of 1887 could happen again on those open windy plains. Maybe Mother Nature had been calmed. Maybe “grace” was with Wyoming this century and nothing of the sort was ever to happen again.

The cattle industry in the West was thriving since the end of the Civil War. Beef production and war needs had decimated Eastern herds, and yet the country was hungry for more beef as it recovered from the war. At the same time, new lands were opened up to grazing as the frontier moved forward past the Mississippi and onward past the 100th meridian. Indians were pushed out, their bison food source was slaughtered, and longhorn cattle herds replaced them on the plains of Texas and Oklahoma. “Free grass” on the open range made fattening beef cattle easy. Markets in Omaha and Chicago became accessible by the ever-growing rail system of the West, and money poured into the cattle business. Soon, it became apparent that the same “free grass” could be found in Nebraska, Wyoming, North and South Dakota and Montana, and the entrepreneurs and adventures came from every part the U.S. and Europe to make their fortunes and legends in the Wild West. Among them came the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and ____, buying up ranches and cattle and looking forward to the fruits of both business and moral salvation in the free ranges of the West. Nearly 6 million head of cattle were driven to market from the north central plains between 1866 and 1885. [1]Most never contemplated the risks of weather, which has always been a part of agriculture, but we joyously ignored in the spate of years of mild summers and winters on the Great Plains. And then disaster struck.

The summer of 1886 had been scorching hot, so livestock were already undernourished when snow started falling early that year. Then, on January 9, 1887, a blizzard formed the likes of which had not been seen for decades. Over 16 inches of snow fell in a single day over much of the Wyoming and Dakota prairies, winds blew fiercely and temperatures dropped to 50 degrees below zero. Nine of every ten head of cattle perished, along with scores of what remained of wildlife on the plains. The economic distress that followed effectively destroyed the cattle business, as it had been known on the northern plains and all but ended the days of large herds, roving cowboys and the open range.[2]

After 48 hours of flying—refueling in Okinawa, Kivajelain and Johnson Island, the C-46 transport carrying Charles and his fellow Marines landed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 23, 1948. From there, Charles boarded a ___ Flying Boat for the 2,400-mile flight to San Francisco’s Alameda Air Station, arriving on December 26, 1948. [3] Charles checked in at the Treasure Island Base, got his orders, found a few days to visit with his brother and fellow Marine, Dick Brown, who had signed up the year before, and finally left the Bay Area on December 29, 1948 for Camp Pendleton (just outside of San Diego, California) for final orders at Marine Headquarters. Charles received a well-deserved 30-day leave from Pendleton, and made plans to fly from Los Angeles to Denver On January 3, 1949. He would have tried to fly home sooner, but flights were difficult and restricted. He passed the time in Santa Ana with second cousins there, and saw, for the very first time in his life, live broadcasts on television. [4] Charles watched the Rose Bowl game on the 13’ screen on New Year’s Day.

Charles boarded a United Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Denver at 1 pm on January 3, 1949. From shortly after takeoff, things got progressively worse. Severe turbulence over the San Bernardino Mountains nearly ended the life of an 80-year old passenger. Continued bad weather forced the pilot to do an emergency landing in Grand Junction, Colorado—about 240 miles short of his goal. The Denver Airport was now closed as the Blizzard of ’49 began its tortuous havoc.

The first day of the Blizzard of ’49 was January 2nd, and the weather raged for 3 days after in a truly intense fashion, and then for two months more—ravaging northern Colorado and Wyoming with record low temperatures, high winds and drifts of snow of 20 feet or more. Federal and state agencies were mobilized to rescue travelers stranded and to try to help livestock survive. The final death toll was 76 people and over 1 million livestock. The number of wild game and birds killed is unknown but probably enormous.

Charles was loaded on to a train from Grand Junction bound for Denver at 8 pm on Monday, and he arrived in Denver on Tuesday at 2 am. He immediately began trying to book a train to take him to Cheyenne, but the rail lines were blocked with snow. He spent one night on the depot benches at Union Station, and then another 5 nights at the nearby Oxford Hotel. Finally, on the next Monday, January 10th, the railroad announced that a train would attempt to make the journey to Cheyenne that evening at 8 pm. The snow was still deep and foreboding, but the railway had outfitted a train with three engines, a snowplow, and a few passenger cars to attempt the 100-mile journey north to Cheyenne. It took 8 hours of slow, methodical travel—ramming snow banks, backing and ramming them again—to make the journey to Cheyenne. Charles disembarked at 4 am on January 11th. No cabs, no cars, streets still blocked with snow. Nothing was moving. So, he shouldered his duffle and stuck out walking the 2 miles to 1717 Alexander Avenue through the snow-bound streets of Cheyenne. Around 5 am, he knocked on the door of his family home—gently—since he remembered his mother’s 44 magnum under her mattress. Grace appeared at the door, long hair flowing down her shoulders, eyes welling with tears. They embraced in the most solid of embraces—unexpected, emotional, grateful and remarkable. Home at last. In the arms of Grace.

But for Grace, Charles would not have joined the Marines. But for Grace, he would not have seen the furthest reaches of America—let alone the mysteries and fascinations of the Far East. But for Grace, he might have led an ordinary an uneventful life in rural Wyoming, never imagining nor even desiring a knowledge of the wider world—never meeting his first love in college—never building a life and career in Colorado Springs—never fathering me, my siblings, grandchildren and great grandchildren. But for Grace, there go I.

His mother makes him breakfast. They opened presents underneath the still-decorated tree. They spent hours reconnecting, remembering, reliving family traditions born of years of trial and triumph. It was a glorious homecoming after a near-death deployment. After several weeks, Charles returned to California to serve out the last 3 months of his service in the Marine Corps. He was out in the spring, and soon on his way to Colorado A&M in the fall of 1949—a new and fresh beginning all possible because of … Grace.

Grace Parker

Grace Cleo Parker was born on December 21, 1893 in the small town of Marble, Arkansas, in the heart of the Ozarks, along the Kings River. Life was poor and hard in rural Arkansas, and Grace’s early life was no exception

According to stories, Tandy met my grandmother, Grace Cleo Parker, on a streetcar in Cheyenne in early 1912. They were married on November 12, 1912.

[1] As reported by Lucas Adams in Modern Farmer, April 2, 2014, “An Illustrated Account of the Great Die-Up of the 1880s.”

[2]Laura Clark, “The 1887 Blizzard That Changed the American Frontier Forever”, Smithsonian.com, January 9, 2015.

[3]According to Charles’s recollections, the flight from Pearl Harbor on Christmas Day, December 25, 1948 to Oakland must have taken at least ___ hours in a S23 “C” Class Empire Flying Boat or a Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper. Today, in a commercial airliner, the flight would take slightly less than 5 hours.

[4]Television systems of any kind weren’t available in the U.S. until 1939, and reliable 624-line blank and white systems

line black and white TVs were not widely available from RCA until 1944. Only one-half of one percent of American households had TV sets in 1946, but more than half of all households had a set by 1954. 

I come from a large family, but I was not raised with a fortune.

Something more was left with me, and that was family values.

- Dikembe Mutombo (1966- )

Grace and Tandy took up residence at Fort D.A. Russell after their marriage in base non-commissioned officers’ housing until his discharge in March 1914. Tandy by that time was the rank of Sergeant, Battery F, 4th Artillery, US Army. The non-commissioned quarters were a tiny brick house consisting of a kitchen, one bedroom, living room and a relatively spacious porch. A small start, but obviously large enough to begin the business of baby-making.

During those years, Vivian (1913), Anna (1914) and Tandy, Jr. (1916) were born. After the third birth, the Army decided that Tandy’s family was growing too fast, and he was asked to retire. Whether this was before or after the very short life of young Tandy, Jr. (born on December 12, 1916 but died on December 24 the same year) is not clear. The family of four moved to a house at 509 West 23rd Street in Cheyenne, and Tandy took a job as a “helper” at Kelley Mercantile in downtown Cheyenne. The next year, Roy was born, and in the following year, June.

By all accounts, it was a happy, but poor family of six during those war years. Vivian, especially, was a happy child—full of energy and laughter, indicative of a life full of music later in life.

Tandy spent a short time at Kelly Mercantile, and soon found a good-paying job at the Union Pacific Railway in 1918, where he stayed for another for 43 years, retiring in December 1959, at age 70 as a conductor.

The family moved to larger quarters at 805 House Street in south Cheyenne around the same time. Grace, always generous but practical, put a sign on the front gate announcing that anyone coming in on the railroad could get a meal at the Brown home, as long as they did some work for it. As a result, Grace always had lots of wood chopped, split and stacked in the backyard. The Brown kitchen was always open to those in need and who could do an honest few hour of work to earn it.

Grace set up a loving household there on House Street in those post-War years. She was known for her kindness to strangers, and to neighbors, like 80-year old Anna Ulrich, a German immigrant, who was often shunned and vilified by neighbors in the War years. Grace defended Mrs. Ulrich and was always kind and generous to her. This attitude was not lost upon her children. Generosity to strangers, and kindness to all who had come to America to share in and facilitate her dreams were welcomed.

While the Browns lived at House Street, three more children were born—Betty (1920), Leah (1922) and Frank (1923). The expanded family of seven children and Grace were all sent off to Arkansas to spend time with Grandpa and Grandma Davis while Tandy worked on adding an addition to the House Street home to better accommodate his exponentially growing family.

The trip to Arkansas was a predictable disaster. The kids all came down with whooping cough and were quarantined for three days in Joplin, Missouri. Then Grace came down with Typhoid Fever just after they arrived in Arkansas and was hospitalized in Eureka, AK, for two weeks. Vivian took up the duties of little baby Frank’s mother—bottle-feeding instead of breast—which he abhorred. On the trip back, young Anna also came down with Typhoid and was quarantined when they arrived back home in Cheyenne. When all were back at home, Tandy ended up being more the “Dad in Charge” than he had bargained for. One consequence were the long curls and braids that Vivian, Anna, Betty and Leah had enjoyed with the constant care of Grace. Tandy couldn’t keep up with the care—so out came the shears. The girls were relieved.

Around ___, the family moved to 223 East 7th Avenue in the Pershing Heights area in north Cheyenne, near the new airport. The house wasn’t big enough for a family of ten (Leonard had made the tenth in 1924), so Tandy converted the garage into a bedroom that slept three. Times were tough, and the Union Pacific was a tough employer. Tandy was blamed for a car rollover and laid off for a month. Grace pitched in by buying flour and sugar in bulk at Gage’s Grocery and baking donuts for sale. Anna and Vivian were sent out with baskets of “baker’s dozen” to sell—and they almost always sold out. Grace also went to work baking pies. Together, they made enough to get by during Tandy’s layoff. The donut trade continued, though, even after Tandy was back at work. Anna and Vivian went out every Saturday with their baskets, learned to make change, avoid hoodlums, robbers and cheats, and bring back enough money to keep things comfortable in the Brown household—until the Crash.

The devastation of the 1929 Market Crash wasn’t really evident in most of the country until the early 1930s. Sure, people in New York with plenty of money were hurting, but the real impact on the rest of the United States wouldn’t be felt for a couple of years. So, in 1930, Tandy and Grace decided to move their large family to a bigger home at 1717 Alexander Street in Cheyenne, right across from ____ Park—a perfect location for a growing, upwardly mobile, American family. Tandy by then was promoted to a Brakeman on the Union Pacific. Things looked promising—and then, they didn’t.

Roaring Twenties

It was Wednesday, the 27th of July, 1927 in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Little Charles Brown was coming into the world. The 11th child born to Grace Parker Brown—the tenth of the surviving children at the time, since young Tandy Parks Brown, Jr., who was born on December 12, 1916 had died only 12 days after his birth. Charles’ oldest sibling, Vivian, was 13 years old at the time, and his nearest sibling, Stuart George Brown, was just a little over 1 ½ years old. Poor little Stuart would die several years later, just before Charles’ 7th birthday, of a brain tumor. [1]His younger sister Nancy was born just 13 months after Charles—to be followed by 5 more siblings over the next 18 years. Charles’ mother, Grace Cleo Parker, had her first child at age 19 and continued thereafter until age 47—bearing 17 children over 28 years (an average of one every 19 months)—seeing four of her children die before she passed away at age 66 in 1959—but adopting three more granddaughters (after Betty’s death in 1947) to keep the house full until her passing in 1959. While the age at first birth might not seem too outlandish by current standards, the fact that she continued to bear children until age 47 would seem almost superhuman today.

Charles actually came into the world as Calvin Charles Brown. For unknown reasons, his legal name became Charles Calvin Brown at some time after July 27, 1927. Whose choice it was to reverse the forenames remains a mystery. The only famous “Calvin” of note at the time was, of course, John Calvin Coolidge, Republican of Vermont, who was President from 1923 to 1929. It may have been that Grace and Tandy wanted to reflect their confidence in “Quiet Cal” in naming Charles, following a burst of popularity for the name in the mid-to-late 1920s in honor of the president. or perhaps it was a throwback to the most famous John Calvin, hero of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. [2]Oddly enough, both names became famous in cartoon annals later in the 20thcentury—Calvin as the famous “Calvin & Hobbs” and Charles Brown, or Charlie Brown, even more famous in Charles Shultz’s long-running “Peanuts” 

The month of July 1927 portended much for young Calvin. Five thousand miles away, a man named Mao Tse-Tung (Mao Zedong) continued to consolidate his leadership of the Chinese Communist Party after the Autumn Harvest Uprising. The Nationalist Chinese Kuomintang Party outlawed the Chinese Communist Party that month, and ousted all its members from government. A few days after Calvin’s birth, Zhao Enlai commanded the nascent troops of the Red Army in the Nanchang Rebellion, marking the real beginning of the long civil war for the control of China. Calvin would be drawn into the final stages of the conflict some twenty years later as a young Marine defending the last outposts of Chinese Nationalists, and he would witness the flight of the last of the Kuomintang to Taiwan in 1949. 

The Fourth U.S. Marine Regiment, known famously as the “China Marines” was sent by Coolidge to establish a garrison at Shanghai in April 1927. The same regiment had been stationed and fought in the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. The China Marines were the only Marine regiment to serve continuously between the two wars, leaving Shanghai in 1941 as the Japanese advanced to occupy China. The Marines were sent to Shanghai, along with British (and even Japanese) forces to protect Western interests in the face of general strife and popular uprisings springing from the growing Nationalist Chinese engagement with warlords from the north and a growing Communist movement from the interior. Marines were on the front line of the US presence in this 3-way civil war between Nationalists, Communists and warlords—in 1928 numbering 5,000 troops—a fourth of the entire Corps. Chiang Kai-Shek became president of China in 1928; three years later Japan invaded and annexed Manchuria. The Japanese, now an Axis ally, invaded Peking in 1937 and continued as the war intensified south to Nanking, Hankow, Canton and finally, Shanghai in 1940. The Marines were finally ordered out of Shanghai and Tientsin and over to the Philippines in November 1941. Not long after, of course, came the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and incidentally, Clark Air Base in the Philippines the same week, and McArthur’s final surrender and retreat from Bataan in April 1942.[3]

At home, Calvin Coolidge ruled with calm sternness as the economy continued to roar ahead, propelling America into it permanent twentieth century status as the world’s leading power.[4] The “Roaring Twenties” on Wall Street were a strange counterpoint to the nearly Victorian demeanor and atmosphere in the Coolidge White House. Coolidge managed to exit the stage in 1928, just before the vultures came home to roost, as the speculation and excesses of the 1920s came to a screeching halt in the Crash of 1929 and the subsequent long and dreary years of the Great Depression. Hoover took the blame. Coolidge was remembered nostalgically.

The summer of 1927 also saw dramatic new developments in air travel—hard to imagine in today’s world of commonplace transcontinental travel. On July 2, a reporter for the Chicago Herald and Examiner became the first airline passenger by hooking a ride on a Boeing Air Transport from Chicago to San Francisco—the first official fight of the nascent United Airlines. Later the same month, Northwest Airlines began passenger service from Minneapolis to Chicago (a 12-hour, 4-stop flight!), Lockheed Corporation manufactured its first aircraft, Pan American Airways was awarded its first flight route from Key West to Havana, TWA was born with Charles Lindbergh’s 48-hour flight from New York to Los Angeles, and the US Air Mail Service, a government-run program, made its last flight, ceding the air delivery of mail to the growing private airline industry. Transcontinental flights were still risky, however. Commander Richard Byrd and three crew members crashed just short of the coast of France while trying to duplicate Lindbergh’s famous solo flight. 

Socially and politically the world was still working through old demons and seeing signs of new ones. Satchel Paige made his debut with the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro League. It would be 21 more years before major league baseball was integrated and Satchmo could join the Cleveland Indians. The Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow were still thriving in the South and in many areas of the old West, including Cheyenne. Josef Goebbels published the first issue of the Nazi polemic newspaper, Der Angriff, and Germany and Japan signed a trade treaty, signaling alliances to come. Prime Minister Tanaka delivered a private memorandum to Emperor Hirohito purportedly outlining a plan for world domination. Turkey began forcibly expelling ethnic minorities, Greece outlawed the Macedonian language, and the Russian Orthodox clergy submitted their authority to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Despite the apparent good fortunes of a decade of economic growth and prosperity in the US, the world was about to begin a very wild ride shortly after young Charles Calvin’s birth.

The fast-growing Brown Family made a series of moves in and around Cheyenne until finally settling at 1717 Alexander Street. My father used to tell stories of the various antics associated with milking the family cow on what sounded very much like a farm that was in reality a house and a large lot at 223 East Seventh Avenue in Pershing Heights, an area on the north of Cheyenne and near the old airport. When Tandy and Grace Brown were first married, they occupied a tiny brick house on the Fort D.A. Russell Army Base (now known as Warren Air Force Base). The address was __ Spruce Street. I was a one-bedroom enlisted man’s quarters of about ___ square feet. Sergeant Brown and Grace had the first of 3 children there. With birth number three, the Army decided that Tandy’s family was just too big to be convenient in the service, so he was honorably discharged and the Browns began private life at a small home at 509 West 23rd Street, in an area near the Bergman’s farm and Crow Creek. A few years after the birth of their fifth child, the young family moved to 805 House Street in Cheyenne where Tandy converted a garage into a bedroom for three of the kids. A year or two later, the growing family (now numbering eight) moved to 223 East 7th Avenue in Cheyenne in an area called “Pershing Heights” near the new airport. As child number 11 arrived, Tandy’s improving prospects and tenure are a brakeman allowed them to move to somewhat larger quarters at 1717 Alexander Avenue, a directly across the street from what was known as Minnehaha Park (now Holiday Park) and a couple of miles from the downtown Union Pacific Station. The park was a godsend for raising a young family of nearly 15. It had a big lake that would freeze over in winter for skating and that yielded crawdads aplenty during the summer. A family of 20 lived on the opposite side of the park, which gave plenty of opportunities for war games and other shenanigans that would keep the Brown kids outside and occupied (when not doing chores or going to school) for hours on end. 

I remember the old house on Alexander. It is no longer there, but it seemed a grand and glorious old mansion, although those were younger eyes and days when the average American home was about 1,000 square feet – the average is more than double that now.  

As the Great Depression deepened its impact on the West, and as railroad revenues began to dry up in the 1930s, Tandy got behind on the mortgage and the family had to leave Alexander Avenue for a time

Cheyenne Frontier Days

The annual festival around which all of Cheyenne gathered each summer was the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo, nicknamed by boosters “The Daddy of ‘em All.” The rodeo was founded in 1897, in the waning days of the real “old West”, by a UPRR railroad passenger agent named Fred Angier. Anxious to promote business and travel to Cheyenne, he suggested to the editor of the Cheyenne Daily Sun-Leader that Cheyenne put on a festival mid-summer, along the lines of the Greeley, Colorado “Potato Day” just south. The first “Frontier Day” was held near the Tivoli Saloon in downtown Cheyenne, and included events like pony races, bronco busting and steer roping. The next year, Frontier Day became two days and included a parade. Today, the Cheyenne Frontier Days is a week-long extravaganza, touted to be the largest and one of the longest-running outdoor rodeos in the US.[5]

[1]President Calvin Coolidge was also subject to early childhood death experience when his mother, Victoria Moor, died of tuberculosis after a long illness. Calvin was 13. Four years later, his sister, Abbie, died at age 14. In his biography of Coolidge, David Greenberg says that early childhood death experiences introduce us (too) early to the capriciousness of life; reinforcing a deliberate, conservative and restrained persona and an “inclination to diffidence or … fear of the unplanned” – as evidenced in Coolidge’s own personality, and perhaps also in Charles Brown. {p.17, Greenberg, David; Calvin Coolidge; The American Presidents Series, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ed.; Henry Holt & Co.; New York; 2006}

[2]Coolidge reflected popular conceptions of both New England Puritan philosophy and Western pioneer attitudes—“esteem for hard work and thrift … and the refusal to show disdain toward others ‘except toward those who assumed superior airs.’” [p. 15, Ibid.}

[3]“The Old China Marines: Shanghai 1927-1941”, China Marine Scuttlebutt, Vol 26 No 2, June 2017, China Marine Association, 183 S Waterlily Road, Coinjock, NC 27923, p1-7.

[4]The America of the 19th century was almost totally focused on the expansion westward and southward, driven in part by a mission to erect an impenetrable and defensible border of wilderness or ocean and to isolate America from the strife of Europe and Asia. The Spanish-American War at the turn of the century was in part to satisfy frontier lust and lacked solid strategic purpose, while World War I drew America, reluctantly, into a role of world leadership that was not intended by most of the population. Coolidge was elected as a response to the international overreach of the Wilson administration, the fear of spreading socialism (and immigration) from the Old World, and the unruly and diverse aims of the Democratic Party post war. The Republicans harkened back to nineteenth century sentimental values of civic duty, robust individualism and fear of overreaching government and used that nostalgic notion to win back the White House in 1920 under Warren G. Harding. Coolidge became one of the eight “accidental presidents” in August 1923 when Harding suffered a massive heart attack.

[5]From cfdrodeo.com, the official website of Cheyenne Frontier Days

They came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America—men and women whose everyday lives of duty, honor, achievement, and courage gave us the world we have today.

- Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (1998)

The War Years

Even before America’s formal declaration of war on December 8, 1941, the Brown brothers could feel the pull of military duty that had always been a family tradition. The oldest, Roy, was activated with the Wyoming National Guard in 1940 and sent to Fort Lewis, Washington. Roy (along with all of his brothers, and sisters, too) had labored long and hard under Grace’s stern eye with a musical instrument, and had therefore been mustered into the 115thCavalry Band of the Wyoming National Guard. He served most of the war in a Special Services Unit at Fort Lewis, where the job was to patrol the shoreline and entertain the troops assembling to leave for the war in the Pacific. 

Roy was destined for service as a member of the Wyoming National Guard junior corps in high school, but it would not be long before military service would become compulsory in America as the world became engulfed in a war even wider than the Great War of 1914-1918, the so-called “War to End All Wars.” On September 16, 1940, Congress enacted the first peacetime draft in its history with the passage of the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940. It required all men between the ages of 21 and 45 to register to be drafted effective in October. Men called up would be required to serve 12 months. By December 1941, the intensity and scope of the war effort loomed more heavily on the nation. Congress required all men between the ages of 18 and 64 to register, and men between the ages of 20 and 44 would be called up. The required time in service was increased to 30 months. By November 1942, youths aged 18 and 19 years old were also being called up, and the required time in service was increased to “the length of the war plus 6 months.”

From October 1940 to March 1947, over 10 million men were inducted into the Armed Services. Over 16 million American men served in the armed forces a sometime during World War II. It was an astounding 11% of the total population, and an even more astounding 20% of the male population of the United States—1 in every 5 living men in America were in the military. Contrast that to the number of military personnel today—1.3 million, or less than one-half of one percent of the total population. It was a massive mobilization. No wonder the Brown brothers needed to be a part of it.

Given their background and upbringing, it was never a question that each of the boys would serve—whether called up or not. This is borne out by the fact that each of the boys volunteered for service well before they were drafted. It was just something to be done. Done by one brother—done by all brothers.

The west was still in many ways a remote wilderness to most of America. Only slightly more than a quarter million people lived in Wyoming in 1940; only a bit over a million in Colorado. Together, they represented about 1% of the population of the country—living on 5.5% of the land mass of the continental 48. Cheyenne was still small by national standards, but it was no longer a small frontier town—about 32,000 souls in 1940—it was now a small city on the plains. Cheyenne was about three times the size of the town that Tandy and Grace had moved to shortly after the turn of the century. The big brother to the south, however—Denver—was ten times the size of Cheyenne and destined to keep growing far beyond its former competitor. 

For Wyoming boys, joining the military was about to take them far, far away from anything and everything they had grown up with. It would be a shock to the system, but one that would forever change their lives.

Frank Brown was the next to join. Graduating from Cheyenne High School in 1942, he tried to join the Navy to attend the School of Music but was turned down and instead offered enlistment as a sailor. That didn’t sound too appealing, so he and a high school buddy talked to the Marine Corps recruiter about joining the “Horse Marines”, a unit that was purportedly active in Central America during the 1930s, but which had been disbanded years before. The time for dilly-dallying was over. By mid-1942 all 18 and 19-year olds were required to register for the draft, and the writing was on the wall. Frank went down to the Marine recruitment center and got his enlistment papers. He took them home to Grace, and she signed without hesitation. [1] Frank went to Denver on July 11, 1942 for his physical and shortly thereafter found himself on a train to San Diego. Entering the gates to the San Diego Marine Corps Base to hoots of “you’ll be sorry” from the current residents,   Frank entered boot camp with the laudatory rank of “Acting Corporal.”

Frank made it through boot camp and was assigned to Radio School, the same path that his younger brother, Charles, would take in the Marine Corps just 5 years later.  He was assigned to Company D, 3rd Tank Battalion of the Third Marine Division.  He trained for overseas duty at Camp Pendleton.  Just before they were to be loaded on the ship transports into the Pacific, he was granted a final leave and went to Los Angeles where Grace came out to see him. [2] Grace and Frank palled around for a few days seeing the sights in LA, and then he bid a tearful good-bye and returned to San Diego for the long voyage west.  Frank was assigned to an unaccompanied Liberty Ship that was transporting tanks to New Zealand. The trip was not only dangerous without naval escort, but tumultuous as they went south of the equator into winter’s rough seas.  The ship was over washed by waves taller than her bow, and then rode the waves down again with her propeller completely exposed.  They kept reinforcing the tie-downs for the tanks to keep them from running all over the ship’s hold, and watched breathlessly as waves crashed over the stores of 55-gallon drums full of high-octane fuel. Not all of these Liberty Ships made the voyage intact.  But here was Frank, whose only experience in open water consisted of midnight paddles on Lake Minnehaha, in the middle of thousands of miles of swirling, angry ocean on a 6,500-mile journey to New Zealand.

He would have a few weeks in New Zealand to train and regroup for the 3.400-mile sea voyage to Guadalcanal—the furthest edge of the Pacific theater still controlled by the Allies.  Guadalcanal was a tropical mess—hot, humid and mosquito-infested. It was subject to nightly bombing sorties by Japanese bombers from bases in Bougainville and Rabaul.  Soon they would be off to meet those forces head on at Bougainville.

It was a bit less than 700 miles in the Solomon Sea to Bougainville, part of the same chain of islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea that included Guadalcanal. The northern end of the island chain was controlled by the Japanese, the southern tip was precariously held by the Americans, with orders to counter attack and move north. On November 19, 1943, Frankj and his tanks moved ashore in Bougainville on landing craft and engaged the enemy in the Battle of Piva Forks. Frank took a shrapnel blast to his right side while in one of those tanks and was evacuated to a field hospital in Choisel. 

True to his training, Frank was a radioman aboard those tanks. After recovering from his wounds, he couldn’t act radioman in the new medium-sized tanks because it required the radioman to also load shells in the 75mm cannon. His injuries wouldn’t allow the lifting. But he still served—driving, reconnaissance, training—all the while preparing for one more invasion, one more dangerous attempt to roll the Japanese back toward Tokyo. 

[1] It seems pretty consistent behavior for Grace, despite her obvious love for her sons, I think she knew that if they could survive the dangers of war, they would be far better off in life than if they stayed in Cheyenne and fell prey to the vicissitudes of small town hooliganism and shortened expectations. Besides, she wasn’t going to be the one to bail them out of jail late at night or welcome them home from bars in the early morning hours. 

[2] It is interesting that Grace could afford such a trip given what I assume were very limited family finances. I suspect that the equivalent of today’s airline employee and family travel privileges that the Union Pacific gave employees and their immediate family members free travel on the rails on a space-available basis.

The US Marine Corps

Charles was a senior at Cheyenne High School in the spring of 1945. The second World War was in the process of winding down, but definitely not yet ended. It would not be until late summer and early fall of 1945 that the Japanese finally surrendered. There was still time and need for young men to join the fight in 1945, and Charles was going to be one of them. 

Grace surmised that, at age 17 and soon to be 18 in July, that Charles had two choices: be drafted or enlist. The other choice, which was not available, was to continue in high school and beyond and continue to get into trouble. Since every brother had enlisted in the Marine Corps before, the choice—Grace’s, not Charles’s—was to enlist in the Marines and hope for the best. Since Grace by then had cultivated an outstanding Rappaport with the Marine recruiting station in Denver, she could even demand house calls from the recruiter, and so she did. On April __, 1945, the Marine recruiter paid a visit to Alexander Avenue and signed Charles up for the Corps, including the required parental consent and signature from his mother, willingly offered. “This will straighten you out, Charles” she said. And so, it did.

Signed up in April and shipped out a couple of weeks later to Parris Island, South Carolina, Charles never had the opportunity to attend his high school graduation. He was sent his diploma by mail afterwards. By early May 1945, he was deep in the muggy trenches of the South Carolina shore, struggling through Marine basic training in a wholly new and unknown part of America. Charles had never been more than about 70 miles from Cheyenne in his entire life. Now he was more than 1,700 miles away to the east. His biggest problem, he said, was the excessive amount of oxygen in the sea-level atmosphere, which made him extra sleepy and lethargic. He was always getting disciplined for falling asleep.[1] 

Fortunately for Charles, he had participated in ROTC programs at Cheyenne High School, and so he knew a bit about military discipline and procedure before he arrived a Parris Island. As a result, and despite his sleepiness, he was soon appointed a platoon sergeant. This was an early demonstration of his penchant for leadership—perhaps much to the surprise of his mother, who was doubtful—and a trait he would exhibit time and time again in his later life. “Here’s the deal, boys, and we better do what we’ve been told, or they will put us through the traces.” Graduation from Parris Island boot camp was in July 1945. Of the 79 recruits in Platoon 223, 62 made it all the way through.

Of course it was tough, but he looks back on it with nothing but gratitude. “I learned more about myself than I had ever known before”, he said. His mother, to whom he gives all the credit, “taught me a good lesson.” He often said that they were the best four years of his life.

At the end of basic training, Charles was given a 10-day leave. The commanding officer offered this bit of advice to all of the newly minted Marines—Go home. Spend the time with your family. Because only half of you are coming back.

Charles paid heed to his commander’s advice and went home to Cheyenne for leave. He visited with his mother, dad and younger siblings in Cheyenne, and ventured north to Casper to see his older sister, June. By mis-July, and just before his 18th birthday, he was back on the east coast at Camp Lejeune, near Jacksonville, North Carolina—one of two primary Marine training bases for amphibious assault and infantry training in the US. It was clear why they were there—they were being prepared for the invasion of the Japanese homeland—an assault that would undoubtedly lead to massive US and Japanese casualties, but that was seen as the only way to end the conflict in the Pacific. 

Charles and his compatriots were well aware of the gruesome news from the Pacific theater. Five thousand marines killed in the first 3 days of fighting on Iwo Jima. ___ more lost on Okinawa. In fact, Charles and his cohorts were being trained specifically to replace troops lost in the battle for Okinawa and to prepare for the amphibious assault on Japan. He was loaded on a train bound for San Diego in order to board ships for Japan when the revision of orders came. The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, 1945. The Japanese surrendered six days later, on August 15, 1945. It was sometime during that period between his 18th birthday on July 27 and the surrender of August 15 that he was ordered back to Camp LeJeune and away from almost certain death on the shores of Honshu.

Once back in LeJeune, Charles was assigned to communications training—basically radio technology and Morse code—and later transferred to Fort Lewis, south of Seattle, Washington. [2]He was 4 months at Fort Lewis, training soldiers of the 2nd Army Division in amphibious invasion techniques and radio communications.

After completing his assignments at Fort Lewis, Charles was ordered to Camp Pendleton near San Diego, and then to Treasure Island, California in the San Francisco Bay, to await further orders. Charles took advantage of the brief stay in San Francisco to visit a cousin living there and to explore a bit of the Bay Area.

Around ____., 1945, Charles was ordered on to an airplane to Hawaii, there to meet a US Navy oil tanker bound for various refueling stations in the Pacific all the way to China. The Navy had been sending sailors home after the war, so to save on personnel and to get Marines to their postings in China, Marines became seamen and crew on their own transports. For seven weeks out of Pearl Harbor, Charles and 82 other Marines did all of the swabbing, scraping, painting, polishing and jibbing that Navy sailors would ordinarily be charged with. They did it under the scurrilous eyes of Navy non-commissioned officers who had a particular disdain for Marines; particularly so when, almost to a man, seasickness set in as they hit rough seas. For most of these middle-of-the-nation boys, it was their very first experience at sea. It was certainly so for Charles, for whom a big body of water was the trickle of the North Platte River through Cheyenne. Charles remembers most of the others were worse off than he for most of the time—save one episode in the Yellow Sea going from Korea to north China. A typhoon came up and tossed the Navy fuel tender like a bobble in the bath. In the middle of the first night of the storm, the Navy captain ordered Charles on deck—handed him a gun—and told him to be on the lookout for mines. “When you see one, blast away. If you don’t, we might be goners.” Even if Charles could have seen a mine in those dark and choppy waters at night, it is unlikely he could have gotten a decent shot off as the deck looped and swayed. Fortunately, they missed the mines.

The tanker arrived in China, at Tsingtao harbor, in November 1946. The platoon’s orders were to provide protection to the Navy personnel who were training sailors in the Chinese Nationalist Navy based in Tsingtao. When that training ____ was completed, Charles and his buddies were transferred further inland, to Tientsin. There he joined the communication unit of the 1st Marine Division—the “China Marines”—as a radio operator receiving and transmitting orders in code from Washington DC regarding, primarily, the process of repatriating Japanese troops from China back to Japan. Fortunately for these Japanese soldiers, repatriation was generally safe and successful. During Charles’s voyage to north China, he had personally witnessed the sinking of 7 LSDs loaded with Japanese troops that floundered in the Japan Sea before reaching shore.

The Marine Corps returned to China in 1945, where the 6th Marine Division commander accepted the final surrender of the Japanese army of occupation in Tsingtao. The 6th Marine Division was disbanded then, and the 1st Marine Division took over in Tientsin and Tsingtao to support the Nationalist Chinese government whose wartime ally, the Chinese Communists, were now turned against them in a battle for control of China. [3]

The Marines continued to try to provide protection to Chang Kai Shek’s troops as the Communists persisted in raids along the fringes of the controlled zones and sorties to try to capture equipment, ammunition and supplies. The 1st Marine Division stayed in Tientsin for 8 months (until the fall of 1947) and then retreated to Tsingtao as the Communists gained more ground. Charles broke his hand loading heavy equipment on to air transports in Tsingtao and spent 2 months in recovery on a hospital ship in the harbor. The hand never healed properly. In his later years, he couldn’t even hold a cup of coffee in his right hand. The Marines were in Tsingtao for 14 months—finally departing in December 1948 as Mao and his troops ran over the rest of north China and the Chinese Nationalists fled to Taiwan. Charles could remember being on guard duty at the airport in Tsingtao in those final days as Chiang Kai-Shek’s troops loaded US cargo planes with truckload after truckload of antique art, furniture, ceramics, jewelry and gold from the homeland. The planes then flew off to Taiwan, the Nationalist’s refuge, and can be seen today in the museums and palaces of the Republic of China.

Charles remembers China as desperately poor—as he put it, “devastated by hunger”—with children lying homeless in doorways or on the streets, begging for food. Marine commanders admonished their troops to never, ever give food or aid to the locals, especially the children; or face the prospect of inheriting their care forever. Eastern China was a county of war victims—first from the devastation of the Japanese invasion and occupation—and now from three years of civil war. He found the people likeable enough, and tough and resilient, but truly desperate. These were “crazy times”, he said, “watching people die in the streets.” I remember my father telling me of witnessing mass public beheadings in the central square.

Was he afraid? Not really, he says. As Marines on off base, they always traveled in groups of two or more. They were welcome patrons at the hundreds of Chinese bars where cheap Russian potato vodka was in abundance. Charles says it was so potent that the Chinese bartenders delighted in doing fiery drink tricks with every cocktail. It was that Russian vodka that made him sick probably his one and only time from drinking. I am sure it is the reason that he remained an adamant Scotch drinker the rest of his life. Otherwise, the Marines lived relatively comfortably in barracks converted from an old Japanese Girls School that had been built by Germans in the late 1800s when they went about the establishment of the beer-making industry in China (hence, the famous Tsingtao brand—a fully German-style beverage.

Charles was flown back to the US through the Naval Air Base at Alameda, California in mid-December 1948. In a bit of luck, he happened to be in the Bay Area at the same time as his younger brother, Dick, who had also joined the Marines, and was training near San Francisco—and later to be shipped off to South Korea and the new war brewing on that peninsula. Dick would return alive from duty, but with a Purple Heart for wounds in battle. Charles and Dick took some liberty days and toured San Francisco for a couple of days together. One can only imagine what they did and saw, but I think it must have been a memorable and therapeutic time for both of them. Dick was undoubtedly Charles’s closest sibling, and they remained close throughout their lives. Dick was my godfather.

Still on leave, Charles took the train down to Los Angeles to spend a few days with Brown family cousins on their farm in Santa Ana, and on New Year’s Day, 1949, he boarded a flight that was to take him from LA (via Denver) to Cheyenne. The saga of that trip is described in Chapter ___ when I relate it to the other historic blizzard year of 1887. In short, his journey home consisted of an aborted emergency landing in Grand Junction, a day-long train ride to Denver, 6 days at $5 a night in the Oxford Hotel near Union Station in Denver waiting for a train to Cheyenne, 8 hours through 15-foot snow drifts—sitting in the baggage car because the train was so full—and a two mile walk with his duffle from the Cheyenne station to Alexander Street at 4:00 am in the morning.

He trudged up the drifted walk, and knocked on the door in the pre-dawn darkness.

“Who’s there?” his mother asks.

“This is your son, Charles. Let me in.”

“Oh, Charles, you’re home!” she cries.

Charles and Grace sat down in the kitchen over coffee and talked for hours.

Later on, Charles made his way up through the still-snowy highways to Casper to visit his older sister, Anna and her husband ____. _____ was working for the USDA, and was supervising the loading of airplanes with hay in order to feed stranded cattle and livestock across the state. It is estimated that over ___ head of cattle and _____ antelope, deer and elk died in the Great Blizzard of 1949.

Charles went back to Camp Pendleton, California, at the end of January and had his final assignments in amphibious training. Rather than re-up, he decided to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and attend college, as his brothers Frank and Leonard had done, and he was discharged, honorably, as Staff Sergeant Charles C. Brown on April ___, 1949.

Did he ever resent his mother for putting him into the Marines? “Never. The best thing I ever did in my life was being inducted into the Marine Corps.” The Marine Corps taught him that you can always do more than you think you can. Never give up. You can endure far more than you think you can. If you are honest with yourself, your resolve will overcome incredible odds.

There is long legacy in the Brown family of military service. It is probably not unlike other American families, especially those of the service and conflict-oriented Scots-Irish descendants in America – gun-friendly, God-fearing, feudal-hating independent souls ready for a fight to defend honor (sometimes loosely defined) at the drop of a bonnet. Tandy Brown’s great-grandfather served in the North Carolina Militia during the Revolution; his father and grandfather served in the Georgia Militia fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and Tandy himself serving during the last years of the Philippine Insurrection under General Pershing. World War I came too late for the senior members and too early for the children. But when World War II rolled around, the Brown boys were ready to serve. In 1940, Charles’s oldest brother Roy was activated with the 115th Cavalry Band of the Wyoming National Guard. He was sent to Ft. Lewis Washington, and while he didn’t serve overseas, he played his heart out stateside for any number of special occasions. In 1942, Charles’ brother Frank joined the Marines (after being turned down by the Navy for their School of Music). He actually tried to join the “Horse Marines”, a unit that no longer existed, but ended up being signed up in Denver (courtesy of his mother’s signature) on July 11, 1942. He was promptly off to San Diego Marine Base for basic training with the 3rd Marine Division. Frank then qualified for Radio School and went off to Camp Pendleton for final training before being loaded on a Liberty ship transporting tanks bound for Auckland, New Zealand. Frank was deployed to Guadalcanal, and then to an amphibious landing attack at Bougainville on November 19, 1943. Frank was severely wounded when a shell went into the side of a tank he was in, and he was medically evacuated to a military hospital on Choisel, and then to Guadalcanal. Recovered (except for his right arm), Frank continued in his tank units for invasions at Guam (July 1944), and then to Iwo Jima (February 1945—incidentally, the same month that Grace accompanied Charles to the Marine Recruiting Station in Denver to sign him up for the Marine Corps.). 

[1]This may be true of the sea-level air, but my father was never one to miss a chance for a good sleep. He could sleep anywhere – chair, bed, standing up or in a City Council meeting, as proven in press accounts in the 1990s. I have inherited a bit of his tendency, and in fact, it is a godsend. Good consciences sleep well and often.

[2] It seems to be a family trait to be radio operators in the Brown family. Charles’s older brothers Frank and __ were radio operators in the Marine Corps. When I took up the “Ham” radio hobby in the sixth grade, I was amazed at the skill my father exhibited at Morse code, never suspecting that a good portion of his life had been devoted to this esoteric knowledge in war time.

[3]Hanretty, Francis, “One to Tsingtao,”, China Marine Scuttlebutt, Vol 26 No 2, June 2017, China Marine Association, 183 S Waterlily Road, Coinjock, NC 27923, p10.

[It was] the greatest investment in higher education that any society ever made, a generous tribute from a grateful nation. The GI Bill, providing veterans tuition and spending money for education, was a brilliant and enduring commitment to the nation’s future.

- Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (1998), p. xx

After the Marines

Charles made his way back to Cheyenne after discharge in April 1949, where he stayed at home on Alexander Street for a while—but not idly. Grace wouldn’t have allowed it. He worked construction jobs with his friend Bob Reade. Tough construction jobs, for I recall the stories he used to tell of being in the piling pits actually holding on to huge creosote wood pilings to steady them as they were pounded from above by 2-ton pile drivers. It must have been bad enough to be unprotected from a missed blow or some other mechanical mishap in that pit, but for every blow that did land, creosote oil spewed out from the wood and covered his face and chest with that (as we discovered later) carcinogenic solvent. I wonder how much those days in the piling pit contributed to the skin cancer that eventually killed him.

He also ventured for weeks on end out to his brother’s farm in Wellington, Colorado (just across the border from Laramie), the only part of his life before coming to Colorado Springs that one could even remotely relate to being a cowboy. It is part of my point—for 90% of those who we would recognize of call ‘cowboys” in the late twentieth century—real cowboy experience was limited and fleeting—certainly not a real occupation. Despite that, we would recognize Charles and the thousands like him, as cowboys based on their demeanor, skills and appearance. Most importantly, though, I would hope we would recognize them based on their values.

His plans to benefit from the G.I. Bill moved forward though the summer of 1949, and in September he enrolled at Colorado Agricultural & Mechanical College—Colorado A&M—later to become Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He declared his major in Forestry, in one of the most competitive and rigorous programs in the nation. In about a year, finding forestry not his cup of tea, and the program a little too rigorous, he switched his major to Civil Engineering. Only in Colorado could forestry be considered a more difficult program than engineering!

Barbara Ann Brookhart

Meanwhile, about 200 miles south in the city of Colorado Springs, the first-born daughter of Ken and Marge Brookhart was graduating from Colorado Springs High School in June 1949, and would be on her way to Colorado A&M in the fall. The 17-year old freshman was planning to major in ____ and was coming to college with a bent toward horses and the western way of life, but like her sister, was bending that way because of the influence of her powerful father, Ken Brookhart. She would spend this summer of 1948 as part of the “rodeo royalty” in Colorado Springs, having been chosen as an Aide to the Girl of the West (the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo queen’s title). She and her lifelong childhood friend, Ann Miller, served as aides to Mariolive Zavislaw. Five years later, her younger sister, Betty, would be the Girl of the West herself—surpassing Barbara in horsemanship and drive to please her father. Barbara was a more independent woman.

Barbara’s mother, Margaret MacFarlane Brookhart, was a fairly sophisticated descendant of a Scottish mining engineering family who had helped found and grow one of Colorado’s most famous mining towns, Central City. While a good part of the family fortune was lost in the Silver Panic of 1893, the McFarlanes were pretty well off as Denver society went, and so Margaret enjoyed education at the best schools and an entry into the University of Denver in 1924—not at all common for women in those days. True to her Scottish roots, Margaret was tough, stubborn, determined and god-fearing; as well as hard-drinking, smoking and fun to be with. Surely some of that spirit was passed on to Barbara. 

Barbara was born on April 29, 1931 at St. Luke’s Hospital in Denver, Colorado, reportedly after an astounding 18 hours of labor. The family was then living at 1110 Albion Street in Denver, 6 blocks south of City Park in an area known as Congress Park—today a well-heeled and gentrified section of central Denver just east of Capitol Hill.

Ken (and Margaret) had graduated from the University of Denver in 1928 (?), and Ken had found a job on the business end of the Denver Post. Barbara’s first year was spent in Denver, but Ken was promoted to circulation manager in Colorado Springs in early 1932, and the family moved to a small home on El Paso Street where Barbara celebrated her second birthday. The home at 1619 North El Paso remained their home until ____, ___ years after Kenneth’s death. I remember well my weekly visits to mow Grandmother’s lawn and those of the neighbors nearby.

Family and religious ties were cultivated, especially by her mother, Margaret. Barbara followed strict Episcopalian edicts—baptism in ___, communion in ____, confirmation 1942, marriage in 1950—all in the same faith and all in the same church--Grace Episcopal in Colorado Springs. Family visits alternated between the Scottish households of the McFarlanes, Davidsons and McShanes in Denver and Central City, and the German-Swiss homestead of the Brookharts in Las Animas and Lamar, in southeast Colorado. 

Despite the prayers and family attention, Barbara was a rather sickly young girl. She had bad bouts with severe colds at age 1, 3 and 4; and then a case of influenza in 1937 that put her in bed and out of school for 6 weeks and then in 1938 with rheumatic fever caused by strep. Barbara spent nearly four months just after her 7th birthday in bed or in a wheel chair and lost a half-year of school.

Colorado A&M

Although conservative westerners, including my father, often sympathized with the “minimalist government” creed of the Republican tribe, he was a beneficiary of its largess in many ways—and at the same time its loyal servant. 

In one of the most farsighted pieces of legislation every passed by Congress, the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 [1](known as the “Morill Act”), funded the establishment of the university that he eventually graduated from, then known as the Colorado State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, or Colorado A&M. The same act, incidentally, was the founding gift that created the university that I attended, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Colorado A&M was authorized in a territorial legislative act in 1870, but it was not until 1878, two years after Colorado became the 38th state in the Union.[1] Shortly after Charles graduated from Colorado A&M in 1954, the college achieved “university” status, and was renamed Colorado State University, and its mascot changed from the “Aggie” to the “Ram”.

Charles served his country well from 1945 to 1949, and in the nation’s pact with the millions of young men and women of that “greatest generation” and beyond, the country saw fit to enact the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the G.I. Bill, to enable veterans to buy homes, get healthcare, receive unemployment and job assistance, and perhaps most importantly, to go back to school after their service. From 1944 to 1956, __ million returning servicemen and women enrolled in the nation’s vocational schools, colleges and universities under the G.I. Bill, swelling decimated college enrollments by 100% or more in a few short years and contributing like perhaps no other government program in the twentieth century to the growth of the American middle class. My father was one of the beneficiaries of this uniquely farsighted program, as were all of his brothers – each of whom served in the Marine Corps and all of whom graduated from college—and otherwise unlikely result.

The G.I. Bill allowed for $500 annually for tuition and a living stipend in addition. While $500 would hardly make a dent in college tuition today in any institution anywhere, it was in the late 1940s and early 1950s more than enough to cover tuition and fees at almost every college in the US. Without that help, it is doubtful that my father or any of his brothers, or indeed many millions of returning soldiers from WWII or Korea could have gone to college. The fact that they did is credit to the incredible foresight of FDR and Congress at the time to prepare for the return of millions of fighting men after the war and to avoid almost certain economic and social turmoil.[1]

Charles was discharged in April 1949 and enrolled at Colorado A&M that fall. Barbara Brookhart would have been a sophomore at that time, but still 4 years younger than Charles. It is doubtful that they shared classes together—Charles was attempting to qualify for the very competitive program in the School of Forestry, and Barbara was planning on a major in _____. But they must have met soon after both were in school, since they were married on August 26, 1950 in Colorado Springs—the summer after the Charles’ first year at Colorado A&M. 

 Don Norgren

I don’t have many details about how my father met and became friends with Don Norgren. But I do know that this was a friendship that lasted both men’s long and full lives, despite the more than 100 miles between them. It was based on a keen and mutual understanding of what it meant to be good, honest and humble.
Donald K. Norgren was born on July 29, 1932, exactly five years and two days after my father. It might as well have been a lifetime in terms of what was happening in the world when they were approaching the age of 18. D

on would have been 9 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and only 13 when the war finally ended in 1945. The Korean War was waged between his 18th and 21st birthdays—and Don was in college and not subject to the draft. My father, on the other hand, was turning 18 while the war was still largely undecided, and he followed his brothers into the Marine Corps as quickly as he could.
I had a similar experience based on just a couple of years of age difference, but this time, I was the one on the side that didn’t have to go. One of my closest friends, who was born in 1949, was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam era after graduating from the University of Wisconsin. By the time I was eligible to be drafted in 1974, the war in Vietnam was winding down. There was no need to draft more foot soldiers for the war.
So, it was for Don—Chuck had gone to war because of timing. Don had been spared because of timing. Now, there is no doubt that Don would have responded to the call—but the call did not come. This seemingly huge difference of fate was never of any consequence in their friendship, just as it was never of consequence, and hardly ever spoken of, in the 45 years I knew Tim Michelson. Fate and war. Friendships are made, and friendships survive, both because and in spite of this.
Don enrolled at Colorado A&M (now Colorado State University) a year after Charles. My father, an experienced G.I., and probably 4 years older than most of the incoming freshman, was nonetheless eager for the college undergraduate experience. He joined in on fraternity rush during his freshman fall semester, and was initiated into Sigma Alpha Epsilon in February 1950. The “Delta” chapter of SAE (which I later came to learn was often referred to as “Sleep and Eat” by fraternal rivals) was one of the largest and most prestigious on campus. My father became an initiate of SAE, badge number 76531, on February 12, 1950.
As short year later, after fall rush, Donald K. Norgren was voted into membership and initiated on May 12, 1951, at age 18, into the Delta Chapter of SAE (Badge number 80955). Charles, as one-year senior to Don, might have been his “older brother”, a sponsor-type relationship; or perhaps they were simply acquaintances, but somehow a friendship blossomed. Before long, they were sharing life’s most important moments and making constant connections of the sort that true and lasting friendships are built upon. 

There have always been parts of Don Norgren’s life that have been a mystery to me. There were legends about unseen wealth that could never be properly confirmed. Where did his family come from? How did they come by that land? Were they really connected to the industrial might of the likes of Ingersoll-Rand, or was this just wishful thinking based on scant Scandinavian name connections? Why was Don so sought after for board seats at important banks and trusts?Don was one of the five children of Carl and Juliet Norgren. Carl’s father, Gustavus Norgren, was born in Sweden in 1850 and emigrated to South Dakota at age 18 in 1868. Gustavus was the son of Samuel Norgren and Elizabeth (Shobergy) Norgren, whose 6 children (less Augusta who died as a child) all emigrated to the United States during the huge mid-nineteenth century wave of European immigration to America . Taking advantage of the Homestead Act, Gustavus staked out his 160 acres in Clay County, SD and began to farm. In 1876, he married Caroline Anderson, also a Swede by birth, and they quickly formed a family of six children, including Carl. Carl Norgren was born in November 1890. He grew up on the farm in Centerville, SD, but the industrious and intellectually curious Carl yearned for the larger world. After high school, Carl found his way to Omaha where he enrolled in college and majored in mechanical engineering. While in college, he met and married Juliet Lien, a local school teacher and 6 years younger. After graduation, he found employment in Omaha and began a career in design and innovation that would culminate in one of the most successful entrepreneurial start-ups of the post-Depression era. 

Carl and Juliet moved to Denver where they bought a home on Hudson Street in southwest Denver. Working on his own time, he came up with a design for a kitchen hose coupling in 1925. He felt that the coupling was so unique that it could sustain a business, leading him to open his own company to manufacture the device—C.A.Norgren Company. With a scant $800 in capital from his wife’s teaching job and space in the garage of a small building at the intersection of Monaco Parkway and Colfax Avenue in Littleton he started his enterprise. Two years later, again at his kitchen table, he perfected an idea for an automatic lubricator for machining systems that he thought could be applied to a wide range of manufacturing applications. This simple but ingenious device enabled the Norgren’s company to lead a multi-billion-dollar industry in pneumatic fluid and motion control devices. Norgren USA was so successful that the British giant, Imperial Metals Industries (IMI plc), a subsidiary of the multi-billion-dollar Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), bought the company in 1972 for a considerable sum. Norgren USA continued under IMI control and became the world leader in pneumatic valves, filters, lubricators and actuators. By 2005, the 80th anniversary of its founding, Norgren USA had 2,600 employees around the world and over $1.2 billion in revenue. Norgren USA was one of Littleton’s largest employers for decades, and Carl was known as an enlightened and benevolent boss, who went to lengths to provide a pleasant work environment, good wages, profit-sharing, and flexible scheduling—innovations that were well ahead of their time.

Don’s early childhood was spent in Denver, at the home on Hudson Street. Don was the youngest of the five—his oldest sister Gene (born in 1926), and brothers Neil (1924) and Leigh (1928). Despite Carl Norgren’s obvious skills and success as an engineer and businessman, he also loved the out of doors, and his roots in the agricultural traditions of South Dakota. Carl and a partner began to buy land and establish cattle ranching. They bought the 500-acre Beyers Peak Ranch[1]near Fraser, Colorado and it became the favorite fishing retreat of President Dwight Eisenhower. Norgren was personal friend of both Hoover and Eisenhower. In 1998, Leigh Norgren, Don’s older brother, donated more than 2,400 pages of correspondence, clippings, cards and invitations shared between Eisenhower and Norgren from 1948 to 1964 to the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. Down in Arapaho County, Carl bought a large parcel that is now the grounds of the Pinehurst Golf Club. On that land, he established a serious beef cattle operation that became the prime responsibility of his youngest son, Don.

While still in college, Don married Donna Jackson, of Denver. Don was barely 19 years old, and Donna was not quite 18, but their marriage lasted more than 62 years until Donna’s death of cancer in early 2014.[2] Together, they had 6 children, 21 grandchildren and 38 great-grandchildren. Shortly after Don’s graduation, they moved to the family’s ranch in Platteville, Colorado, and there established a long legacy in the Hereford cattle business. Don had been raising Herefords on the Norgren family ranch on the Pinehurst Country Club grounds since before college—now he moved the herd to Platteville. The Norgren Cattle Company became a household name in Hereford breeding circles, and Don and Donna became fixtures in the beef cattle industry in Colorado. Don became a director of the prestigious National Western Stock Show in Denver in 1971 and a member of its executive committee in 1977.

Don was always a loyal supporter of Colorado State University, even though he didn’t officially graduate from the institution until age 63. He loved the college for what it could do for young people, and he and Donna supported hundreds of students with scholarships through the years.The Norgrens and the Browns were inseparable from those days. They shared “married student” status, they had children while undergraduates, they went to football games together and shared the bonds of the Pikes Peak Range Ride and the National Western Stock Show every year. When Barbara Brown died unexpectedly and suddenly in 1962, Don and Donna were at dad’s side. When my father remarried, the Norgrens were gracious and accepting—welcoming a new woman into their old friend’s role. Not easy to do sometimes—only real friends manage it—and not always. Even family seems incapable of coping sometimes. It was incredible to witness, this bond of friendship that survived crisis, rebirth and the slow certainty of age and death.

I looked forward each summer to the times when Don would drive down to Colorado Springs with Donna, horse trailer in tow, and check in--always--at the Palmer House in order to join Dad on the Pikes Peak Range Ride. Don’s first ride was as Dad’s guest in 1957. He was welcomed as a member two years later and made the annual ride 41 times, and later even though not riding, would loyally drive down to join Dad--his old friend who was also not riding--to sit, relax and enjoy each other’s company among other good friends. In the early years, we would take to making visits to the Platteville ranch in the summer around Range Ride time, and the Norgren tribe would teach the city kids the ways of ranch life, thus creating a friendly bond between generations of two families who learned the values of hard work and humility from the “head of the table."  I always looked forward to seeing Don each year. He was a strong and silent hero to me. Quietly, he would observe; rarely would he comment, but when he did, it was always a with a keen and candid sense of human nature. Honest as the day is long. Loyal and open to all. When my sons, Ted and Bryson came along on the Range Ride, one of their favorites was always Don. He went out of his way to be a good and steady counselor to them. Don’s family wrote in his obituary that he was a man of integrity and honor. Those were easy to see. What is more important, I think, is that they also said that “ he made every member of the family feel special and conversations that were had with him were intentional and full of purpose.” Intentional and full of purpose. That was Don Norgren—quiet, proud and kind. My father let that rub off on him. So did I, and so did my sons.  I love looking over the photos of my father and Don Norgren  from the Range Ride over the years--from the earliest days in the late 1950s where Don looks oh so young; and with Donna, Barbara and Chuck, too, at the annual Cowboy Ball.  But my favorite is the photo of the “three amigos”—Don Norgren, Harlan Ochs and my father—lounging in the long grass during a break in the ride one sunny summer day in 1965. Three good men in their prime, enjoying their company in the great outdoors, confident in the future, grateful for the past. One true cowboy and two sometimes cowboys--but all part of a great western tradition of the “Cowboy Way.” Courage, pride, persistence, duty, fairness, loyalty, honesty, humility.  The company you keep.  [1]The Byers Peak Ranch was so-named for the original editor-in-chief and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, William N. Byers, who founded the paper in 1859 and became one of Colorado’s greatest promoters. During his long, varied, illustrious and sometimes questionable career, he bought a huge area of land south of the town of Hot Sulphur Springs, which includes what is now known as Byers Peak and the ranching valleys around it. 

[2]Don and Donna were married in August 1950—exactly one year after my father married Barbara Brookhart, a sophomore at Colorado A&M. My father was 23 years old; my mother was 19. I was born 22 months later 

The Oklahoma Land Rush

Ken Brookhart was born on a cattle ranch in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, on July 21, 1906, that was then part of the Cherokee Nation Indian Territory. According to family stories, Ken’s father, Henry Clifford Brookhart established his ranch in Tonkawa through the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1893. Henry was born in 1869 in Palmyra, Iowa and so would have been about 24 at the time of the Land Rush. Adda, who was born in 1878 in Missouri, met and married Henry some years after he had established his homestead in Tonkawa.

In mid-century Europe, just as America began to seriously power her westward expansion toward the Pacific, German farmers were reeling from years of civil strife and oppression by ruling landowners. Between 18__ and 18__, over 5 million German, Swiss and Scandanavian farmers made their way to the US, closely followed by over __ million Irish peasant farmers fleeing the potato famine and the oppressive English land laws. While the Irish mainly kept to their enclaves in the cities of the eastern seaboard, the Germans, Swiss and Swedes made their way toward the interior—looking to farm on lands similar to the ones they left in the Old World. Up until 19__, when the immigration of Hispanics overtook them, the single largest immigrant group in the US were of German descent.

Henry’s Brookhart ancestors (originally “Burkhardt” or some other German variation) settled first in Pennsylvania but then rapidly moved west, probably in concert with the great opening of farmlands under the Homestead Act of 1862; and finally settled in Warren County, Iowa. After a generation or two, younger sons, like young Henry Brookhart, were forced to look even further west for their own lands as the older brothers took title to family lands. It was in that way that Henry found himself in the line-up a few miles northwest of present day Oklahoma City on September 16, 1893 with 100,000 or so other land seekers waiting to rush westward to claim plots in the Cherokee Strip.

Primogeniture was not embedded in law or custom in the United States, as it was in Europe. Alexis de Tocqueville argued that because generations of first sons had not been able to secure long-standing claims to land and the concentration of power and wealth that pervaded Europe’s estate traditions, American families had not developed an attachment to place and patrimony that tended to root population.[1] Instead, the open westward frontier beckoned to each new generation an opportunity to do better than the generation before. That opportunity beckoned to the young Brookhart. But there was also a strong “push” westward. The US was gripped in a severe economic depression—the Panic of 1893—and the government, to satisfy its white electorate and in part to continue to punish the “civilized” tribes (the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek and Seminoles who had sided with the Confederacy, was about to push the tribes off of lands just given to them after the Civil War. 

The 100,000 families lined up with wagons, horses, carriages or on foot were not all going to be successful.  Only 42,000 parcels were available to the 100,000 assembled. Hence the cheating that went on—“sooners” who snuck out the nights before and claimed land ahead of the rush as opposed to the rule-abiding “boomers” who waited for the cannons to fire. 

Las Animas Days

Around 1911, when Ken Brookhart was around 5 years old, Henry and Ada moved their family to a new ranch near the town of Las Animas, Colorado, in famous Bent County. Ken would have been joined by two older brothers, Lester (age 10) and Clifford (age 7) and his older sister Viola (age 9). The family of 6 would be joined by two more children, Harry (in 1914) and Willard (in 1915)—to round out a ranching family of eight souls—not unusual at all in the US at the time. 

Ken Brookhart started school the next year in a little sod school house called “Frog Holler”, and soon became infatuated with Western history and lore, reading every available book he could find. It was said that he could converse for hours on any subject pertaining to “how the West was won.”  It was there in southeastern Colorado that he also developed his deep and lasting love of the outdoors and the ranching life. By age ten, he was tending his father’s cattle herd by himself. He never missed a horse race, a rodeo, a roping or a bronc-busting event. He was a go-to horse tamer for all the neighboring ranches, and participated in rodeo sports, as well as track and football, throughout his school years. He won a track scholarship to the University of Denver (known as “DU” by most locals), and enrolled there as a freshman in the fall of 1924.

A New Life on the Front Range

At DU, Ken was a starting tackle on the football team and a track star, lettering every year. He set a conference track record in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference for the ______ that stood for many years. He joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity, and majored in ________. Ken drove a yellow cab and worked in the circulation department of the Denver Post while an undergraduate.

He married Margaret McFarlane, a fellow DU student, in 1930. Ken and Margaret made their home in Denver (on Albion Street in the Capitol Hill area), where Ken continued to work for the Denver Post. Their first child, Barbara Ann, was born on April 29, 1931. In 1932, the Denver Posttransferred Ken to Colorado Springs in order to boost circulation and business in that part of the state. Ken was the El Paso County circulation manager for the Denver Post until 1938. That year, Ken decided to try his hand at a different type of business—lumber and building materials—and signed on with Crissey-Fowler Lumber as a salesman. A second daughter, Elizabeth (“Betty”) Brookhart was born on August 17, 1939.

The Great Recession (1930-1937) had the same destructive impacts on Colorado Springs as it did throughout most of the country. Unemployment was high, business earnings were low, and poverty and belt-tightening could be seen everywhere. Colorado Springs had grown enormously in the last decade of the nineteenth century after gold was discovered in the Cripple Creek mining district just west of the city. That growth continued into the early 1920s as mining fortunes, like those of Spencer Penrose and W.S. Stratton were poured into resorts and hotels. But growth in Colorado Springs began to taper off earlier than in other parts of the nation. The 1920s were a slow time; and the 1930s were even slower. It must have been hard for anyone to sell anything in those days—including newspapers. No wonder that Ken Brookhart turned to the lumber business just as soon as recovery from the Depression had begun. Recovery meant building—and building meant lumber. 

A little more than a decade later, as the second World War drew to a close and servicemen and women made their way back to the nation, a new growth boom was on in the mountain west. Other than a short post-war slowdown in mid-1946, the economy would resume a period of expansion for the next 3 years, then pause again briefly in early 1950 before taking off again almost unchecked through the entire decade of the 1960s —until current times, the longest economic expansion on record (106 months from February 1961 to December 1969). Ken could sense the opportunity, and moved in 1948 to form his own business on the eastern edge of the city where he sensed growth and demand would be the strongest. On December 16, 1948, he opened the “Brookhart Lumber Company” in a small one-story storefront and lumber yard in an area known as “Knob Hill.” It was a bold but sanguine move. The area east of Colorado Springs proper was mostly a large drainage lake with open ranch land beyond. Knob Hill was almost 2 miles from the edge of the city, but there was no room to expand to the west, and access to the south and north were problematic due to military installations and ownership. If Colorado Springs were to grow, and grow it seemed it would, it would be to the east. Ken put his lumber yard smack in the path of this growth, promising responsive service to builders on the eastern edge of Colorado Springs, as well as to the ranchers and farmers further to the east in El Paso County and beyond. He opened with just two employees—the brothers Roy and Virgil Murr—and a mere ______ in capital. It was a bold move, but just the type of move that Ken and his peers in Colorado Springs would later build small family fortunes on in the post-War boom.

At the time Ken opened Brookhart Lumber, he was quoted in Western Building Magazine as follows: “I am going to (have) a large lumber and building materials headquarters that will serve the wants of this community. We will have a one-stop building center and handle everything from the foundation to the roof of a house, together with all of the equipment necessary to do the job.” [2] The population of the Colorado Springs metro area was roughly 75,000 in 1950, near the time that Ken Brookhart opened his new business. By 1960, three years before his death, the population had almost doubled to 144,000; and by 1970, the population of El Paso County which roughly equates to the metropolitan area, had soared to 236,000 people—more than three times the number of people—an annual average growth rate of ___. This would be a growth boom like only one other in the history of the city—during the heyday of the Cripple Creek gold discoveries of the late 1800s when the city grew from little more than a prairie encampment of some 4,000 souls to a town of 30,000 people by 1920. 

The city was still a relatively sleepy town basking in the shadow of Denver and the more industrial Pueblo. The mining fortunes that had built the town had long ago faded, and the city relied mostly on income from tourism (thanks to the renowned Broadmoor Hotel and local attractions like Pikes Peak) agriculture, and, thanks to civic boosterism in the pre-war years, to a growing military presence and the federal dollars that came with it. Beginning just after the end of the Great Depression, local leaders like Charles L. Tutt, began to aggressively court the Federal government to establish major installations in the region. First among these projects was Camp Carson, as $30 million project to house and train the 30,000 troops of the Army’s 89th Division, a growing mechanized cavalry division of the rapidly modernizing Army. [3] The Army made its decision to build Camp Carson in 1942—beginning a long and fruitful association with US military installations in and around Colorado Springs: Ent and Peterson Air Bases, the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), the Consolidated Space Operations Center, and most notoriously, the US Air Force Academy in 1954. 

As Colorado Springs grew steadily eastward, Ken’s business stood smack in the middle of growth, just as he had predicted, and Brookhart Lumber Company grew and prospered. In 1955, Ken began construction of a new, larger storefront and lumber yard just to the south of the original location—opening in December, 1955 at 2425 East Platte Place. Business grew steadily, but Ken began to have issues with his heart, forcing him to miss his beloved Range Ride for several years beginning in 1958, and finally taking his life in a massive heart attack on May 10, 1963 at age 56.

Pikes Peak Range Riders and the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo

Fortunately, well before his death, Ken Brookhart was thinking ahead about his community and what he could do for it. He had founded his small business in 1949, and the economy was still struggling to come out of a fairly severe post-war recession. On one of his weekly rides in the Austin Bluffs Part north of town, Ken and his auto-dealer emprassario friend, Everett Conover, were throwing out ideas about how to promote and grow their little town, and with it, their own fortunes. Ken had recently been regaled by tales from Hugh Bennett, a local rancher and bulldogging national rodeo champion, about his ride with the California group called the Rancho Vistadores; and later the Round Up Riders of the Rockies—two groups of well-heeled businessmen, politicians and ranchers who gathered up for a week of nostaligic trail riding and other hijinks—all in the name of local business promotion, as was the predominant spirit of the era.

Ken was intrigued with the idea. A week of “old style” cowboy trailriding to bring back the spirit of the old West to sleepy Colorado Springs and its mildly successful summer rodeo. Besides, what fun could be had by a bunch of men let loose into the mountains with horse and sans spouse, for a week of rugged adventure.

My grandfather was probably the only true cowboy in the family before my brother, Ron, took the stage in his 20’s as a roper and drill team rider. Grandpa loved riding horses, and even more, racing and breaking them. That put him on the informal local circuit in southeastern Colorado—purportedly, he was the man to call when a bronc needed busting or a colt needed a jockey in the local fair. He grew up loving local rodeo, and probably worshipped the names of the cowboys who made the big time in Denver, Fort Worth or Cheyenne.

The first rodeo in Colorado Springs was held north of the Garden of the Gods back in 1911 and finally achieved its formal status as an annual sponsored event—the Colorado Springs Rodeo—in the 1920’s at a permanent location just northwest of the current site of the Penrose Hospital. Today that area is a mix of homes and small busineeses, and at least one famous rodeo hangout—the Hogan—well-known to my brother and his rodeoing comrades.

In 1939, the rodeo had attracted enough attention from business elites like Spencer Penrose for its potential to boost summer tourism that “Spence” decreed, in the year that he died, that the rodeo, now known as the “Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo” would have a permanent and somewhat glorious new home at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain on the newly constructed 10,000 seat Spencer Penrose Stadium, built on the site of the old polo grounds. The old West had finally overtaken the British aristocracy—bronc busting and bull riding would replace chukkers and ponies.

My grandfather amped up his involvement in promoting and supporting the Pikes Peak or Bust over the ensuing decade—despite the fact that the rodeo was suspended for __ years during World War II. When the war ended in 1945, it took less than a year to get back in gear, and to return the rodeo with a new-found purpose and celebratory cause—a dedication to American servicemen and veterans, who coincidently now flooded the Colorado Springs economy as they returned from the war to set out new lives in a western way that they had only discovered because of the war. El Paso County’s population grew from 54,000 in 1940 to nearly 75,000 in 1950. That trend, only a precursor to the more robust growth of the next two decades, when metropolitan Colorado Springs would more than triple its population to over 235,000, was the signal to Ken Brookhart that it was time to get into the building business on his own. [4] 

So it was, on that early morning ride in the summer of 1949, Ken Brookhart and Everett Conover decided to organize a publicity-generating trail ride around Pikes Peak to generate enthusiasm for the “ways of the old west” and by association, the rodeo and the community in general. 

The first ride of the Pikes Peak Range Riders was organized by Ken and Everett in just 14 days. On July 22, 1949, 38 riders gathered up and headed out westward up the Gold Camp Road on the first ride. Today, nearly 150 to 160 riders (members and guests) set out in late June each year for five full days of fellowship and community boosterism in the beauty of Colorado high country. There have been rides every year since 1949 except for two cancellations—one due to fire in ___ and this year, 2020, due to Covid-19. Not only has the Pikes Peak Ranch Ride been a substantial part of the success of the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo, the Pikes Peak Range Rider Foundation established has been responsible the award of thousands of dollars of scholarships, internships and charitable grants. In ____, the Foundation established its own western heritage and equestrian center at Latigo Trails in eastern El Paso County, dedicated to preserving and enhancing the “cowboy way” amongst local youth.

Ken Brookhart took over as president of the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo Association in ____ and remained president until his death in 1963. During his tenure, he was also elected as the first president of the newly formed Rocky Mountain Rodeo Association (January 12, 1961), an assembly of ___ rodeo organization in the states of Colorado, ____, and ____ with the stated objective of “improving rodeo management in difficult times.” [5]

Brookhart’s lumbers on without its Founder 

Ken’s death was unexpected, and his lack of estate planning was evident in the tax crisis that followed. Whether he was just under-insured, or whether he simply didn’t plan well, the estate of Kenneth D. Brookhart owed a whopping estate tax for which there was simply not enough cash to meet the obligation. Assets had to be liquidated. The assets most beloved were also the least remunerative—Ken’s dream ranches east of Colorado Springs and in the mountains west of the city. It would have been impossible and fiscally irresponsible to unload Brookhart Lumber Company. The business was doing well, and the future looked bright. It constituted the livelihood of both of Ken’s daughter’s families, and provided a generous income for his widow, Margaret. So the business was untouched except for his directions as to its management. Margaret, who knew little about the day-to-day operations was named president. She was also its only shareholder. While Charles had been with the business since 1953, and was recognized by all as the one who ran the business and knew the most about it; Ken knew it would be difficult and contentious to play favorites in naming Charles the new COO. His surviving daughter, Betty, had married the second son of a wealthy Texas cattle family—Tom Watt, of Fort Worth—and Tom was not one to be counted out of either inheritances or recognition. In addition, Charles had recently re-married a younger woman, slightly more than a year after Barbara’s death, and Betty in particular, and perhaps Margaret, were peeved. To preserve a sense of equality and to assuage Tom’s ego, both Charles and Tom were named vice-presidents of Brookhart Lumber. Tom had spent very little time in the business at all by then; preferring to spend his time, and his father’s money, on cattle operations out east of Colorado Springs and Throckmorton, Texas. Betty, however, was eager to keep her and her husband’s oar in the water at Brookhart’s, and so Tom began to flirt with learning the business.

Under Chuck’s leadership, the business grew exponentially. In 1965, the company (along with outside financing that was possibly provided by the Watt family), built a large shopping center complex across the parking lot on land that had been purchased by Brookhart years ago in his expansion to Platte Place. The development brought valuable income to the company as well as more traffic and prestige to the Knob Hill area. Among the tenants were good friends of Ken’s and fellow range riders—Dee Niehans, who owned one of the most popular western wear stores in the city—and ______, president of the Central Colorado Bank, on whose board Ken Brookhart had served for many years. Eastgate Center, as it was called, was a success for many years. It was also a great training ground for me as a young lad. I was apprenticed out to the construction crew during the summers, learning by observing and doing as no other experience could do. Once Eastgate was completed, I was sent out to work with a small crew to build a spec house near Calhan, Colorado as part of a small foray of the Eastgate Builders into the contracting and development world. Personally, it was a formative experience—almost everything I know, or claim to know now, about fixing things around the house came from that summer building one from foundation to roof with 4 other men. For Brookharts, and Eastgate Builders, it was the first and last foray into the construction world. From then on, they stuck to the building materials trade.

Chuck Brown, rear, and Margaret Brookhart admire unique wood-styled exterior of newly completed Eastgate Center. (Colorado Springs Sun, October __, 1965, p.__0

By 1970, the business had begun to feel the heat from larger hardware retail chains like Ace Hardware and True-Value; and from larger regional lumber dealers whose volumes commanded more buying power. Brookhart’s needed to step up or be left behind.

Negotiations began with a Chicago-based hardware buying cooperative called Cotter & Company; who franchise brandname was “True-Value Hardware.” By using the True-Value buying and advertising leverage, Chuck and Tom believed that they could expand both margins and volume if sufficient retail space were available in a new storefront. Plans were put in place to build a huge new “building center” in place of the existing 15-year old structure. The design called for block and pre-stressed construction and a mansard shake roof with 30,000 square feet of retail display space and 13,000 square feet of office, shop and storage, in addition to the 5 acres already devoted to lumber warehouses and outdoor storage and a _____ car parking lot. From the original 2 employees in 1948, Brookhart Building Centers (as it was now called) had 64 employees—including my sister, brother and me most summers. The project was purported to cost $ 1 million in 1970 dollars, or the equivalent of $ 6.5 million today. Where this money came from is a question. It is unlikely that the business had enough cash on hand to fund the entire project. A mortgage would have been possible, but risky. My guess is that the financing of this project came from a combination of debt and financing from the Watt family fortune—one more step in the gradual ascendancy of Tom Watt in the management and ownership structure of Brookhart’s, despite the obvious managerial predominance of Chuck Brown in the daily operations of the company. If you were to ask employees in those days “who runs this company”, the overwhelming response would have been “Chuck does.”  If you had asked the man on the street in Colorado Springs, the answer would have been “Chuck does.” If you had asked most city leaders, business colleague or friends, the answer would have been “Chuck does.” Perhaps only the bankers, Betty Watt and Margaret Brookhart- and Chuck- knew the real story of how money buys power.

The new store opened to great local fanfare on January 14, 1972. Mayor Gene McCleary did the ribbon-cutting. Brookhart’s held a giant grand opening sale, including raffles and store give-aways—most prominently a VIP trip for four to Disneyland. The ads are an interesting review of prices in those days—paint at 2 gallons for $11, 2x4 lumber at 79 cents, sheetrock at $1.39 each, and, true to the relative price deflation of electronics, GE clock radios at $10.88—the same or perhaps better quality could be bought today on Amazon for $9.99!

[1]Kathleen Neils Conzen, A Saga of Families, Ch. 9, p. 320 of The Oxford History of the American West (1994). See also Alan Bogue, An Agricultural Empire, Ch. 8, p. 284 about the reasons for westward migration and the Mormom chorus “Some may push and some may pull.”

[2]“Brookhart Building Center celebration set”, ”, Colorado Springs SUN, January 13, 1972, p. 8.

[3]According to a story related in Marshall Sprague’s history of Colorado Springs, NewPort in the Rockies, location of Camp Carson in Colorado Springs may have been favorably influenced by the treasures of Spencer Penrose’s personal vault of fine wines and liquors which remained protected in the cellars of the Broadmoor Hotel after his death in 1939. According to one of Penrose’s biographers, Helen Clapsettle, when the Army brass descended on Colorado Springs to consider its candicacy as a location for Camp Carson, they were treated royally at the Broadmoor Tavern to the finest libations from the Penrose collections—at that time a rare opportunity given the war time rationing and shortages that allowed generally third-rate, rot gut, liquors to the US population, including generals. The generals reported fine clean air, and likely other salubrious aspects unique to Colorado Springs in their report, so influencing the final award of Camp Carson to this sleepy mountainside town.

[4]The population of metropolitan Colorado Springs was estimated to be nearly 740,000 in 2018, another tripling in size over the last 50 years. In contrast, the total population of the United States only increased by a factor of 1.6x over the same period, meaning that Colorado Springs was growing roughly twice as fast as the country as a whole. Despite that healthy growth, it was the period between 1950 and 1980 that seriously changed the face of this small town at the base of Pike’s Peak. I was able to witness most of that growth first-hand. 

[5]“Back Pages”, Gazette Telegraph, January 12, 2011, p. A2

The Old Highway 94 Ranch

 My brother called me in late October of 2020 since he knew that we would be coming out to Colorado for a few days before Thanksgiving. He had just heard that our old ranch on Colorado State Highway 94—what we used to call the Ellicott Ranch—had been sold to developers in Colorado Springs who had big plans for a huge housing and community development on the property. Who knew how soon the old ranch house, barns and corrals would be plowed under to make way for $800,000 homes? Maybe it was time, he suggested, to go out and take some final photographs of the ranch before it changed forever.

In fact, our family had not been involved with the old ranch for many, many years. My grandfather, Ken Brookhart, had died rather suddenly and unexpectedly at age 56 of a heart attack in 1963, and his estate planning was woefully inadequate for the tax burdens that would follow his death. I know that we ended up liquidating our interests in both the Ellicott Ranch and the ranch near Divide, Colorado soon after his death. Both were dreams of my grandfather ever since he left his family’s homestead in Las Animas and went off to the University of Denver and to a different, but ultimately successful, career in business. Despite his great success as a retail entrepreneur and a community leader, my grandfather always hankered to return to the land—to own and run his own cattle ranch, to ride the range, to smell the sweet land and feel its heat.After settling in Colorado Springs in the early 1940s, Ken Brookhart eventually found an opportunity to build a business of his own on the rising tide of returning servicemen and women to the Colorado Springs area, and the heady demand they fostered for new homes, stores and schools. He founded the Brookhart Lumber Company in late1948, and the business became the mainstay of the family economy for decades thereafter. My father joined the company around 1955, after graduating from Colorado A&M with a B.S. in Civil Engineering. 

In 1960, my aunt Betty married a Texas heir to the Watt Cattle Company fortune, Tom Watt, who was an undergraduate at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Tom’s family were legendary in north Texas for their ranches west of Fort Worth. Tom’s father, W. R. “Billy Bob” Watt  was the Executive Director of the Fort Worth Stock Show from 1946 to his death in 1977, one of the biggest livestock exhibition and rodeo in the US at the time.  He was succeeded in that role by Tom’s older brother, Bob Watt.  The Fort Worth Stock Show has been a Watt family affair for more than a half-century.  Tom Watt became a fixture at Brookhart Lumber right away, and with his support, Ken Brookhart was able to leverage the investment required to purchase over 6,000 acres east of Colorado Springs to establish the cattle raising operation he had dreamed of owning since a kid. The Watt-Brookhart Cattle Company (brand W hanging B) had three major Colorado ranches—the old Highway 94 Ranch near Ellicott, the Watt Ranch near Rush, and the Brookhart homestead near Divide for summer pasture. I grew up believing that my grandfather was in full control of at least two of these properties (Ellicott and Divide), but the truth of the matter is that the Watt family was probably the lead investor in all of the ranches.

Nonetheless, these were the ranches where I learned to become a cowboy. From age 8 to age 12 (roughly 1960 to 1964), I was a regular at brandings, roundups and general work gatherings at both Divide and Ellicott. I wrestled calves for castration and branding, fixed fence, rounded up herds with cantankerous bulls, birthed calves, administered IVs for heat stroke and helped brand and inoculate hundreds of angus cattle. I doubted my courage and the fidelity of my horse, but still rode out to do what I was told to do. I witnessed horrible slaughter of antelope and jack rabbits, but also helped rescue young deer and helpless calves. I delivered calves to their mothers in the spring, and then found myself dragging the mothers to “burn pits” in the summer after a wicked drought and heat wave had beaten our attempts to save them.  It was a profound introduction to the old American West, and I am forever marked by it.

I am not exactly certain of the number of years that my family owned the Old Highway 94 Ranch, but I do know that we were there in 1961 when my father inscribed my brother’s name in the concrete foundation of a Quonset barn on the property. I suspect that my grandfather purchased the land around the time that his youngest daughter Betty married into the Watt family (1960); otherwise the financial resources simply would not have been available. And what were those resources? Further investigation will reveal – but my estimate is that the ranch probably cost about $100,000 or so at that time.  The minimum wage in those days was $1.00 an hour. The only benchmark I have is a story by Pete Smythe, the famous KOA radio personality, who says he bought a prize dude ranch near Bailey, Colorado about 10 years before this for only $45,000.
In later years, I used to boast to my friends that we had 10,000 acres and ran 1,000 head of cattle on the ranch. I overstated both. The ranch actually comprised about 5,400 acres with about 1,000 to 2,000 acres of leased ground from the State. At the normal ratio of one head for every 20 acres, it would mean that we could run a maximum of 600 head of cattle—and that is precisely the figure used by the real estate marketers who sold the property in 2020. Still, 600 head of cattle is a pretty big operation—certainly for a young 10-year-old cowboy, his dad, grandad and a few hire hands.Our hired ranch manager and his family, the Orr’s, were the salt of the earth. Mr. Orr ran the ranch like clockwork. His wife doubled as the chief telephone operator at the Ellicott party line exchange, and as a cook-extraordinaire for round-up and branding time. I will never forget those very, very hearty midday meals at the old ranch house. My brothers and sisters spent many hours at the ranch. When we weren’t trying to pretend, we were working, we were getting into all kinds of mischief, like seeing if barn cats could actually survive a parachute dive from the barn roof, or seeing if the orphaned baby antelope could jump over our heads. 

My grandfather, Ken Brookhart, died very suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1963. I don’t think he was prepared for this; nor was his estate prepared for the tax bill that came its way in 1964. In order to save the lumber business in town, the family needed to sell other assets. The biggest prize was the Old Highway 94 Ranch, which went to Ken’s old friend, Leo Ververs, around 1965. Leo Hardin Ververs was born in 1922 in the small town of Kutch, Colorado, although some say that it was actually the town of Keyser, neither of which can be found on most maps today. Kutch several miles east of Ellicott and was named for a rancher in the area, Ira Kutch, who established a post office there in 1905. The center of Kutch was just a few miles north of the intersection of Elbert County Road 11 and Highway 94 and consisted of a gas station, small general store, a blacksmith shop, a dance hall, dance barn and a baseball field. The post office closed in 1971, and Kutch has pretty much disappeared off the map.

Ververs is a Dutch name. Like many of the settlers on the flat plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado, Leo came from northern European immigrant families were leaving Europe in huge numbers during the latter part of the nineteenth century and taking up homesteads, encouraged by the railroad companies, to head west to the “fruitful” plains. Of course, the Great Plains were anything but “fruitful”, with average rainfall less than 20 inches per year anywhere west of the 100th meridian (close to desert conditions, as noted by John Wesley Powell in his mid-century survey). Even with Congress doubling the number of acres that could be claimed in individual homesteads from 160 to 320 acres in 1909, it was devilishly hard to make a go of it in the ranching business when you needed around 20 acres of land—and some access to water—to support a single cow.

Yet, somehow these hardy immigrant farmers and ranchers survived. While about one-third lost their farms, or simply abandoned them, in the 1920s Dust Bowl, those who stayed eventually became the mainstay of the agricultural economy of Colorado that helped sustain the state when the gold and silver ran out.

Many, like Leo Ververs, started out on a ranch but built his career in the fast-growing city. Leo started his own, very successful, construction business around the same time that my grandfather opened his lumber yard. Leo was one of Brookhart’s first and most loyal customers. Leo’s friendship with my father and grandfather, and his ranching upbringing, led to him becoming a member of the Pikes Peak Range Riders in 1955, just a couple of years after my father, and only 6 years after the organization’s inaugural ride in 1949. Leo’s business grew as rapidly as the city. In the late 1960s, Leo became a director of the First National Bank, one of the city’s oldest and largest banks, and that experience led him to found the Western National Bank, whose mascot was a long-horn maverick, on the edge of town where my grandfather was also growing his business. When some of my US National Rowing Team colleagues and I struck out on our own to compete in the Olympic Trials in 1976, Leo sent us all “maverick” lapel pins as an encouragement .That was Leo. You would never have known that he was a very wealthy man. We grew up in a house just a few doors away from Leo and his family on a modest street in the eastern section of town. His son, Charlie, was an easygoing kid a few years older than me that we used enjoy hanging out with. Leo, like a lot of Dad’s good friends, didn’t need to let you know how rich he was. He was just interested in you, and what he could do for his community.

After buying the Old Highway 94 Ranch from our family in the mid-1960s, he continued to raise cattle on the 6,000-odd acres. As a member and enthusiast for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, he one organized a celebration cattle drive to mark the 100th anniversary of the Association. Leo and fellow ranchers drove 1,000 head of cattle from the Old Highway 94 Ranch along the highway to the center of Colorado Springs in the late fall of 1967. What a sight that must have been!

In 1976, Leo ran for the El Paso County Commission and served as a Commissioner for a number of years. The county created a board of five commissioners in that year and instituted a district representation scheme for the five districts. My father later ran for the same commission in 1983 and served until 1996.

Leo Ververs died on the ranch at the age of 75 in 1998. Charlie took on the ranch from there and continued to own it until its sale last year to developer and banker Jeff Smith, one of the founders of Classic Homes in Colorado Springs. The property had been listed for some time by Hayden Outdoor. It finally took a developer’s eye to see the $7 million price tag as reasonable—not in the context of a cattle ranch—but as an exurban development opportunity for fast-growing Colorado Springs. Just as the returning veterans and Cold War military spending had boosted the city’s post-war growth and fed the late twentieth century local fortunes, now the prospect of more military spending for the US Space Force Command promised new development riches. Smith’s plans for the Ververs Ranch, which he predicted would unfold over a 30-year timeframe, include 11,500 to 23,000 higher-end single family homes, a hotel, golf club, shopping center, schools and commercial developments—hinging largely on the prospect that the US Space Force Command would be permanently located at Schriever Air Force Base, just to the south of the Ververs property. Schriever AFB was the leading contender for the plum location as of the time of Smith’s $6.25 million purchase of the Old 94 Ranch from the Ververs estate. Also included in the deal, apparently, was a $100 million line of credit for future development. Clearly, Leo Ververs was even wealthier than we thought!

However, in on January 13, 2021—in the final days of the Trump Administration—the Secretary of the Air Force announced that the permanent command center would be going to Huntsville, Alabama. How much red-state vs blue-state politics played into this last-minute decision is unclear, but Colorado Springs definitely felt stung by the surprise decision. It is sure to be appealed in the new Biden Administration. However, the future of the Ververs Ranch hangs a bit in the balance.Meanwhile, the ranch goes on much as it has for the last 60 years. Cattle wander up to the barns, roundups occur regularly for branding and vaccinations, machinery needs tending, old heaps still decorate the nearby fields. The old ranch house has gotten a facelift. We peeked in and it looked nothing like the days when the Orr family lived there. I can still remember the big meals of beef and mashed potatoes piled high just after noontime for a ranch dinner before the last chores of the day were done. The antelope still roam freely on the open pastures. I wonder if they are still mercilessly hunted the way they were in the 1960’s. Some of the outbuildings are full of interesting old memorabilia. We took photos, but before this is all put out to the junkyard, someone should consider a historical sale.

 
The memories are distant, but at least one marker remains to remind Ron and I of how we became, most accidentally, Colorado cowboys about 6 decades ago. On the corner of the entrance to a very large Quonset barn is a foundation block poured with an interesting inscription. Clear as can be after 60 years, is the print of two very small cowboy boots and an inscription: 

RONNIE NOV. 1

BROWN   1961 

Active in business and civic circles, Brookhart once stated to the press “I believe a man should put something back into the community in which he lives.” He was one of the founders of the Pikes Peak Range Riders; riding a mule on the yearly outings. He was a director and president of the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo Association; member of the soil conservation society; and senior active member of Rotary International.  He was also vice president of the Allied Retail Lumber Dealer Association and, until his death, served on the board of directors of the Central Colorado Bank.[1]

I am reminded by a recent New York Times  article[2] of certain similarities between the economy of the early 1970s and those of the last years of the second decade of the 21stcentury. Auto workers are on strike, pressure on the Fed from an ultra-conservative and unpopular President to lower benchmark interest rates to bolster re-election prospects and a “war shock” sending waves through the interational oil market. In the 1970s, it was a much stronger union (union membership was about 25% of the total workforce throughout the 60’s—today it is only about 10%) demanding compensation after years of high inflation and strong profits. They got it. In 2019, it is weaker unions demanding reparations from give-backs granted in the Great Recession, and looking to claw back only a portion of the gap between wage increases (-2%) and cumulative price increases (+18%) in the decade since 2010. In 1972, it was Nixon assailing Fed Chief Arthur Burns. In 2019, it is Trump doing the same to Jerome Powell. In October 1973, the Arab states declared an oil embargo on natioins perceived as supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The embargo caused oil prices to rise nearly 400% in the space of a year. I can well remember the long lines for gas. The price of oil went from $3/barrel (about $18/barrel in today’s dollars) to $12 (about $63 per barrel, about the same as today’s actual prices after the strike on Saudi oil refineries in mid-September 2019). The 1973 embargo was a step change in the world oil market that has never been reversed. 

Certainly, US dependence on Middle Eastern oil supplies has declined, but prices—now for oil from Texas and North Dakotas instead of Saudi Arabia—have remained in this heightened level. The Middle East—some 45 years later—remains a hotbed of conflict and division, and the US finds itself and unwitting and ineffective participant. 

Among the headlines on Wednesday, April 2, 1975—the day election results were announced and Chuck Brown had won his first political race by a convincing margin—were the following:

· Mayor Richard Daley, patriarch of the great Chicago political machine, won re-election with 77% of the vote

· The South Vietnam Senate voted unanimously to oust President Nguyen Van Thieu and to sue for an end to the war. North Vietnam now controlled three-fourth’s of the South’s territory—the latest grab unopposed by South Vietnamese troops. America began making preparations to evactuate US citizens from Saigon. Over 700 Marines were sent in to try to keep order as ships arrived to evacuate thousands of civilian refugees. In Cambodia, Lon Nol, who overthrew King Norodom Sihanouk in 1970, abandoned the country, leaving it in the hands of the Red ____.

· Egypt asked the US and the Soviet Union to sponsor peace talks with Israel

· Natural gas shortages continue. Ford is asked to sign a bill removing Federal price controls on the wellhead price of gas. The forest industry warns of rising lumber prices due to the shortages of nitrogen fertilizer, which is made from natural gas.

· Farm prices declined for the 5th straight month, but consumer food prices continued to rise—a remnant of the “stagflation” malady of the 70’s economy

· The Dow Jones Average closed at 761

· Gun control was still a topic of heated discussion

· “Dear Abby” was dispensing advice to a worried wife to not question her husband’s frequent “boys night out”—or risk “ruining” their marriage

The morning papers reported that the 1975 city council elections had been a “180-degree turnabout” from the 1973 election when a slate of more liberal, “quality-of-life” candidates had been put in control of city council. So-called pocketbook issues were said to have ruled the 1975 election—reflected not only in the four top vote-getters who were are running on business and economic revival platforms—but the fact that six out of seven bond issues failed, including issues calling for more open space, museums and infrastructure. Only a $6 million airport improvement bond was approved; and a measure intended to provide pay for city council and mayor ($4,000 annually for council members; $6,000 for the mayor)

was roundly rejected.

Chuck Brown, running at-large, was the top vote-getter of the night, receiving 13,338 votes from the approximately 24,000 persons who voted in the election. Voters could cast their ballots for up to five candidates. The total number of votes were about 119,000, and the top five candidates, who received terms on the city council, accounted for 51% of the votes cast. The field was large (22) but not necessarily diverse (only 5 women). 

Chuck, Dick Dodge, Larry Ochs and Bob Isaac were all endorsed by a powerful Republican PAC called People for Economic Progress (“PEP”) that had been organized and funded among businessmen and conservatives in the area to promote candidates who would support a business-friendly, growth and reduced regulatory environment. Control of the city council had been handed two years prior to a group of more liberally-minded citizens who were endorsed by another PAC, the Citizens Lobby, who successfully elected a Colorado College professor, Fred Sonderman; Michael Bird; Andrew Marshall; Betty Krouse; Marty Kyer and Luis Cortez. Krouse, Kyer and Marshall all sought re-election. Only Marshall made it through. Sonderman did not seek re-election.

Speculation was rampant on election night about who would replace Andy Marshall as mayor. In Colorado Springs (until 1979), the mayor was elected from among the members of the city council, by the city council. Odd-on favorites were always the top vote-getters in the general election—but not always. Chuck expressed interest in being mayor that night, and some thought he could be good at it, but others, like second-place Dick Dodge, thought he lacked experience. In the end, it was Larry Ochs who got the nod—a calm and affable figure who could command the respect of all the council and the city. Chuck, Dick and Larry were all good friends and fellow Range Riders. It must have bee hard to run aggressively.

The new city council would consist of:

· Chuck Brown

· Dick Dodge

· Bob Isaac

· Larry Ochs

· Andy Marshall - liberal

· Leon Young

· Mike Bird - liberal

· Cortez - liberal

· Don Willman

Chuck attributed the PEP wins to a changed mood amongst the electorate: more economy in government, more industry boosterism, no more taxes in times of economic hardship. Ochs touted his campaign slogan “to get back on the right track”, and blamed the prior council for lack of credibility and trust, which was holding back business investment. Disappointed though Marshall was, he was encouraged by the fact that the new members were “reasonable people” and so he discounted the fears of a return to policies of urban sprawl. [3]

Dave Sellon, then president of the Homebuilders Association of Metropolitan Colroado Springs, put it more bluntly, saying that the vote “shows that people are concerned about the economy and having better leadership than we’ve had the last two years. Two years ago the issue was quality of life … but it’s been a disaster. The people we had talked about quality of life and didn’t perform. Now we’re getting some real leadership.”[4] The open space bond issue would have gone to the acquisition of about 2,000 acres of new land purchases, and use of federal matching funds for scenic easements and more open space purchases.

[1]“Ken Brookhart started it all 24 years ago: Building Center to be dedicated to founder’s memory”, Colorado Springs SUN, January 13, 1972, p. 9.

[2]Irwin, Neil; “A Rerun from the 1970s? This Economic Episode has Different Risks”, New York Times online edition, September 18, 2019.

[3]Hawes, Alexander, “Election winners predict administration tuned to economy,” Colorado Springs SUN, April 2, 1975, p. 3

[4]Saad, Chuck, “Defeat of open space bond called direct economic vote,” Colorado Springs SUN, April 2, 1975, p. 3