

### SHINING LIGHT

Revealing conversations with dedicated people

### BY CHARLES MCNAMARA

Smashwords Edition  
ISBN 978-0-692-27262-6  
Copyright ©2014 by Charles McNamara  
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014914608

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

DEDICATION

To Dennis Rhoades who gave me the idea for my on line magazine called Tributary and then hounded me until I turned it into this book. Dennis and I have been close friends for more than 30 years. It is a splendid thing to know someone who enjoys your writing and encourages you to do more of it.

To Don Carson, my journalism professor at the University of Arizona, who told me I was going to be a fine journalist. I pray he is not disappointed. He is now Professor Emeritus of Journalism at the University of Arizona and author of The Life and Times of Morris K. Udall.

INTRODUCTION

Dr _._ Kenell Touryan explores the harmony of faith and science in Points of Harmony _._

_________________________________________________

In this book you will meet, through interviews and portraits:

John Schaffner - cowboy poet and chuck wagon cook.  
Will Morton - carousel conservator.  
Marjorie Lansing Porter - Adirondack ballads collector  
Dr. Bonnie Clarke - Japanese Relocation Camp archaeologist  
Badger Puthoff - Mountain man re-enactor

My career as a journalist began with writing who-what-where-when-why news stories. But when I did my first interview I was fully engaged in the conversations that developed. While I was scribbling down the facts, I watched facial expressions, and got braver about asking deeper, more personal questions. It was a professional form of social interaction that I very much enjoyed. I was learning about the person and their character rather than just getting answers to my questions. So I stopped making notes as fast as I could and brought my tape recorder so I could listen more and join in the conversation.

In all of the 22 interviews published here, I felt I have developed a certain friendship with the other person. That is not simple journalistic fact gathering. And when the other person began to share very personal life details, I was uncomfortable at first, but learned that was why I had been called to this work -- to be a confidant, and with their permission, to share with you, the reader, what they had told me in their story.

I have been publishing these interviews for the past three years on my website called Tributary. One Flows Into Another. My inspiration for how to write the introductory paragraphs for each interview usually comes from the portraits I make of each person. I record every conversation and make side notes as I listen to what they are saying. However, I have discovered that by listening to their eyes in the portraits I hear another aspect of what they were trying to say.

A friend of mine, who is also a publisher, told me once, "I am enjoying your Tributary articles very much. I believe they are accomplishing your goal of celebrating the everyday, common and down-to-earth. After reading each one, I come away with the feeling of appreciation for each person, their passions and their contributions. This could even be a way to bridge 'misunderstandings' between various groups, just like telling your story almost always opens up doors of understanding among people. It removes the stereotypes and replaces them with real, complex and vulnerable people," Cheryl Touryan, Publisher, Indian Hills, Colo.

And so I would have to agree with Muriel Rukeyser who said, "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." Ms. Rukeyser was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism.

Charles McNamara, Littleton, Colorado

### TABLE OF CONTENTS

_Lisa Anderson introduces us to "_friendlationships _" in the_ Pursuing Marriage _interview_

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Dedication

Introduction

An indelible stain

Preserving the family store for four generations

There are no medals for kindness

Points of harmony

The deadliest job in America

Harp shooter

Shikata Ga Nai

An Irish storyteller

We're in this together

America's carousel conservator

The lone man

Mountain man Badger Puthoff

Capitol building tour guide

The ballads collector of Lake Champlain

Cowboy rhymes with thyme

Mount Evans fixture

Jesus in my knapsack

Practicing retirement

Pursuing marriage

Rehabilitation is gone

School lunch for 35,000

Gas, coffee and quinoa: A life changing pit stop

AUTHOR INFORMATION

About the author

Other books by Charles McNamara

Connect with Charles McNamara

### An Indelible Stain

Mike Keefe, The Denver Post's editorial cartoonist, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011

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Mike Keefe was born November 6, 1946 in Santa Rosa, California. He had two sisters and a brother. They lived in the San Francisco Bay area until Keefe was in second grade when they moved to St. Louis, MO, where Keefe graduated from Ritenour High School in 1964.

His brother died at age two and a half, devastating his mom and forcing his father, Ray Keefe, to find ways to care for her while earning a living. Running out of resources, he took the family back to California to be closer to other family. It didn't work. The Keefe family fell apart. Mike, at age 17, was on his own and started wandering. Mike's two sisters were put in foster homes. He lost contact with his family for years. His father cared for his wife until she died in 1971. Ray died in 1980.

Keefe hitchhiked across America for a couple of years, worked for a year at the Chevrolet plant in Leeds, a suburb of Kansas City, and then was drafted into the Marine Corps. After his discharge, using the GI Bill, he went to the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) and earned a Bachelor's, Master's and completed the coursework for a PhD in mathematics.

Of all the turmoil during the early1970s, the killing of four unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio by the Ohio National Guard affected Keefe the most. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds in 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others.

During this time, while studying at UMKC, Keefe started drawing cartoons for the University News. He became friends with Bill Sanders, cartoonist at The Milwaukee Journal. Sanders heard that Pat Oliphant, editorial cartoonist for The Denver Post, had taken a new job. He wrote a referral letter about Keefe to the Post who hired him in 1975. At that point he had drawn about 50 cartoons.

Since then, Keefe has won many awards including the Fischetti Editorial Cartoon Award, National Headliners Club, Society of Professional Journalists and Best of the West contests. He was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University (studied short story writing) and is a past president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He was a juror for the 1997 and 1998 Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011.

He  retired in late 2011 from The Denver Post after 36 years.

TRIBUTARY

Will you continue cartooning or try something new?

KEEFE

I'm still doing one, or more, cartoons a week for syndication (featured in more than 800 papers through Cagle.com) and the Post is running these. I'm enjoying the break. I want to try some experimental stuff. It's time to stretch out and try something with the art of the cartoon in a fine art sense.

In 1979 my wife, Anita, and I, vacationed in  Colmar, France. I was totally charmed by the town and drew the town square including a church and steeple. What I didn't know at the time was that my dad's unit, the12th Armored Division had liberated Colmar in World War II. I started doing early research on the unit and learned about Colmar. I recalled a newspaper clipping from my dad's trunk about him volunteering to take out a sniper in a church steeple. As he was coming down he was fired upon by his own men. It turns out the incident occurred in a nearby town. So, I had been very close to where he had been and didn't know it.

So now I am devoting a lot of time to writing a book, which is kind of about the 12th Armored Division but really it is turning into more about my relationship with my dad. I'm discovering who he was. He didn't know me and I didn't know him really. So, I'm trying to rediscover him. I have a lot of regrets I'm trying to address. I've been thinking about this for many years. I would always run out of time to delve into all this but now I have the time.

TRIBUTARY

How are the pieces of the puzzle coming together?

KEEFE

I've discovered that my dad rode a motorcycle across America in 1935 with his friend Jack Auxier. Jack recorded a tape about the two of them in 1982, two years after dad died. I have a transcript of the tape. It's full of great detail, a real period piece. I found a roster of Troop A, 92nd Recon Battalion of the 12th Armored and recognized the name Cecil Jones as someone dad had mentioned when I was a kid. I tracked Jones down to a small town in Oklahoma and called him. That's when he told me that he and my dad had been the best of friends, how my dad was a master on the motorcycle. Cecil had named his son Ray, after dad.

I also found the battalion surgeon from my dad's unit living in Tucson. He wrote a memoir on the 12th Armored called "Our War for the World" and it is one of the best war accounts I ever read. He didn't know my dad but the book describes the war and all the places my dad had been. I've been talking to him for several months trying to fill in some of the blanks.

So with all my research I come over here to the Metropolis Café (in Denver) every day and write 500 words.

TRIBUTARY

What got you thinking about national issues and politicians and drawing cartoons? Was it while you were trying to solve math problems?

KEEFE

Well it was the day the students were killed at Kent State in 1970. I was in a Marine Corps enlisted men's club when the news broke. The other Marines started cheering for the National Guard. Cheering was not my reaction.

TRIBUTARY

Do you get the sense that somehow you are speaking for the rest of us?

KEEFE

That's true. I consider myself a commentator just like an editorial writer or a columnist. I boil something down to a nugget about an issue and the reaction I get is, "I never thought about it like that. That's exactly how I feel." If I get those kinds of reactions I'm real happy. I also get very negative stuff too. Readers can get very angry. I feel like I am contributing to the dialog on issues in as concise a way as I can find, using humor; not always. Some of them are dramatic.

TRIBUTARY

On one hand you get to speak out but you also have to deal with the outrage coming back at you.

KEEFE

You develop a tough skin that I don't think I was born with. You realize that if you weren't getting those kinds of reactions you aren't doing the job right. You aren't being provocative enough. Now if I do something that outrages everybody, I may have stepped over the line in some way, and that has happened occasionally. When people who normally agree with what I have to say are outraged, then I have to think, well maybe I didn't censor myself enough on that.

TRIBUTARY

How do you fend it off?

KEEFE

It used to be I got a lot of letters. When somebody sits down to write a letter they think about it more and the comments are more interesting. Now with instant-gratification email people just shoot off nasty stuff and when I get that I just ignore it. If somebody calls and wants to talk to me about an issue, I'll talk to them. They say their piece and I explain what I was trying to do. I don't apologize but I try to clarify my position. It is a dialogue. I don't want to take pot shots from my foxhole and duck down and avoid any crossfire. I engage. I'm not above getting emotional about these issues myself so I try to channel it in some constructive way that might give somebody a laugh.

TRIBUTARY

It's been said that once you tag a politician with a caricature, it leaves an indelible stain that the public will often remember more than his portrait; more than his policies.

KEEFE

Nixon was the easiest subject for this. I actually drew cartoons of Nixon in the early 1970s -- his ski jump nose and more. You need to be looking for one thing that stands out, like Obama's ears. Everyone else seems to be doing his ears. That's his indelible mark. Yet you have to be careful not to follow the pack with the caricatures though.

TRIBUTARY

How would you describe the contribution you've made to political commentary?

KEEFE

I haven't given that a lot of thought over the years. It's sort of me and a piece of paper. I know that I'm contributing somehow. It's been really interesting this year. I get lots of emails now congratulating me. I had one this morning that just said, "Mike we miss you". That's gratifying. I don't think the world would be any different if I hadn't drawn a cartoon in my life. I know I've affected people emotionally at time and intellectually at time. So that's satisfying.

Related links:

 12th Armored Division background)

Keefe's website

### Preserving the family store for four generations

Coralue Anderson with the original display for Dr. Hamer's Home Cures.

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Their great grandfather Henry Kneisel used to sell Dr. Hamers High Altitude and Dry Climate Home Cures. Today they feature Colorado-made products including jams, syrups, sauces and gift foods.

Dr. LeGear's Heave and Cough Remedy for horses was a modest seller, after Emil Anderson became partners with Kneisel, along with Scandinavian cheeses for the miners most of whom came from Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The demand for Heave and Cough Remedy is gone but not the demand for Scandinavian specialties. Lovers of Scandinavian foods come to the store every time they are anywhere near Georgetown.

On a shelf behind the cheese counter sits an old delivery container painted with "Kneisel and Anderson, Staple and Fancy Groceries, Georgetown, Colorado." Wendy and Coralue Anderson have preserved everything in the original store, a major undertaking and a large part of why '"heritage tourism" continues to draw visitors to Georgetown. "Don't you ever get rid of these old items or antiques," their dad, Henry Kneisel Anderson repeated often.

"That's why we still have the store; to maintain the heritage," commented Coralue who will often show interested visitors artifacts such as 150-year-old tea canisters from Japan, an original Eveready battery display and unopened boxes of Fairbank's Gold Dust Washing Powder or Eureka Harness Oil. "Georgetown is one of the few mining towns that never burned. I think people come here to get a feeling of what life was like during the mining days," commented Coralue.

They grew up sweeping the floors, stocking shelves, making deliveries. Even though Coralue taught school for 33 years in various school districts in Colorado, California and Oregon, she often worked in the store.

Wendy and Coralue Anderson, Kneisel and Anderson Store, Georgetown, Colorado

_________________________________________________

Wendy taught Swedish at the University of Washington. When their father passed away in 1993, the two came together again to run the store. Wendy pauses for a moment to write down a list of items a local customer has selected. "We still have credit slips for the locals," she explains. "We always have. Before I-70 was completed in the early 1970s, we used to make deliveries here, Silver Plume and Empire twice a day. We would call ahead to see who needed what and many people used the charge slips."

Both still live in Georgetown. Wendy, who married her Georgetown high school sweetheart, lives in, and continues the work of preservation on, the original Victorian family home, the kitchen structure of which is the original log cabin from the 1860s.

Kneisel and Anderson is not only the oldest store in Georgetown but also one of the oldest continually-owned family-operated stores in Colorado. It was started by the Guanella Brothers. Henry Kneisel worked as a baker for the Guanellas and later bought the business.

Related links:

 Archive photo of grandfather Emil Anderson, a Swedish immigrant.

 Georgetown \- a National Historic Landmark District and American Treasure

Georgetown events to raise funds for preservation

There are no medals for kindness

Gordon Rozanski carried wounded from LZ Xray, the first battle with North Vietnamese requlars.

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Vietnam 1965 – Capt. Gordon Rozanski flew into Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley on the supply helicopter. He was the supply officer for the 1st Battalion 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). It was the first full scale battle between American and North Vietnamese troops.

As the chopper landed he jumped off and started unloading supplies as bullets ripped into the side of the aircraft. He picked up wounded lying on the ground and laid them inside the chopper. Several bodies were brought over by soldiers who had wrapped their fallen friends in green rain ponchos.

"Some of the guys had dressings on their wounds, some did not. I held bandages on faces, on sucking chest wounds. One man whose arm was almost gone needed a tourniquet. We were lying on the floor of the chopper. They were stacked on each other. The ships were overloaded. We just couldn't stop. It had to be done. I wasn't going to let somebody die because I might get my hands bloody," Rozanski recalls. He flew supplies in, and dead and wounded out, day and night for two days.

"As I was reloading back at Camp Holloway on one of the round trips, I talked with five solders who were going home in a few days. They saw I needed help and volunteered to fly back in with me even though they didn't have to. Five went back in"...he paused and looked down..."only two came back."

"After I left Vietnam I made it a point to go and talk to the parents of the three who died. I didn't have to, but we were like family. They figured if I was going back in, they would go to. Their friends were back there," he said.

The pilots who flew the helicopter received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

One month later, Rozanski was leading B Company 1/7 through rice paddies near the village of Bong Son in an expansion of the operation that had taken them to the Ia Drang area.

"I could hear the 'thunk' of an NVA mortar being fired behind us. I looked down and right in front of me I saw the tail fin of the mortar go into the rice paddy. The explosion knocked me on my keister. I was covered with mud and a little dazed. I didn't think I was wounded. I got up and we moved toward the village in front of us.

"We stopped to wait on our helicopter gunships to take out some of the fire coming from the village. A sniper round hit me in my left elbow. My guys put me in a sling and bandages and we fought our way to the edge of the village about nightfall and stopped.

"I was flown out that night to the brigade aid station. The doctors pulled off my boots and they were full of blood. They realized I had shrapnel wounds from my chest to my ankles. They patched me up and put a body cast on me since the only thing holding my arm on was skin.

"The only thing I remember was that I was covered with mud, and, I couldn't go to the bathroom. I had tears in my eyes. I wanted to go to the bathroom."

Two days of flying put him into Lowry Air Force Base in Denver and he was taken to Fiztsimons Army Hospital.

"I was still nasty dirty. The surgeons cut my cast off and put me in a bed. I could finally go to the bathroom. Several nurses came in to bathe me. The head nurse was a Major, a good Irish girl. I was so grateful to finally be cleaned up."

Fitzsimons specialized in orthopedic survey. Reattaching his forearm and rebuilding his elbow required surgery every week for the next six months.

"The surgeon who built a new elbow for me was Col. Paul Brown who I will never forget."

Rozanski was put back on active duty and sent as an advisor to a National Guard unit in Rochester, MN. He was in charge of next of kin notifications for the next year.

"I would read the telegram and spend some time with the family. I would always follow up with every one of them. I got the body to the funeral home and helped the family with other details like insurance.

"I dressed all the bodies for the funeral homes. I made sure the soldier's uniform was correct, that the ribbons were in the right place. I would look at their faces and remember the soldiers who died at Ia Drang.

"At that time I was sent back to Fiztsimons so they could rebuild my hand and then it was time to retire. I wanted to go back to Vietnam but left the Army on February 4, 1971 at Fitzsimons."

Rozanski became an antique dealer and appraiser.

Related links

 Capt. Rozanski with B Company 1/7

Landing zone X-Ray: The first encounter

The first full scale battle between the U.S. and North Vietnam troops

 Ia Drang - The battle that convinced Ho Chi Minh he could win

The second encounter: Battle of Bong Son

 Paul W. Brown, M.D.

 History of Fitzsimons Army Hospital, Denver, CO

 We Were Soldiers Once...And Young by Hal Moore and Joe Galloway

### Points of Harmony

Dr. Kenell Touryan speaks five languages and played violin in the Denver Philharmonic Orchestra (formerly the Centennial Philharmonic) for 12 years

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Throughout his career, Ken Touryan has been deeply involved in the physical sciences, Bible study and explaining his conviction that the two are not mutually exclusive.

A Fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation, Dr. Touryan has a PhD in Aerospace and Mechanical Science from Princeton University. He recently retired from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO where he managed U.S. Department of Energy projects between American industry and former Soviet block countries. He is the recipient of a number of a number of awards for his work.

He holds a number of patents for his work in photovoltaics and has published more than 90 papers in scientific journals. Along the way he served on the Boards of Colorado Christian University and World Vision. For more than 20 years he served as an elder in his church, Evergreen Fellowship, Evergreen, CO. After retirement from NREL, Ken served as Vice President for Research and Development at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan, Armenia for seven years.

He is now involved in trying to traverse the sometimes contentious border between the secular naturalists and those who believe in a Creator God. Along with his wife Cheryl, and daughter Lara, they are developing materials for parents and teachers centering on the theme "Wonders in our World" which develops points of harmony between science and Christian faith.

TRIBUTARY

Now that you are retired from full-time scientific work you are shifting your focus to helping Christian groups understand more about the life view of scientists.

TOURYAN

Our research shows that Evangelical Christians in the United States have an unwarranted fear of science. As a result parents are discouraging their young people from looking seriously at science. There's a fear that they are going to lose their young people to the secular viewpoint because they will learn things like evolution and will say, "There's no such thing as creation." As a result, young Christians are not well represented in most of the sciences, particularly the biological sciences, which means that we are losing our place in the public arena when it comes to discussing serious philosophical and ethical issues.

In reality, there's nothing to be afraid of. We want to help Christians overcome insecurity and apprehension in dealing with scientific matters. In general our society has moved so far toward looking at everything through a scientific, technological lens that we have lost a sense of wonder and this affects one's spiritual life. I think this does our kids a great disservice, as well as the scientific community. There is magic and mystery in so many things. The beauty. The poetry. We can appreciate the meaning and purpose of life from two perspectives – science and faith. We need to foster a non-controversial, awe-inspiring appreciation of both.

TRIBUTARY

And scientists, are they reluctant to engage in discussions about Christianity?

TOURYAN

When you ask a scientist, "What is the purpose of your life, who are you, what comes after death, you raise philosophical questions which science is not even allowed to talk about. Science is a very well-defined system that is empirically based on testing and measurement. But, the minute you raise questions of origin, meaning, or purpose, it crosses outside those boundaries into philosophy and religion.

The ultimate question is the purpose and meaning of life. These issues go beyond the purview of science and science draws the line here and says, "It is not for us to determine." You can give technical answers but then you come to a point where it becomes philosophical. You can't measure it. You can't count it. Science often can only provide partial answers.

TRIBUTARY

Where have you found common ground?

TOURYAN

Christians are afraid science will contradict the Bible, or that our reliance on technology and science is becoming society's new faith and the belief in God is becoming irrelevant. We can harmonize science and faith. One is not to the elimination of the other. Good science honors God. Believers are enlightened by scientific explanation. This is where I see the two being complimentary rather than one opposing the other.

Einstein was full of awe when his equations matched what was in the universe. "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind," he said.

TRIBUTARY

Is that the basis for your book  "A Cord of Multiple Strands?"

KEN TOURYAN

Yes. The issue is very sensitive in both the science and faith communities. One bashes the other as nonsense when it is not. Or they recognize these are two circles that should stay apart. Don't mess them up. In reality science raises religious questions and religion raises scientific questions so they cross each other. Both are afraid of each other. A better approach would be to explore the boundary where they cross over to see if we can harmonize things. They do cross over and there is a point of harmony that you have to consider.

We appreciate the fact that scientists are passionate. They are enthusiastic about their work. Scientists in general are there because they love their work and the expectation of discovery. On the other hand, there is the ego side. Many won't throw their theories away. They hang on to them tightly. They fight for then. Only the true scientists recognize there is ego involved in even the most objective physics.

TRIBUTARY

Was there a point in your career where you were more scientist than Christian or, saw things in science that made you questions your Christian beliefs?

TOURYAN

Oh yeah, especially in the discussion between evolution and creation. I grew up in a home where six-day creation was accepted. But science showed us that the age of the universe is in billions of years so I started questioning this difference. In time I realized this, and many others issues, can be resolved. And I realized both have their inaccuracies and overstatements.

TRIBUTARY

I watched The Decalogue* as you suggested. The first episode representing the first of the Ten Commandments (I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before me) depicts a scientist who calculates the thickness of the ice in a neighborhood pond and reassures his son it is safe to go skating. The ice breaks and the boy dies. I guess the point is that ponds are not predictable and that the reliance on the computer, which did the calculations, is a false God? Or, that the Ten Commandments are not black and white rules but cautions about living in a complex world. Is that the point, that while science and technology are helpful, they alone are not enough for the moral and ethical struggles we face?

TOURYAN

You are right. This movie depicts a man who based his life's meaning on scientific inquiry. He did not believe in life after death and had no room for religious questions. His young son however kept asking those questions. Ultimately, after his son's death by drowning, the father's eyes were opened and he realized that there is more to life than simply the naturalistic, secular search for truth. It is often in these crisis moments of life that we realize who or what we have been worshipping.

TRIBUTARY

Your wife Cheryl is an accomplished writer and editor and Lara Touryan-Whelan has a doctorate in Material Science. They have collaborated on a new publication on these issues.

TOURYAN

Yes, it is called  "Wonders in our World: Insights from God's Two Books." It is a book for curious minds that weaves together wonders in nature and Scripture, complementing answers from the physical world with answers which Scripture provides.

Related links

The Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science

 Realism and Antirealism

*The Decalogue is a 1989 Polish television drama series directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski and co-written by Kieślowski with Krzysztof Piesiewicz. It consists of ten one-hour films, each of which represents one of the Ten Commandments (Decalogue) and explores possible meanings of the commandment—often ambiguous or contradictory—within a fictional story set in modern Poland.

### The deadliest job in America

Daniel Mills working 150 feet in the air on a cellular antenna tower

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Daniel Mills has the deadliest job in America \-- climbing towers to install cellular telephone antennas, coax and microwave dishes. Based in Arizona he travels throughout the West sometimes away from home for more than a month at a time.

"The worst site so far was a 300-foot tower in North Dakota. 40 below zero. 20 mile-an-hour wind. Everything works different in the cold; slow motion. The ropes are stiff and it's hard to move with heavy clothing on. Then add the weight of my tools and parts. It makes the job much harder. Miserable," according to Mills.

Tower climbers, while one of the smallest specialized construction groups, face the worst hazards, according to OSHA. Logging jobs are rated as the second most dangerous occupation.

Mills, 28, has worked on towers as high as 500 feet in the White Mountains of Arizona. "I'm never worried about me or my equipment because I check it constantly. I am 100 percent tied off all the time. And I double check and double check at every move," according to the nine-year veteran.

"Recently while I was climbing a monopole, a crow came out of nowhere and flew at me. I flinched with both hands and let go of the tower. If I hadn't been hooked onto the safety cable and my fall arrest harness, I definitely would have fallen. That was scary.

"We have safety meetings every week and I always learn something new to think about from hearing how someone else around the country was hurt or killed. It makes me think, and slow down. I force myself never to be in a big hurry.

"I guess the reason I do it is because I'm outside, every day is interesting, I get to see unusual places from up in the air." Mills works for Arizona Construction Site Services in Phoenix, AZ.

### Harp Shooter

Courtney Hershey Bress, principal harpist for the Colorado Symphony Orchestra

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The glaring sun burned in the still, humid air. The clouds had fled. The bugs had not. Courtney Hershey Bress was starting to sweat in places under her helmet and harness. She laid down in the hot sand and looked at the rows of targets in front of her, and beyond at the pine-covered hills around Columbia, South Carolina.

The loudspeaker from the range tower blared, "Ready on the firing line. Commence firing."

With hands that flew over the strings of her harp, she flicked the safety lever off. With eyes that focused on pieces for harp by Debussy, she aligned the sights of her assault rifle with the target. She squeezed the trigger. The target fell. And the next one. And the next one.

All that mattered here was that she could shoot. The Army qualified her on her first try.

Days later, she sat alone, in the middle of the night, on the edge of a foxhole she had dug. She remembered the hours spent as a child sitting on the living room floor at the base of her mother's harp, listening to her play.

"Mom, I want to play the harp," her voice echoed in her memory.

TRIBUTARY

How did you end up in the U.S. Army?

HERSHEY BRESS

My teacher at the Eastman (School of Music, Rochester, NY) had posted an audition for the U.S. Army Field Band. I looked at it and said to myself, "Right. Me in the army? Yeah, right."

She saw me looking at the audition posting and came out of her studio and looked at me and said:

"Courtney you are taking that audition."

"No I'm not."

"Yes you are and you are going to win it."

"Which I did," she explained.

So one week after I graduated I was in basic training at Ft. Jackson, SC, which was quite a wakeup call. It was in the heat of the summer. They treated musicians just like everyone else. I had to go through all of it. I was very good at riflery. I qualified right away and they were shocked. I had shot air rifles at summer camp growing up so I was a pretty good shot. I actually liked that part of it. I struggled in other areas, but not with the rifle.

Somehow I made it. It was the worst eight weeks of my life. Men I have talked to about basic training say for them it was more fun. But for women it affects them emotionally more. I had horrible nightmares when I got out. But now it's comical. If I ever have a dream about the army now it is very comical. I'm glad I did it. I was in for three years.

TRIBUTARY

Were you based in Washington, D.C.?

HERSHEY BRESS

I was based at Ft. Mead in Maryland right outside of Washington, D.C. There are three premier bands in the army. The Army Band is the DC band. Then there is the Army Field Band. They are the touring band and do all the PR. Then there's the West Point Band.

The field band tours the U.S. three times a year so I've seen 49 out of 50 states and been to almost every town you can think of. And I've played in the best concert halls and some real cow barns.

The army really trained me for being in an orchestra. I learned to sight read very well, which is very hard to do on the harp. I played several concertos every year on the road where we did not have time to practice. I would just show up, warm up and go out there to perform. We had arrangements for the concert band to accompany me as the soloist.

TRIBUTARY

So you played more than just John Philip Sousa marches. Did you have to sit out for the march selections?

HERSHEY BRESS

No, I played a ton of marches but the arrangements for harp were horrible. I edited every single one of them. There is not a lot of band music written for harp so it can be hard. We played all kinds of music though -- popular, marching, classical -- everything you could think of because it was PR and meant to be fun.

TRIBUTARY

They couldn't talk you into re-enlisting after your three years?

HERSHEY BRESS

My dream always was to be an orchestral harpist so, as my enlistment came to an end, I started taking auditions with various symphonies. But I decided I should get my masters. So I called a teacher I knew in Chicago who teaches at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. I auditioned for her and got in, got a scholarship and moved to Chicago.

I auditioned for the Chicago Symphony to get on her substitute list (she was and still is the principal harpist). While working on my master's I played with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago which is a training orchestra and with the Chicago Symphony whenever I was needed. I was very poor financially but it was a great year.

At the end of that year a job opened up here with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. I still had a semester left on my master's but the school said if I would come back and do a big recital they would give me the few credits I needed to finish.

So, I moved to Denver and I've lived here for more than 10 years. Colorado is a dream come true for me. I started skiing out here when I was three.

TRIBUTARY

You have been the  principal harpist for the Colorado Symphony for those 10 years. What led you to seek orchestral work?

HERSHEY BRESS

I almost avoided it completely. I was in the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony in high school. I was terrified! Terrified of performing with an orchestra! I was pretty good at it. I was just terrified. The same was true my first year at Eastman.

I had to take a year off to deal with some family problems which was a hard period in my life. When I finally got back to school that's when I really started to thrive. I won a national competition. I started auditioning for everything I could. I played in every orchestra I could. I never turned anything down. I went on the 1996 tour with the Eastman Wind Ensemble to Japan.

This is when I fell in love with what I did; with the instrument; with performing; with wanting to be the best I could possibly be.

TRIBUTARY

You chose a profession where it is difficult to make a living. So many people in the arts spend years developing their talent and get little in return. Why do you do that?

HERSHEY BRESS

You get your own reward. I get a complete high playing on stage. It is a thrill. I love what I do and I am happy. I may not make a lot of money but I'm happy and to me that's much more important than money.

And, I am immersed in music of all kinds. For me it's all about emotion -- all of your emotions and senses. Its love, its hate, anguish, death, everything. Every composer has their own way. If they had a harder life, you hear that in their music. One of my favorite orchestral composers is (Gustav) Mahler . His music tears me apart in good ways and in sad ways. I get so emotional playing it. Sometimes it is the most beautiful thing in the world and sometimes I just want to cry.

I often get goose bumps while I am playing because I can add my expressions to the composer's. When you are learning to play you learn how to hit the right notes, but it is really what is between the notes that counts. The expressiveness.

In my car I never listen to classical music, ever -- unless I'm studying it. I listen to a lot of rowdy music. I just like to let loose and have a good beat going. I've gotten pumped up for a concert before listening to Hip Hop. It depends on my mood.

For me it's a lifestyle. I can't just turn it off at the end of the day. I know I need to practice. Every time I walk past my harps I swear they talk to me, "When are you coming to practice?"

TRIBUTARY

Do you have a sense that people just don't care about a community-supported orchestra or are we struggling to find a new formula for their support?

HERSHEY BRESS

I think it is a struggle to find the right formula and I think we are on the right track now. We (Colorado Symphony) have new management who are finding a new way for us for the future. You will see us reach out more, more small chamber performances, smaller orchestra settings, rather than just trying to get everyone to come to Boettcher (Concert Hall).

We had a great summer season at Red Rocks last summer. We were the backup orchestra for Chicago. For the first time ever, Sarah McLachlan had an orchestra. We felt like rock stars doing things like that.

When I perform outside the symphony orchestra setting, I talk to my audience. I tell them what I'm doing, what this piece means to me, how the instrument works. They love the performance because they have related to me. That is a big part of what we have to change, to reach out and not be formal.

The orchestra wants to reach out to do more music education in the schools. We already do some of that but this coming year our goal is to do more.

After a lot of concerts we have what we call a "talk back." The conductor and soloist will go into the audience after the performance and do an informal question and answer session. People can see you are a real person, not just up there performing.

TRIBUTARY

You give private lessons. What do you tell your students about their future in music.

HERSHEY BRESS

I've been very honest with them that the music scene is extremely difficult to succeed in especially if you want an orchestral job. It doesn't matter how good you are. It has to be your day. If you are that good and you fit that orchestra you get that job. But it is hard.

To this very day I get up every morning and I say, I am so lucky that I have my job. There are so many harpists out there that would like to have my job. But there are no positions for them.

I also tell them when they get to music school they should get a double major. Then you are not just a harp performance major. I suggest maybe a music education major as well. Or, something totally different such as math or science. You have to make a life for yourself and with the harp you can move into a city, get a good website, start teaching and you can make a life for yourself. You can freelance. There is a good demand for harpists performing at various events.

TRIBUTARY

If I wanted to hear some great classical harp pieces, which composers would you recommend?

HERSHEY BRESS

Any piece by Marcel Grandjany.

Maurice Ravel.  Introduction and Allegro.

Gustav Mahler.  Symphony No. 5

Claude Debussy.  Danse sacrée et danse profane

Shikata Ga Nai

Archaeologist Dr. Bonnie Clarke

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It appears there is nothing left of Amache except a small cemetery with gravestones and other memorials. The swirling wind doesn't remember. The prairie grass twitches indifferently. The concrete barracks foundations are motionless.

But buried below this forlorn landscape are pieces of ceramic tea cups, Go game tokens) hair barrettes, eggshells, rounded stones from the nearby Arkansas River and residual pollen from plants grown on the site. For archaeologist Bonnie Clark, Ph.D., these are glimpses into the daily lives of the more than 7,000 Japanese Americans removed from California and forced to exist in southeast Colorado during World War II. Clues build stories, stories the internees have rarely shared.

After two summers of sifting shovelfuls of dirt, the story is unfolding. What has she discovered and what can we learn from the University of Denver's Amache Research Project?

CLARK

The most amazing single discovery we made was in one of the vegetable gardens near a barracks. In the pollen samples we found pollen from Canna.)

Canna is a relative of ginger and banana. In Hawaii people eat the root of the plant like Taro. And we found it at Amache. Where on earth anyone would have gotten Canna during World War II is completely beyond me. There is no way we could have found the pollen without the plant having been there. This got me thinking about the tie between Amache and Hawaii. The government did not intern the Japanese in Hawaii, even though that's where Pearl Harbor happened, because the whole island would have shut down. They needed all those people. I suspect someone at Amache wrote to a friend or family member and had them send a little root.

These are the minute details we discover as we explore the routine of daily life. You get this texture that people who were there don't write down because it doesn't seem important. None of the accounts of Amache mention Canna, or how laundry was hung in the back, not the front yards. They didn't think it was important to their story.

We begin to see the incredible effort it took to make this seem like home, to bring in things that allowed them that dignity. The Japanese have a phrase, "shikata ga nai," which literally means "nothing can be done about it." But what I hear them saying in that expression is, "You can uproot us and send us to the middle of nowhere but you are not going to destroy who we are."

I find this incredibly inspiring. The evidence of this kind of ingenuity is something their descendents today are very proud of.

TRIBUTARY

And what about the eggshells?

CLARK

In front of many of the barracks we found evidence of small personal gardens, called  entryway gardens. These are deeply rooted in Japanese culture. In one garden we found crushed egg shells that were sprinkled throughout. That's not accidental. We've never found that in any of the other places we excavated on the site. So they are composting. And not everyone has access to eggs.

Someone who worked at the mess hall, or at the ranch where they raised chickens, was connected to one of the residents. Together they were turning trash into something valuable to make the garden beautiful.

This to me is a statement of human dignity. I can be in the mind of this person who was thinking, "I know how to make the earth a better place and I'm going to do it in this place, despite the fact that my country doesn't think I have a right to be here. And I'm going to do it in this quiet, quiet way."

I love moments like this. This is not a famous temple or a place of golden idols. This story is very subtle yet powerful at the same time.

What we have seen in these entryway gardens at the camp are little concrete ponds some of which held carp from the Arkansas River. They did not have access to koi. People also caught snapping turtles and put them in the ponds. They had graveled areas. They also transplanted wild plants. There is a real variety. It was an expressive space where people could change that military landscape where everything was exactly alike.

These discoveries also helped us understand their networks. In one garden they employed broken water pipe as planters. The trash from the camp was dumped outside the barbed wire fence. So this was somebody who knew somebody who was on the construction crew, or on the crew that picked up the trash.

TRIBUTARY

What else did you see at Amache that you didn't expect?

CLARK

One of the things we found, and it's still out there, is a mochi pounder.

This is an annual tradition during the Japanese New Year. They get together as a community and make mochi sweets, which brings good luck. I met a man who used the pounder to make mochi at the camp. It typically is a carved bowl but at Amache they made it out of concrete. You can still see on the outside the marks from the barrel staves. They poured the concrete into the bottom half of a barrel and then busted the barrel off.

During one of the internee reunions I met a woman who showed me her scrapbook with pictures of mochi pounding.

TRIBUTARY

How did the University of Denver (DU) get involved with Amache?

CLARK

My idea for the project was in line with DU's history of outreach to Japanese Americans. The university has always been affiliated with the United Methodist Church although we are not a religious school. The Methodist church throughout its history had done a lot of outreach to the Japanese American community. During the war Caleb Gates, the Chancellor of DU, had written Colorado Governor Ralph Carr.

Gates was concerned that the talented, college-age kids, were behind this barbed wire and that they should be in college. So with Carr's blessing DU recruited students at the camp and brought them to Denver. They could do that because they were a private university. So seeing these Japanese Americans get what might appear to be preferential treatment would not upset the taxpayers.

After Amache was dismantled (1945), the hospital building was brought to the campus and used as temporary housing for returning GIs.

When I came back to DU to start teaching I had read the report of the first systematic exploration of Amache that had been done by an archaeology firm working with a Denver Japanese American organization. I was just fascinated by what they said they were finding. It was just about to become a National Historic Landmark, which meant to me that more people would start visiting the site and potentially this would cause damage to what had yet to be fully explored. I wanted to get in on the ground floor as an archaeologist and start to protect the resources so they would be of value to everyone involved. I was very lucky in my timing.

TRIBUTARY

Before your explorations at the Granda Camp you had excavated the home of Amache and John Prowers in Boggsville, CO, for your masters thesis.

CLARK

It's funny how a thread was established before I even thought of the Amache Project. Amache Ochinee Prowers' father was a Cheyenne sub-chief and religious leader who was killed at the Sand Creek Massacre. She had married John Wesley Prowers (Prowers County is named after him), a cattle rancher. The mayor of Lamar suggested Amache as the name for the camp's post office during the war since the town of Granada already had a post office.

It was certainly an apt name for the camp. Amache, especially after Sand Creek, was a woman caught between two worlds and one that she could never go back to. So here are these Japanese Americans sent out on the plains of Colorado having left a world then cannot go back to. So, I think it was a fitting tribute to her.

TRIBUTARY

Were there extensive effects of the internment on the prisoners, or were they so good at making the adjustment that it did not bother them?

CLARK

In the long run the effect was a great deal of loss. Most lost whatever they left back at home. They lost their property. Many of them destroyed any possessions that would link them to Japan. The whole experience was traumatic to the point that many of the internees never talked about it. Some of their children suggest the silence was in part because they didn't want to poison them against the United States. They also decided to put it behind them and just move on. Shikata ga nai.

I have a friend whose parents were in camp and she knows almost nothing about Japanese culture and she blames that on internment. She feels, "We would have more connection to our own history, to our ethnicity, if that had not happened."

These people were a very transnational, global community. Before the war, they would send their children back to Japan to be educated, to meet their grandparents, to do business, to learn Japanese culture. They were involved in international trade and the war cut all that off. It divided the Japanese Americans from the rest of the Japanese Diaspora.

The impact was not only economic but also psychological. The internment experience for many was degrading and shameful. This came out during the 1980s when a congressional commission investigated the reasons for the internment. They invited internees to testify about the camps and this accelerated the process of reclaiming this history. The government knew this was going to be traumatic so they brought in social workers to help them deal with the psychological effects of reliving the story.

So knowing this, the most important thing we do with our studies at Amache is provide a way for families and others who are connected to the survivors to reclaim that history and be able to start talking about it. We can take them to the barracks where their parents were, or take the young children to the place where they grew up.

Two summers ago, while at the site, I took a man born at the camp to the first place he ever lived but had never been back. He brought his kids and his grandkids and it was incredibly moving.

Two of my volunteers this summer were little girls in camp. Their parents didn't talk about it but they will be out there reclaiming that history shovel full by shovel full. We're bringing it back up and we're having this conversation.

It's a reminder that when people are feeling threatened that civil liberties are often the first thing to go. Fear and racism are a very, very dangerous mix.

People often think we are just treasure hunters. If that's all we do then why can't anyone just poke around and find treasures. We are as much anthropologists and historians as archaeologists. Archaeology is a way to draw people's attention to a history or issues that they otherwise might not be interested in. So we get their attention with the artifacts, but then we get to talk about the civil liberties lessons of a place like Amache. And have a conversation about human dignity in the face of injustice.

I had always been interested in this issue of how do people live out their identities on a daily basis. And specifically how do they do that in times when their identities are under siege. So the day before Pearl Harbor these folks are a certain people and the day after Pearl Harbor, they wake up and they are the same person but all the politics around who they are have changed radically. At that moment, do you still serve rice in a porcelain bowl from Japan? Do you still drink sake? Do you still celebrate Obon?

What are those decisions that you make? The camp is a great place to explore these questions. And, very quickly, it became clear to me that this was a chance to do a really different kind of archaeology where we do the exploration in conversation with people who had experienced that past themselves, or whose families had experienced it.

When we find these little glimpses, these for me are the magic moments that bring history down to that level where we can all understand it, where we all have shared the experience. These are the windows that archaeology provides.

By the way, there is a lovely children's book now called "The Pink Dress." Leslie Kitashima-Gray, the daughter of one of the internees at Amache wrote it. It is her mother's story of her 9th grade graduation at Amache.

DONATIONS

Please consider a tax-deductible donation to the  Friends of Amache to help with preservation efforts. Funds help maintain the site, create educational materials and assist other Amache-related preservation groups. Send to: PO Box 1234, Denver, CO 80202.

Related links

Video about life in Camp Amache

DU Amache Research Project

Dr. Bonnie Clark DU Portfolio

Testimonies of Japanese incarcerated at U.S. camps

 Photos of various Japanese internment camps

An Irish Storyteller

Mick Bolger weaves stories and music together with a group named Colcanon

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In the town of Ballybay, in the County of Monaghan, four roads converge beside Lough Mór. The Dromore River meanders south of this Irish town. Tommy Makem, The Godfather of Irish Music, sang about a young lass in Ballybay who had a wooden leg to which she tied a string and played it like a fiddle.

Along Clones Road sat an old nursing home where another storyteller was born in 1951. A nun wrapped the infant, Mick Bolger, in a blanket and placing her hand on his head, whispered a prayer in Gaelic that the Lord would guide his steps.

Mick listened to many stories over the years in the places where Irish stories are shared; living rooms of neighbors, on the bus to school and later in the pubs. The Irish would call him a seanchaí (pronounced shan-a-kee), a teller of Irish stories. He ended up marrying a lass who played the fiddle and together they developed Colcannon, an Irish group that artfully weaves traditional Irish music with their own tunes and of course Mick's endless stories.

Formed in 1984 in Boulder, Colorado, Colcannon has released eight CDs encompassing various forms of Irish music on the Oxford Road Records label in Denver. The band's recent CD, The Pooka and the Fiddler, is a story by Mick Bolger with original music by Colcannon which received the  Parent's Choice Award for artistic merit from the Parent's Choice Foundation.

The Emmy®-award winning PBS special, "Colcannon in Concert," filmed at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts has aired nationwide. Colcannon was named ensemble-in-residence at Colorado College, the first non-classical Irish music group to be awarded this position.

TRIBUTARY

It seems like you love to hear stories as well as tell them. Where did you start hearing the old stories?

BOLGER

When I was a kid there were certain houses in every neighborhood that were known as céllí (pronounced kay-lee) houses. Céllí has to do with the notion of coming together. It was a place where people would drop in and socialize. In the evenings neighbors would just walk in, no knocking on the door. Knocking was kind of rude. They would have a cup of tea and chat, share stories and sing songs. Stories about local lore. I loved to just sit and listen. Even in high school the songs were around. If we went somewhere on the school bus a lot of that singing would go on. Everybody just knew the old songs. And a lot of these songs were the ones I sang when Colcannon first formed.

TRIBUTARY

Irish lore ascribes the talent of the seanchai as gift from a higher power, maybe even from the fairies.

BOLGER (Laughing)

There's certainly a tradition of thinking of music in Irish terms as not so much composing it as almost channeling it. That if you listen in the right places and at the right times, tunes will be given to you. It's not a way of apply knowledge to construct something but applying a knowledge to gather it in. And there is a feeling that having done that, it really doesn't belong to you. It was given and you were the receptacle. That's how we feel in Colcannon as a group. It's an odd sort of situation, like being in a céllí house, it's not competitive and its not show-offy. None of us is interested in geewhizzery where people are saying, "Wow what great players."

What we would like to hear is, "Wow what a great tune." And we try and mix it up so that one song has you in tears one minute and the next song has you laughing, next one feeling something dramatic, and the next one more reflective just as an evening in somebody's house. Nobody there is showing off and everyone is contributing to that atmosphere. And their storytelling is about stuff that happened to them or people they know or stories about places round about. They pass them on. Certain stories belong to certain geography. Or a song that someone sang at a funeral that everyone remembers.

So the storytelling is not separate in any way from the people. And when one tells a story another might top it off with a quip. And it's all very unselfconscious. If you want to learn more about this read "Passing the Time in Ballymenone," by Henry Glassie. He lived in one area of Ireland for a number of years and closely observed the social interactions. It's basically anthropology. How the culture worked. It is absolutely fascinating. How conversation works between Irish people.

TRIBUTARY

Does your music do that, or is it the story set to music. Do you attempt to make music move around like an Irish conversation?

BOLGER

Irish tunes are very short. They are also very simple and repetitious. They are good for dancing that way. What happens is we will go through a tune several times but we will make slight little variations on it. After awhile even a simple tune will be repetitious. So what we do is go into another one. We will do a medley of two or three tunes. We will know because we have it all worked out. To find the variation in the first tune and then find the next tune that will fit in with it takes a lot of work. So we definitely try to create variations and take the crowd to a sad place and then to a happy place.

TRIBUTARY

Sort of an extended story. A journey to many places.

BOLGER

The Irish appreciate a good story well told. They are very verbal people. I think there is something very therapeutic about stories. It involves a journey with many experiences and that gives one power. The idea of theater is that we can vicariously experience somebody else's life. By being able to experience that, and stay removed from it, it's not actually real anyway, it does evoke the emotions. By going through that process it helps to heal us and give us power in those situations where we may feel powerless.

A lot of the songs that I like are either funny, bawdy or really sad and personal. I think there is an event that happens here that is at the core of storytelling. It is a way of developing skills to deal with shock, grief, torture, love... so that when they come up in real life you are better able to handle that. Stories take us through emotional occurrences that allow us to handle those situations.

I remember a quote from Oscar Wilde: "A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."

Stories also take us away from that dreadful loneliness that surrounds us. Loneliness is probably the very worst human affliction. I think it is why we are so terribly afraid of death. And storytelling helps us feel that we are not alone and not disconnected. We are not so powerless.

TRIBUTARY

What brought you to the U.S.?

BOLGER

Ireland was very Catholic, very paternalistic. There were all kinds of authorities to obey and your best hope if you stayed was to become one of those authorities that other people obeyed. The limitations of that were terribly galling to someone who is 17 years old. I was expected to go into the priesthood or get a good job in civil service, or go onto university but pretty much you were tracked toward a certain type of life. None of that appealed to me.

I was very lucky because I escaped the political troubles. Some of my brothers were pressured to join the IRA, pressure that they resisted. (Mick has four brothers and three sisters and he is the oldest). My mother was threatened by the IRA because we lived right on the border between northern and southern Ireland. It would be the border between County Donegal and County Tyrone. This is a political boundary, not religious. Twenty-six of the counties are known as the Republic of Ireland and are independent from Britain. Six of the counties are known as Northern Ireland and are British, part of the United Kingdom.

The rallying call at the time was "One man. One vote". You had to own a house in Northern Ireland to be able to vote. But if you were in a Protestant area, no one would sell to Catholics, so the Catholics didn't have votes. So it started out as a civil rights issue around voting but it quickly reverted to  the old conflicts of a united Ireland versus a northern province that wanted to stay British.

In the mid-1960s I was sent to a secondary boarding school near Dublin taught by Franciscan priests. Just about the time I finished school in 1969 was about the time of the beginning of The Troubles. Riots had started in Derry. This was about 10 miles from where my family was living in Donegal. By Sept. 1969, I had found work in England in construction and left.

With the money I earned working in England I traveled abroad for while. I was a hippie at the time. I was just a kid trying to see what was going on the world. I spent six months in Portugal making horseshoe nail jewelry and selling it on the streets.

Then I went back to England and decided to go to the University of Lancaster. There were a lot of American students there from the University of Colorado in Boulder who spent their junior year abroad studying at Lancaster. And every year the University of Colorado offered a scholarship to graduating Lancaster students to come and spend a year in the U.S. that I applied for and received. So I came over here (1979) and have pretty much been here ever since.

I became a citizen in 2011. I'm not sure why I didn't do it earlier. I think part of me has never taken my coat off in America. Even now at the age of 60 some part of me thinks, well when I've gone through this phase, I'll go back to Ireland and make something of myself.

TRIBUTARY

How did Colcannon come about?

BOLGER

Somebody told me about this pub in Boulder, the James Pub and Grill, where they had Irish music on a Monday night. The pub in Ireland is much different than the bar in the U.S. It's like the communal living room. People meet and chat and tell jokes and have a drink. And it may be a lot warmer than your own house in the winter. Basically I was hoping it would be akin to something that I was used to. And there were musicians there, wouldn't you know. I started hanging out with the musicians and would sing the occasional song or tell a story. But it turned out I knew a lot more traditional Irish songs than anybody else.

So I would sing with different small groups and met other musicians and gradually Colcannon got formed. Then in 1984, the James had an opening for a regular house band. So we became the house bad for nearly nine years, mostly on weekends. By 1991 we were making our first CD in a big studio with a proper producer. And by then we were writing our own music. We were still firmly based in Irish traditional music but we were moving away from what would be expected from a pub band that would be more of the  Clancy Brothers songs.

TRIBUTARY

And the storytelling continues through Colcannon with or without vocals.

BOLGER

Absolutely. That's what human beings do. Storytelling. We spend our lives talking and telling stories. When we've taken care of shelter and food and reproduction that's what we do next. Storytelling is what the human condition is about. I would say that we put roofs over our heads and get food so that we can do this.

________________

The seanchai

If you stand beside the big Oak tree early in the morning,

and wait for the warm fingers of the sun to lift the mist from the valley floor,

you will see the place where I was born.

So long ago, that people forget that there was such a time.

It was a day like any other, the warm sun creating little wisps of moist air,

reflecting all the colours of the world around the cottage as I took my first breath.

It was also the day, my mother told me, the fairies came.

They laid their hands on my head and said that I was blessed,

and I would keep their history in my head and tell it wherever I was to travel.

So gather round, listen, for I am the seanchai.

– by John W. Kelley

____________________

Related links

Mick Bolger sings Crooked Jack

Colcannon recordings

We're in this together

Andy Grant cultivates ways for consumers to buy direct from local farmers.

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Andy Grant is a national innovator cultivating ways for consumers to buy directly from their local farmer. Called Community Support Agriculture (CSA), the program gives consumers incentives to pre-pay for the season's locally-produced vegetables, herbs, eggs, meats, flowers or fruit; direct from the farmer. In return the farmer has an income he can depend on and supporters who are invested in the outcome of each season's crop.

"I believe this has the potential to be the solution not only for those who want fresh, local produce and who want to support thriving agriculture but also for us as farmers. Our CSA members are basically our crop insurance. They are sharing the risk and challenges with us through thick and thin. This is a huge incentive for me as the farmer. If we don't perform, we lose customers. We're in this together."

Grant Family Farms, located near Ft. Collins, signs up participants early in the year before staff are tied up 16-hours a day in the field harvesting and packaging. A buyer purchases one or more "food shares" which is a box of produce delivered once a week to a large number of Front Range  pickup points from Cheyenne to Colorado Springs.

Grant makes sure the CSA members are given the best of each week's harvest before the remainder is sent to the wholesale market. Prices are lower than the grocery store. "Shareholders" can visit the farm learning more about the production process and develop a relationship with the farm staff.

If you purchased a "single veggie  share" for $520, Grant will deliver eight to 10 veggies for $20.23 a week for the 26 week Colorado  growing season, usually June through November. If you added a "half dozen egg share" you would spend an additional $3 a week.

"A lot more people could join a CSA," Grant added, "but they have been misled to think they can have a tomato any time of the year. From June on we provide lots of lettuce, cilantro, radishes and onions but no tomatoes. They aren't ready. If you're not used to purchasing foods in season you will ask 'where are my tomatoes?' Wait until August and September and we'll give you great tomatoes.

"We grow more than 200 varieties of vegetables and try to keep a nice selection in the box every week. We have learned that we better have pretty damn good tomatoes and sweet corn when it's ready because people really crave that. They crave home-grown tomatoes. We pay a lot of attention to those two items."

Another benefit to the customer is the freshly-picked produce travels less than 100 miles. The average produce from Mexico and California travels 1,500 miles to get to most grocery stores.

According to LocalHarvest.org there are more than 4,000 CSA farms in the U.S. Enrollment is growing at about 20 percent a year, according to the Organic Consumers Association. Grant Family Farms is one of the more successful CSAs in the U.S.

"I will contend that in 20 years, except for a growing number of community-supported farms like ours, there won't be any vegetables grown in the U.S. It will all be grown in Mexico and then trucked across the border. So the question becomes--who is your farmer? Where did this food come from? "

Related links

Grant Family Farms

Colorado CSAs list

Local Harvest Organization

### America's carousel conservator

Will Morton and a friend explain the process of restoring carousels

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From 1885 to 1928, an estimated 4,000 wooden carousels operated in the United States; less than 300 of those exist today, about 150 of which are operational.

They were carved and painted by European immigrant craftsmen who were proud to be in America. Patriotic images such as eagles, flags and banners were used extensively.

Will Morton has spent half his life using his form of exploratory craftsmanship to reveal the character and history of the original craftsman's work and then meticulously restore it. His museum-quality restoration techniques influenced carousel restoration across the nation.

His original effort was the Kit Carson County Carousel in Burlington, Colorado, which he began restoring in 1978 and still visits for occasional maintenance work.

Originally manufactured by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company in the early 1900s, PTC No. 6, like many carousels, stopped spinning in the early 1930s due to the Great Depression, and other factors. The organ never made a sound again until the mid-1970s.

During the Dust Bowl, government-provided feed grain was stored in the carousel pavilion. The rats loved it. The wooden animals never took a bite.

When funds from the American Bicentennial Commission became available, the county decided to make the restoration of the carousel its preservation project.

Will Morton had been an artist and sculptor in Denver and had worked with art conservator John Pogzeba who was chosen to restore the carousel's 42 original paintings. Pogzeba asked Morton for help. Morton went on to finish the paintings and then was chosen to restore the 46 animals. It was the start of a new career.

MORTON

I worked during the summers restoring each of the animals at the site in Burlington. I was uncovering the original paint, doing research on the type of paint and on the Philadelphia Toboggan Company and how they did things. I removed layer after layer of varnish and paint until I found the original paint. Then I recreated what was missing. I wanted to present the original paint on the animals to the public who came to ride the carousel. It was what you might call a museum approach to conservation of this artifact.

If there was a scratch I would paint just the scratch or a crack. It was tedious work but art conservation is tedious work. It was something we had to do because it was worth doing.

TRIBUTARY

Was the carousel in bad shape?

MORTON

It was covered with dust and dirt because it had only run one week a year during the Kit Carson County Fair since 1937. It was all one color, a dirty yellow-brown. You couldn't distinguish one color from another because the old resin varnishes had darkened. So I was going down through these layers: the varnish, the repaint, the old varnish, taking away one layer at a time trying to awaken a sleeping beauty.

I spent a couple of summers in Burlington to do all the animals. I rode the Greyhound bus three hours out from Denver on Sunday night and came back Friday evening. We only had one car and my wife (Marlene) needed that to get the four kids and herself where they needed to go.

I would often take one of the kids along with me for the week. It was a time of discovery for them. Actually my son discovered a piece of evidence I had not seen. He was crawling around underneath the animals and found numbers carved under each one.

The numbers were created by the original designer,  E. Joy Morris, specifying the row, section and machine number for the assembly of the carousel. Subsequent research showed the numbers did not reflect the animals' placement on the Kit Carson County machine, and carousel sleuths have speculated that the buyer from Elitch Gardens, the carousel's original owner, was unaware of the layout and selected animals from throughout the shop. Thus, the carousel became a mixture of animals intended for other carousels.

TRIBUTARY

You mentioned a renewal of interest in carousels, and carousel art, was happening about this time.

MORTON

Well I didn't know much about it until some enthusiasts got wind of what I was doing. One by one someone would drop by to see what was happening and pretty soon people were coming from everywhere. I soon found out from them about a revival of interest in carousels that was sweeping the country.

The people who were interested in carousel restoration assumed I was an expert at this restoration and knew all about carousels when I didn't. But I thought to myself: this is working out pretty well so it would probably be wise to become the expert these people were hoping to find out here.

So I read everything I could get my hands on. I also listened to these people who were dropping by because they knew more than I did about the history of carousels, so I learned from them.

So eventually I became an expert and I found myself doing something that no one else had done. They liked the conservation approach I was taking.

TRIBUTARY

What was your next project?

MORTON

I restored the animals at the Pueblo City Park Carousel starting in 1981. That took about a year. We tried to do the  restoration at Pueblo so their staff could touch up the paint as needed. I used readily available paints and basic colors. That was a good theory but as time went on that didn't turn out to work too well. As parks had to cut staff due to tougher economic times, they didn't have anybody who knew how to do the work.

After Pueblo we took on the Topeka, KS,  Carousel in the Park located in Gage Park.

This one had been with a traveling carnival for a long time. Lots of nails holding them together. Lots of new legs had to be carved. One horse had a head and neck that came from another carousel builder. That needed to be changed in order to make it right.

So I carved an all-new head for the animal and had to re-carve one of the sides. I took this opportunity to carve "The Kansas Horse". It was the same horse that had been on the carousel but as I rebuilt it I made it unique. I added big sunflowers and sheafs of wheat to the decorations.

Another one I called "The Ribbon Horse". I added ribbons on the horse and I poofed up the mane to make it larger with peek-a-boo holes through it. I wanted to make this one a lead horse. Most carousels have what people can identify as the lead animal. That becomes the beginning — an especially fancy horse, or it may be some spectacular animal like a big lion.

The other thing I did was create new paintings. The ones on it were Mickey Mouse cartoon panels. So I created paintings of Topeka historic themes from the turn of the century. I tried to paint them in the carousel style, kind of a neo-classical art style. Most carousel paintings were European romantic scenes.

In America, the painters who did these were mostly European-trained immigrants. They had found jobs in carousel shops and sign shops. They were carvers too. There is a myth that the carousels were all carved in Europe. They were not. They were carved in America. Some of the original carvers were very well trained in classical art. Some had been sculptors who worked on churches or public buildings.

There has always been a lot of discussion as to whether this is commercial art or folk art. I don't know if anyone ever resolved it. I think everyone has pretty much accepted that it is folk art mostly because of the age of the paintings and animals.

TRIBUTARY

What came next?

MORTON

Sprinkled in with the major projects, I restored hundreds of individual animals for collectors and antique dealers. And then came the Prospect Park Carousel in Brooklyn NY. This one had about 60 animals. It was the largest one I ever did.

When I arrived I put out the call for artists to help with the project. They turned out to be theater scenery painters, costume designers, various other artists. One of them was an Italian fellow who worked in a plaster molding company and created architectural plaster. He was also a painter. I had to train them in the various techniques. It worked out really, really well. The Italian man stayed on with the Prospect Park Alliance to operate the carousel and maintain it.

TRIBUTARY

Did you ever just get on a horse and ride the carousel alone?

MORTON

Yes I've done that a lot, but not to just be alone. I did it mostly to check out the machinery and see how the gears and bearings were working. I wanted to feel what was going on and then maybe adjust something. But I did enjoy those moments. I guess there will always be carnivals won't there? Time somehow repeats itself like a carousel ride.

TRIBUTARY

In 1984 you took on the Colorado Springs Carousel at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.

MORTON

It had been a portable carousel. It had about 22 animals, which is typical for a portable machine. Trolley park machines have about 40 to 70 animals.

The basic machinery, the gears, rods and mechanisms were in bad shape. I always liked the machinery. This was my first venture into extensive repair of the entire carousel including the machinery. So I took it on. It really became quite a project because you have to take the whole carousel apart right down to the ground because the mechanism hangs from the main top bearing.

The top bearing was trash. The operators had run it and run it until the roller bearing ran out of grease. It was a mess.

TRIBUTARY

Along the way did you find a favorite animal among all that you have worked on?

MORTON

Everyone always asks me that question. That is like asking me which of my four children is my favorite child. But I do have a favorite carousel and that is the Kit Carson County Carousel. And, it is the favorite of all carousel people we know in the carousel world. USA Today called it the "Jewel of America's Carousels."

TRIBUTARY

So now your ride has pretty much come to an end.

MORTON

Joe Downey called me from Kit Carson County and asked if I had one more carousel left in me. Next thing I knew some horses showed up, so I guess my answer was yes. It is more of an effort for me now, but I'm going to do it. I love the work. The horses came from a carousel in Nebraska.

Related links

Kit Carson County Carousel website

Before and after photos of paintings at Kit Carson Carousel

Recordings of carousel music

 Introduction to carousel art

Reflections on carousels

Painted Ponies: American Carousel Art (book)

The lone man

Fine art black and white photographer Cole Thompson

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Something flows through the work of fine art photographer Cole Thompson. It is a current from secret, obscure shadow to revealing, engaging light. It circulates like blood flowing in ones veins, or, like warmth from the sun. Thompson often finds the edge between shadow and light, moving away to a place of solitude, examining the place without distraction, interruption or...It is so vast and yet reachable, a place where inspiration finds you. Cole Thompson has learned to work alone.

THOMPSON

The real key is to find your own style. I can't be a great portrait photographer and great landscape photographer and a great still life photographer. So I have accepted that and now and I do what I love best, create images in my own style of fine art photography. This was a great life lesson that I learned; appreciate and focus on what you are good at and don't be envious of what you're not good at. To do this I had to stop caring what others thought. I'm not creating for them. I'm not doing this to earn a living. I'm doing it for me. So I divided my work into the two piles; ones that I really loved, and ones that I didn't, and from then on I only focused on images that I had a passion for. So even if people loved those other images, or they were published, or sold well, I quit producing work that I didn't love. This approach led me to a style and look that said: this is a Cole Thompson image. My style is very specific. It's very dark, very contrasty, dominated by blacks.

TRIBUTARY

That takes some courage to abstain from seeking inspiration from the work of others and deciding you are going to go on alone.

THOMPSON

We're trained to think of certain people as experts and to hang on every word they say. As well intentioned as these experts are, they are giving advice from their perspective. Their advice may be good, but it may not be good for my vision and my definition of success. I am a businessman and I see this all the time. I read a book that argued that the IBM culture of professionalism, wearing dark suits and white shirts was the best way to achieve success. But you could turn around and look at the Apple model with a casual work environment where everyone was wearing sandals and shorts. I'm not sure any one way is right but there is value in creating a plan that fits your goals, and outlook on life, and then pursuing it with conviction. Five years ago I stopped looking at other photographer's work. The reason I did that was because I found myself constantly imitating others people's work, style and images. I used to say that this was how I learned but really all I was doing was imitating instead of finding my own vision. So now I practice photographic celibacy. This approach may not work for you but it works for me.

TRIBUTARY

How did you make the transition from photo documentation to creating fine art?

THOMPSON

My piece called  "The Angel Gabriel" is the first time I had created an image versus taking a photograph. It was the first time I molded the image that my eyes saw into the vision I had. I created something that was unique and mine. As I created this image, I learned an important lesson about following other's advice. I loved the centered image and when I showed it to my mentor she told me, never center an image, and suggested I crop it. I remember thinking how this advice didn't feel right but since she was the expert, I went back and put the image off center. It looked horrid and almost made me ill. This was not how I envisioned the image. It didn't feel right. So, I learned not to listen to other people's advice because it comes from their point of view and their vision, not mine.

TRIBUTARY

You have a lot of attachment to this image. Is there a story that goes with it?

THOMPSON

I met him on the  Newport Beach pier. I was photographing the pier and it was a very busy day. Because I was doing a long exposure, most of the people would disappear. I could see the shot needed a subject. I looked around and saw a man eating French Fries from a trash can. He was homeless and hungry. I asked him if he would help me with a photograph and in return, I would buy him lunch. He agreed and I did a couple of shots but then he, Gabriel, wanted to hold his bible in the shot. This turned out to be the image I chose. Gabriel and I then went into a restaurant on the pier. He was dirty and carrying his bedroll and bible. He ordered steak with mushrooms and onions and told me he hadn't had one in years. When it came, he ate it with his hands. I asked Gabriel how I might contact him, in case I sold some of the photographs and wanted to share the money with him. He said I should give the money to someone who could really use it. "I've got everything I need," he said and he walked away with his bedroll and his bible.

TRIBUTARY

Where does your inspiration come from?

THOMPSON

I keep a list of about 50 ideas to pursue for projects. What I've found is that I've never been successful in turning one of those ideas into a portfolio. Every success that I've had has come in a moment of inspiration and I immediately pursued it. Like "Ceiling Lamps." I'm in Akron, Ohio, standing in a hotel lobby and I looked up and saw a ceiling lamp, a simple, round lamp but standing directly beneath it, it took on this wonderful abstract shape. So I pushed away the table and couch below the lamp and just laid on the lobby floor looking at it. I thought, this is my next portfolio. A lot of people tell me that they are working on a project but it's a struggle to get motivated. I find that if I am not excited about a project and I have to force myself to work on it, then I have the wrong project.

TRIBUTARY

Your most well-known portfolio is "The Ghosts of Auschwitz." How did you create these images?

THOMPSON

I had no intention of photographing at the camps. I was there simply as a tourist. The first place they take you on the tour is in a room with a pile of children's shoes, a pile of glasses, a pile of hair and other personal items taken from the victims. A few minutes into the tour I felt claustrophobic and couldn't breathe. The presentation was so depressing that the air seemed sucked out of the room. So I went outside to find relief but couldn't. Every time I took a step I couldn't help but wondering, who has stepped here before me and now is dead? Who had walked in the same path and been murdered. I started thinking; I wonder if their spirits are still here?

That is when the idea of photographing their spirits came to me. I had been working with long exposures for several years, mostly with water and clouds, but I had the basics down. I had 45 minutes left in the tour so I rushed to create long exposures of the other visitors at the camp. The long exposures turned the visitors into ghosts, proxies if you will, for those who had lived and died at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was difficult to get these long exposures because the Europeans are so polite and would move out of my way when they saw me photographing. That is exactly what I didn't want. So I had to devise ways to fool the people into thinking I wasn't photographing. I had a cable release so I would turn my back and pull out my cell phone and act like I was on the phone so people would move back into the area. Even then it was difficult to get the images where everyone kept moving. For every photograph that worked, four didn't. My goal was to portray Auschwitz-Birkenau differently than I had seen it portrayed in the past. I didn't want to create historical photographs of this place, or treat it like an old museum. I wanted to show that real people lived and died here. I wanted to make people think. This is an example of how inspiration just hit me.

TRIBUTARY

So many people are interested in photography today. When they create an image that pleases them what should they do next? Frame it? Stick it in a box? Go to the closest gallery?

THOMPSON

Well, how would you define success for you? The normal definition for photographers seems to be selling for big dollars, getting into a gallery or having a book published. Many automatically go down that path believing that will make them happy. So when I went down that path, and had some success, the resulting euphoria was fleeting and the satisfaction momentary. I realized that this definition of success was not working for me.

For me success is the freedom to create what I want and loving what I do. It is having a creative outlet that brings balance into my life. I recently posted an article on my blog where I said, "I would rather my art be in thousands of homes than sell it for thousands of dollars." I'm glad my goal isn't to earn a living from my art because then I would feel pressured to produce images that others wanted and not what I was passionate about. I do enjoy exhibiting in galleries and I have a very simple requirement: the gallery loves my work and invites me. There is one galley in a small southern Colorado town that I exhibit in every year. Why? Because they love my work and invite me. Being wanted and having my art appreciated is more important to me than anything else.

TRIBUTARY

So a person doesn't need to find an audience, just worry about yourself as the audience. Isn't there a desire to have some kind of audience besides your family?

THOMPSON

We all like praise. We all like to have our art appreciated. There is no harm in that. But when you create for others your work lacks something. It is not as powerful or convincing as the art you create for yourself. When you create for yourself then the praises and accolades you receive are a wonderful extra. I call it the cherry on top that makes success even sweeter.

Related links

The Lone Man – A Cole Thompson portfolio

### Mountain Man Badger Puthoff

John "Badger" Puthoff is dedicated to sharing the life of the mountain man

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Approximately 3,000 mountain men roamed the Rocky Mountains between 1820 and 1840, the peak beaver-harvesting period. While many were free trappers, most mountain men were employed by major fur companies.

Mountain men lived aux aliments du pays, French for "nourishment of the land", surviving by using the provisions of nature. Eating bull cheese (buffalo jerky) and galette (a basic flour and water bread made into flat, round cakes and fried in fat or baked before an open fire). They lived alone.

Remembering and reenacting that adventure attracts men such as John Puthoff, 74, known as Old Badger. Puthoff spends every weekend being a mountain man so others can appreciate what his life must have been like 200 years ago.

TRIBUTARY

What attracts you to the mountain man lifestyle?

PUTOFF

I do it because I love it. It's been a part of me since I was a kid. I ran these hills in Deer Creek Canyon (west of Denver) starting in my early teens (early 1950s). I rode the school bus down old Highway 285 along South Turkey Creek to Bear Creek High School. I got to be free as a bird roaming these hills with the same attitude as the mountain men had. They answered to basically nobody. They did what they needed to.

I always had an affinity towards being by myself and learning, watching and understanding things. When I was running the hills here as a kid, I carried a .22 caliber rifle in a leather sleeve that was fringed. I had a tomahawk on my hip, which I still have. I had a knife in a sheath and a pouch full of bullets. What more did I need?

I lived in my own world up there. There was one summer where I didn't come out of the hills to go into town for probably four or five weeks. I was living a dream that a lot of kids will never get a chance to experience.

When I dress in the mountain man way, I step back 200 years. I try to be as historically truthful and real about the history and lifestyle from the mountain man era. Everything on me is hand made to resemble actual equipment. I carry an English folding knife that is more than 150 years old which my grandfather acquired somewhere along the way.

TRIBUTARY

You are wearing a leather totem of a badger track around your neck. Why the badger?

PUTHOFF

(Pulling his hair back) I also wear badger claw earrings. The Native Americans believe each person has an animal guide that accompanies them through life. There may be more truth to many of the Indian legends than many people want to believe.

Seeing badger tracks was a sign of future success to the Indians, a sign that all things are possible when we tap into our inner creative powers. Watching and studying about the badger I have learned to walk my own path at my pace. Never mind what others may say. I have discovered that I am well equipped to take on whatever challenges I face. I also have an attitude like a badger on occasion.

Like my leatherwork. It is from that era but no one taught me how to do it. I discovered it on my own. I'm self-taught. My first day in high school my teacher set a rack of tools down in the middle of the table, backed up and said, "Boys those are leather craft tools. Have fun."

My grandfather gave me a scrap of leather when I was a kid and the first damned thing I did was make a holster for a cap gun.

Since then I have never stopped creating leatherwork. I have designed many things for many people. I worked for Tandy Leather for about 20 years. I was teaching classes, giving demonstrations, sales. Traveled all over the west. I enjoyed working with people. I am a teacher at heart.

TRIBUTARY

After high school you were on active duty with the Air Force and then you were a surveyor for the Denver Water Board.

PUTHOFF

I loved surveying and did it for about nine years. I worked in a feed store for a number of years, then started selling my own custom leatherwork. I worked on my own after that for about 30 years. I sold most of my work at gun shows and took a lot of orders for custom designs.

TRIBUTARY

When did you get involved with the rendezvous and what attracted you to those events?

PUTHOFF

I was doing mountain man rendezvous from the 1970s on. I made a buckskin leather outfit back then. Made it in 1975. I would sell my leatherwork there as well.

A rendezvous is a place to relax and enjoy myself and partake of a time period with others who enjoy the same thing. We would trade things. I did some teaching. I love actually showing people how to do something, especially in leather. I have been an educator, a leather craft teacher, since I was a kid.

It's re-enacting, recreating and stepping back in time to a less stressful situation where you are with like-minded people who are craftspeople and historians. They understand what they are doing. They teach others.

When my wife was alive, we'd go to some of them and spend two or three days. The Rendezvous I still like to go to that is close by is in Fort Lupton. The other one I like is here at The Fort and every year is the Annual Indian Market and Powwow.

TRIBUTARY

It sounds like you lost your best companion when she died.

PUTHOFF

She died Christmas Day 2009 suddenly. She wasn't feeling good. Had an upset stomach. It was about 8 a.m. and I was giving her a back rub. She said it felt great. I took her dishes back out to the kitchen and when I came back she was laying over on her side. She had had a seizure.

It left me lost in space for a while. I dearly loved the lady. She was part of my life for 30 years. I have since re-learned that my world is the one that I am in now. I'm a loner and I am finding out now that is where I belong. That's where I am comfortable. I am a loner by choice. My traits, my actions since I was a kid, is a loner.

TRIBUTARY

On the other hand you love talking with people here at The Fort and being an educator.

PUTHOFF

Well, but I do it at my pace. Not somebody else's. If I need to walk away for a while, I do. This is the world I believe I existed in once before. The mountain man was very solitary.

TRIBUTARY

You seem to enjoy being in these red rocks overlooking Denver.

PUTHOFF

I am walking over the same ground that the Native Americans walked more than 200, 300, 400 years ago. I stand here and look out over the same countryside that they did. I have the same feelings within my heart, the spirituality of everything around me and how the Indians respected all these things, I try to do the same. (Pausing) If I choke up, I'm sorry. It happens. This is the time period, and the world, in which I am extremely comfortable, being a part of, and being able to share with other people.

TRIBUTARY

Is there somehow a sense that you were there back then?

PUTHOFF

Very definitely. I've been here before.

TRIBUTARY

Your leatherwork business card lists your name as Jacob T. Dof, not John Puthoff. Where does that come from?

PUTHOFF

It's an acronym for "Just A Cantankerous Old Bastard That's Damned Old Fashioned."

TRIBUTARY

Would you describe what you are wearing?

PUTHOFF

The knife I wear around my neck is hand made out of a saw blade. This turtle emblem represents longevity and the Indians used it to represent the American continent.

This is the Cross of Lorraine. It would be carried as a trade piece to give to the Indians. The silver bracelets and turquoise, that's simply me. I've worn them since the Sixties. I will not part with them. Mountain men did have earrings and bracelets but not to the extent that I have.

TRIBUTARY

Kind of a Hippie thing.

PUTHOFF

No. Beatnik.

This is my possibles bag. It has fire starting equipment, parts for the guns, whetstone, flint and steel. Your life would have depended on what was carried in the bag. Extra flints, a tin of priming powder. Sometimes a bullet mold.

### Capitol building tour guide

Carol Keller became a tour guide at the Colorado State Capitol at age 62

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Richard Lamm was governor (1975-1987) when Carol Keller started giving tours of the Colorado capitol building 25 years ago.

She waits quietly for her next tour group to gather. She says good morning to Gov. John Hickenlooper as he enters the Executive Chambers near the capitol tour guides desk. It's Friday, 10 a.m., according to the Mickey Mouse watch on her graceful wrist. Time to start.

At age 87, she's entertained thousands of school children, senior citizens, visitors from Europe and Japan revealing history and trivia about her home state and its capitol building.

She will tell you about the five-foot thick walls of granite quarried near Gunnison, Colo., and the likeness of George Washington in the pink rose onyx, quarried near Beulah, Colo.

The capitol building's floors are Yule Marble from Marble, Colo.

Born in Greeley, Colo., she spent her first career as a Registered Medical Technician at Denver General Hospital, now Denver Health.

At age 62, she took the capitol building tour and thought she might like to be a tour guide. Today she has many stories to tell about the state capitol building, designed to commemorate Colorado's Gold Rush days, and the pioneers and miners who helped build the state.

KELLER

Each of the governors is a little bit different. Gov. (Roy) Romer was nice. If he walked by he would always stop and talk to the groups and so would (Bill) Owens. One funny thing happened recently with Gov. (John) Hickenlooper. The security people told us (tour guides) that the governor was busy and doesn't want to talk to the tour groups. I told the kids if the governor came out he was very busy and couldn't talk but they could wave to him. So out comes Gov. Hickenlooper and walks up to the kids and asks where they are from and did they want to have their picture taken with the governor out on the steps. So we go out through the governor's security entrance, which we never do, and they had their pictures taken.

When I came back in I looked at the security guard and said it was not my fault. So the rules change with any given situation.

I lived through a number of the capitol building evacuations when Gov. Dick Lamm was in office (1975 – 1987). We were having some bomb threats due to his position on extending the lives of the elderly. He was kind of in the doghouse with the public over  the "duty to die" issue.

TRIBUTARY

When we got to the Colorado Quilt and the Women's Gold Tapestry on the tour you seemed to stand taller and be very proud of them. Did you help sew both of them?

KELLER

The Colorado Quilting Council has a  show in the capitol every two years. There were 240 quilts the last time and you could hardly see the building for the quilts. I have always made quilts and so I would help with the show and lead tours.

Edna Pelzmann was in charge of the capitol tour guides and had the idea to put together a Colorado Quilt. So she and I chaired it and recruited 25 capitol volunteers. We started in June 2007 and it took us about 250 hours. Each person chose one of the state symbols and could do that section however they wanted to. The border is 38 stars since we were the 38thstate admitted to the Union.

TRIBUTARY

The  Women's Gold Tapestry depicts 18 women who made contributions to Colorado history. How did that get started?

KELLER

The project was started by  Eve Mackintosh from Idaho Springs. It started out as a church quilting project. Then, during the state's centennial in 1976, Eve worked very hard to get the tapestry finished. I think she had more than 3,000 people put stitches on it. It traveled the state for two years. All hand stitched. She was quite a go-getter.

TRIBUTARY

Who is your favorite woman in the tapestry?

KELLER

Mrs. Crawford, the lady who didn't want to come here. (Pointing at the tapestry) This is her standing in a wagon.

 Margaret Crawford came with her husband during the Gold Rush from Missouri. In the bottom of the wagon she insisted they bring a rose bush and a lilac bush from home. They ended up in mining camp near Steamboat Springs. She began cuttings of the yellow roses to all the mining camps. That's why the tapestry was named Women's Gold because the miners nicknamed those  yellow roses "the women's gold

TRIBUTARY

Any ghost stories?

KELLER

Well my ghost story involves a gang of banditos down in southern Colorado called the  Espinosa Gang. They were really bad. They had murdered some people so the governor put a bounty on their heads. The bounty hunter cut their heads off to send to the capitol but the governor had since left office. The state never paid the bounty for the heads. The heads were put downstairs in the tunnels. At that time the caretaker lived in the tunnels. He discovered the heads and decided there weren't going to be any heads in his domain so he threw them in the furnace.

TRIBUTARY

So the Espinosa Gang could be wandering through the state capitol?

KELLER

Without their heads!

That same caretaker was very frugal and wanted to be paid in silver dollars. The story goes that he was stashing the silver dollars in the tunnels somewhere. Since then many have searched for the hiding place but found nothing. So we don't have any big fortunes in the tunnels.

Then there is the story about the guy who stole gold from the capitol dome. The dome got its first coating of 24-karat gold in 1908 and the second one in 1950. By this time it was chipping very badly from weather damage. So this guy would put a bucket under the down spout and catch the flaking gold after a rain or hail storm. So when they redid the gold on the dome, they also changed the downspout so that wouldn't happen again.

TRIBUTARY

When the legislature is in session is there a different feeling to the place?

KELLER

Yes it changes where people can go. We used to be able to bring groups into the observation area on the main floor of the House and Senate Chambers but we can't do that anymore. We now go into the upper galleries and walk across on the tour. If visitors want to come back and watch what is going on they can.

There are many more people here conducting business and it's all fun and games until budget time and then things get a little tense. You can feel it in the elevators and watching people. It's gotten a little tighter than it was years ago when the state was doing well. The legislators are here for business and they know it. I'm non-political. I don't like politics. We have to be neutral as tour guides. You can't really know all the legislators. I haven't changed but look at how many times they change every year.

TRIBUTARY

Other favorites?

KELLER

Did you know some of the Perry Mason episodes were shot in the  Supreme Court chambers. I like trivia.

On my 75th birthday we got to go clear up to the very top of the capitol dome to where the airplane lights are. There are some real rickety ladders that take you up into the dome and then get out on the roof. We went all the way up there. So I have literally been from the tunnels to the roof of the capitol building. There are more than 150 rooms.

In the two legislative chambers I love the stained glass windows and the large chandeliers. The chandeliers used to be all gas but now they are electric. They let them down on a pulley to polish them and pull them back up.

TRIBUTARY

Do you have to memorize all these details to be a capitol tour guide?

KELLER

When we train new guides we tell them to find what interests them and find those stories to tell. So each of us highlights what we find interesting. So I spend a little extra time at the two quilts. I'm sure the male guides talk about different things than I do and the college age guides have their interests. We all have to hit the big highlights but the rest is up to us.

Related links

 State Capitol Art and Memorials Guide

2011 Capitol Quilt Show

The ballads collector of Lake Champlain

Marjorie Lansing Porter collected more than 450 recordings of original Adirondack folk songs

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Journalist Marjorie Porter watched the old woman's wrinkled hands spinning yarn and listened to the tune she was quietly humming as she worked. A cool breeze from across Lake George) was stirring the humidity in the shade. It was 1941, and Porter, 32, had spent many summers with her family at the lake. Today, this exhibit of pioneer life in the Adirondack Mountains brought her to the spinning wheel of Lily Delorme.

"Mrs. Delorme, I'm Marjorie Porter. I'm a reporter for the Plattsburgh Daily Press (today's Plattsburgh Press Republican). "That song you are humming, is that a Lake Champlain ballad," Porter ventured.

"Grandma" Lily Delorme, as she was known, nodded yes, not pausing from her spinning or humming. Other visitors stood by watching her work.

Porter, wrote in her subsequent article, "Her story of pioneer life in the Adirondacks was set to a musical hum as she paced, now close to the big wheel, now away from it."

"Would you allow me to record the song," Porter asked. "Do you know the words?"

"Oh yes," Delorme smiled looking up from her task. "I know a bunch of them."

"Do you happen to know, by chance, a ballad called "The Banks of Champlain," Porter asked.

"Why, yes, it went this way, 'Twas autumn and round me the leaves were descending..."

"Her thin, reedy voice told the whole story in a score of verses," Porter wrote. "Grandma's saga continued in lively conversation as I drove her home. She spoke of her grandfather, a Vermont pioneer named Gideon Baker, veteran of the War of 1812, and of his muzzle-loader and bullet mold from the war. We talked about how The Banks of Champlain was written by the wife of General Alexander Macomb) during the Battle of Plattsburgh.

TRIBUTARY

Marjorie Porter was born in Port Henry on Lake Champlain in 1891, the daughter of Charles and Helen (Prescott) Lansing. Her great-grandfather, Wendell Lansing, founded the Essex County Republican in 1839 in Keeseville, as an organ of the Whig Party and its anti-slavery platform. They also owned the Plattsburgh Sentinel of which her grandfather, Abram Lansing, was editor. The paper became the Press-Republican in 1942.

She married Howard Guy Millington in 1912, and then Homer Porter in 1922. She had five children: Helen Millington (1913), John Millington (1915), Mary Elizabeth Millington (1918), David Porter (1922) and Philip Porter (1924).

Surrounded by journalists and other storytellers in her own family, she was naturally fascinated by the family stories about the mountain region of northern New York, and northern Vermont, forming the valley for Lake Champlain. Her many articles captured wonderful details which reader's enjoyed. She became, over time, the region's official historian, and began expanding her efforts to collect ballads and oral histories.

Porter wrote later that this encounter with Lily Delorme was "the seed for a constructive activity – the collection of folksongs, ballads and lore illustrative of life in the Adirondack Mountains and the adjacent Lake Champlain Valley." She recorded more than 100 of Delorme's songs on her new SoundScriber Recorder.

By the time Porter died in 1973, that collection consisted of 33 reel-to-reel tapes that held more than 450 recordings of folk ballads, lyrical folksongs, early hillbilly pieces, French Canadian songs and fiddle tunes from steamboat captains, loggers, farmers, lumber jacks, and trappers.

Porter's SoundScriber recorder

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Copies of the recordings are at Archive of Folk Culture in the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress. The originals, along with Porter's manuscript and photo collection, are at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Plattsburgh  Special Collections where Porter's SoundScriber discs have been digitized.

Porter recorded another "tradition bearer" named John Galusha, or "Yankee John" as he was known locally. He worked his whole life in the Adirondack Mountains as a logger, farmer, forest ranger and guide. Starting at age sixteen, and for decades afterwards, he'd spend the fall and winter months in the lumber camps, then work the Boreas, Hudson, Moose and Beaver Rivers in the springtime driving logs downstream to the mills. Summers were reserved for guiding and/or farming, and in later years, fire observing on Vanderwhacker Mountain. Then, back to the woods in the fall.

Click link to hear "Yankee John" Galusha singing one of his songs.

Word of her collection spread in folk music circles and Pete Seeger found his way to her home to hear some of the recordings. They provided the source material for albums by Pete Seeger (1960) and Milt Okun (1963). On  "Champlain Valley Songs", Seeger sings, "The Banks of Champlain," which was originally sung by Delorme and recorded by Porter.

2008 interview with Pete Seeger by Porter's granddaughter June Millington

TRIBUTARY

Kathy Gill, daughter of Helen Millington, spent summers traveling with her grandmother, the ballads collector. She recently wrote this letter to her cousins who were meeting with the SUNY Special Collections staff to turn over personal photos and papers to the Porter archives. The letter offers many insights into the personality of Marjorie Porter.

GILL

She drove her trusty '48 Studebaker coupe as we traveled to the newspaper offices in Keeseville and Plattsburgh where she dropped off her weekly columns. I remember climbing a long flight of rickety stairs at the back of the Keeseville press with the AuSable River thundering by underneath, shaking the stairs and even the door knob on the back door. I felt only those with real stories to tell would dare to enter. The door would open to a huge grimy room alive with monstrous, roaring machines pounding out the news with words typed all over these sheets of newsprint as they spewed them out in a deadline glut. I felt my humble nine-year old heart bow in respect. I had discovered my religion; my forbearers smiled and so did Grandma.

We visited ancient, ancient people way back in the hinterlands. She had a little machine which would record important stories and their versions of old, old ballads on a wax cylinder. She would mail it to a place in New York City and it would all be transferred to a small flexible bright-green disc which could be played on a record player. The ballads were sung by elderly folks with scratchy voices and they were hard to understand, but Grandma knew all of their folks songs and taught some of them to me as we drove along in the sweet little coupe, which was traded in, I might add, to my horror, in 1957, on a brand-new black Studebaker Skylark with red-leather interior.

Folk singers, such as Pete Seeger (who did not like kids!) came to visit now and then and I think Milt Okun did also. She always fed them her delicious waffles or pancakes with real butter and maple syrup. She made the best doughnuts in the world.

She loved nothing more than talking to, and teaching others, about the history of the Adirondack Mountains and Lake Champlain. She knew the North Woods right down to the pine needles on the forest floor and was glad to share all she knew with others. Her eyes would light up with delight and a zeal that was far beyond her normal interaction with others.

She loved to hob-nob with others of like mind and could talk with zeal for hours.

She was the one who taught me about birds and the woods, old stories and ballads and she made the best egg-salad sandwiches in the world.

Marjorie Porter photo by Michael McNamara, grandson

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I will always love her for opening a whole different world for me, by the Grace of God. And I will never forget how she would stomp across Route 9 in Keene as we'd be leaving after Sunday services at the old Methodist church, muttering, "Ye gods, people. Don't any of you know how to sing?" People would turn and look at her with mouths hanging open, they were so shocked!

She always smelled good, like soft put-away clothes from a cedar chest.

When she tucked me in at night, her breath was warm against my face as we said goodnight prayers and she would sing the first stanza of 'Thank Thee Our Father', in a beautiful old-lady voice with a spring to it. I wish all of you could just hear how beautiful her voice was as she sang different goodnight songs each evening just before sleep came.

Her little vanity in her bedroom had a three-part mirror behind it with simple things at hand; a comb, a sterling silver hairbrush and the most simple and beautiful sterling silver hand mirror with her initials waltzing across the back. I would stand in her doorway and just stare at that scene; so spare, yet so beautiful, just as her best paisley dress was, and her poor mis-shapened spectator pumps. (She suffered from bunions.)

One time I dared reach over and pick up the mirror and look in it, then quickly tried to put it back just as it was. I wanted to see if I were beautiful, also. I only saw a kid with scraggly hair staring back with eyes too big. But, I knew her reflection was beautiful, yet stern.

And she was so tiny. I towered over her by the age of 10 or 11. Many times, she had to buy her clothes in the children's department because there was nothing in her size in the women's section. It was very frustrating for her.

My happiest moment was the summer I arrived and I knew I finally really belonged in her library because I could read all by myself. I couldn't wait to devour all the books I could possibly reach on tiptoe. I will forever be grateful to her for that wonderful, wonderful door to the rest of the world and beyond. She, in her somewhat stern way, totally changed my outlook on life in certain ways and it was good, and predictable and safe.

TRIBUTARY

Porter wrote a regular column on the history and folklore of region for these newspapers for many years. This excerpt is from the Plattsburgh Press-Republican, October 27, 1943.

PORTER

It was one of those hazy September days when mountain outlines are obscure against a smoky blue sky, sunshine lies hot on fields golden and red with stubble of oats and buckwheat, maples wave scarlet banners here and there along winding dirt roads on the hillsides, blue birds make splashes of color on nail fences, and calls of jays and crows are muted in the pines.

We were driving up the valley of the Saranac in mid-afternoon, our objective High Falls Gorge, just above Moffittsville and 18 miles from Plattsburgh. One more "some day" trip had materialized and the gorge, of which we had heard so many tales, was near at hand.

Here it was that in lumbering days, almost a century ago, river drivers fought those sudden terrible logjams, when immense sticks piled high in wild confusion between rock walls, and a single man must step out on the heaving mass to set the key log free. The other end of a rope tied around his waist was held, by a companion on shore, who watched with the utmost vigilance to snatch him into the air and back to the river bank, if he misjudged his step in leaping to safety. If he fell into that roaring inferno of water, boiling around grinding, tossing logs, he was lost, though he be the bravest river man of all and perhaps well-loved in camp for his Irish blarney and his gusty songs.

TRIBUTARY

Marjorie Porter left very little about herself. She wrote mostly about other people. "The recent family donations completed the collection and gave insights into the personality of Marjorie Porter, " commented Debra Kimok, Librarian of Special Collections. "The folk music and oral histories are just rich with information. The visit of the grandkids helped my staff and I learn more about her and fill out the collection a bit more."

Hannah Harvester, Program Director at Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY) commented, "Marjorie Lansing Porter's music collection is an extremely significant resource for anyone with an interest in traditional music or the cultural heritage of the Adirondacks and Champlain Valley. It was very helpful for us at TAUNY when we created our Adirondack Music website module, as it contains songs from diverse groups such as loggers, miners, Irish, Iroquois, and French Canadian groups, as well as oral histories recorded with many of the singers. Many of the songs were recorded just in time, before the tradition bearers passed away."

Photo credits: SoundScriber by Debra Kimok, SUNY Plattsburgh Special Collections.

Black and white portrait of Porter in front of window by Michael McNamara, grandson.

Adirondack Ballads and Folk Songs by Lee Knight. Songs from the lumber woods, iron mines and farms. Collected by, and dedicated to, Marjorie Lansing Porter. Sung unaccompanied or with guitar. "My times with Marjorie were highlights of my life, not only in terms of the folksong collection, but just in being with her, her letters and talking on the phone. She had a way about her that taught me lots of subtle and not-so-subtle things."

 Songs to Keep. Treasures of an Adirondack Folk Collector — A new documentary project including film, album, book and concert tour featuring rare Adirondack Folk songs collected by Marjorie Lansing Porter being rediscovered and rerecorded after 60 years.

Cowboy rhymes with thyme

Cowboy poet and chuck wagon cook John Schaffner

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Cowboys driving cattle after the Civil War cooked on hot, smoky coals and recited homemade poetry. They flavored their beans with molasses and stories. The chuck wagon was the kitchen cabinet. Poems were the entertainment. Mix in some rain and dust, add a heavy dose of lonesome, and a pinch of Irish storytelling, Scottish seafaring, Mexican horsemanship and African improvisation and you have the original recipe.

John Schaffner uses that recipe for his chuck wagon dinners. He learned cowboy poetry as a child from an 85-year-old cowboy. He cooks potatoes, biscuits and peach cobbler in cast iron Dutch ovens covered with coals. He measures his coffee by the handful and uses an old whiskey bottle as a rolling pin, an historic detail he learned from other chuck wagon cooks, nicknamed "coosie", slang for the Spanish word cocinero, or cook.

Schaffner cooks for family reunions, company parties, trail rides and charity events. To reach him you have to do it the traditional way with a telephone. He doesn't have a website. By the way, he was the official cook for John Wayne's 100th Birthday Celebration at his birthplace in Winterset, Iowa, in 2007.

The poet cook was born in Ferriday, Louisiana on the Mississippi River. The town is the birthplace of Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart. Schaffner now lives in  Wray, in northeast Colorado.

TRIBUTARY

How did you get started doing chuck wagon cooking?

SCHAFFNER

I got into the chuck wagon absolutely by accident. I was at a farm sale about 20 years ago and they had an old farm wagon. I told my wife I'd love to have that wagon. I ended up getting it bought pretty cheap. So we took it home and I put in the yard kinda like a yard ornament. A couple weeks later a friend drove by and said you know what, I've got a chuck box from an old chuck wagon. We ought to put that in the back of the wagon.

I told my wife if I'm going to have a chuck wagon, I'm going to learn to cook. So I started practicin'. I burnt a lot of biscuits. I tell people I made a lot of hockey pucks. Anyway I was just playing around for the fun of it.

One day a neighbor who had seen me cooking by the wagon asked me at church if I would be interested in cooking for the volunteer recognition banquet for the Head Start Program. She figured there might be 35 people. So I said I would do it. She called back in a couple of weeks and told me the reservations were up to 75. She asked me if I would still do it. Well the cowboy way is that if you tell someone you're going to do something, you do it. So I got my friend, who had given me the chuck box, and his wife and my wife pitched in and by just pure luck we turned out a pretty good dinner. About two weeks later somebody who'd been at the cookout called and wanted to know if I could do a chuck wagon dinner for a family reunion. From there it took off. We really have never done any advertising. It's all word of mouth.

A few years after that I was real fortunate to get acquainted with Michael Martin Murphey and we became real good friends so now I cook at a lot of his events. I don't sing. I tell people I got a lot of music in me but none of it has ever come out. I'm a prison singer – always behind several bars and never have the right keys. Michael Martin Murphey says that the two of us work well together: "I don't cook and John doesn't sing."

TRIBUTARY

Where do you get your recipes?

SCHAFFNER

I always try to cook things that were authentic to the trail drivin' days. My most popular meal is beef tips with gravy. I do cowboy potatoes in the Dutch oven. And you gotta have beans. That was just a staple on the chuck wagon. Cowboys called 'em "whistleberries." If you think about that long enough you'll know why they called 'em whistleberries.

TRIBUTARY

And the poetry, how did you get started there?

SCHAFFNER

As a kid, growing up in Louisiana, I was fortunate enough to meet an old gentleman, a guy by the name of Carter Wailes. Most of the people in the area knew him as "Deacon" Wailes. He was a deacon in the Methodist Church. He was 80 something years old when I met him and I was 12 or 13 years old. He was an old cowboy. He had cows until the day he died and he died out in his pasture one day. He always told me he wanted to die with his boots on and that's what he did.

He was born in 1882 near Ferriday. I tell people I'm a millionaire many times over, not for what I got in my pocket, but for what I've got in my head and my heart, the things that I learned from Mr. Wailes. He was teaching me to cowboy but he was also teaching me life skills. We did a whole lot of cattle work and put up a lot of hay. He told me if I was going to work cattle I had to learn to think like a cow.

I didn't know at that time that he was writing some poetry. When I was in high school I hated writing poetry. I was real shy at the time and didn't want to get up in front of the class. The poetry he wrote he just put in a dresser drawer.

I started about 25 years after I got out of high school. I heard other cowboys tell stories and I had a few ideas of my own. One of the first poems I wrote was about Mr. Wailes. His second wife was still alive so I sent her a copy of the poem. She sent me copies of some of the poems he had written. Every poet has a certain style and the uncanny thing is that my style of writing and his are almost identical even though I had never read any of his poetry. But there was something about our time together and the things he taught me that carried over.

I not only recite my own poetry but I have memorized a whole bunch of the old classic poems that were written back during the cattle drive era by Henry Herbert Knibbs, S. Omar Barker and Badger Clark. All from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Knibbs was actually not a cowboy but a hobo that spent a lot of time in cowboy camps. He actually published four books of cowboy poetry as well a bunch of novels about hobos.

TRIBUTARY

You told me you've memorized about 100 old cowboy poems. Why memorize so much?

SCHAFFNER

Well I like to say them to myself when I'm out driving cattle or in my pickup. Cowboy poetry is not a written language. It has to be spoken. I get more out of listening to a cowboy recite a poem than I do just reading it. His personality comes through, inflections change.

TRIBUTARY

It seems like a lot of people are doing cowboy poetry today. Do some of them do it badly?

SCHAFFNER

Well their heart's in the right place. There's people who have never lived the cowboy life that try to write poetry. I think it's a lot harder for them to really put the feeling into it. If you haven't been out there on a horse and had a wreck and been busted up and haven't taken care of cows and watched the baby calves be born, you cannot put that feeling in a poem. I can pretty much tell whether they've been out there or whether they're just reading it out of a book.

TRIBUTARY

What is it about the cowboy life? The cattle drive era only lasted about 20 years but the heritage lives on.

SCHAFFNER

It's just the fact of the Cowboy Code, the code of the West. When you tell somebody you're going to do something you do it no matter what it costs ya. It's one of those things that just born into you. There's just something about that way of life that people want. The closeness to nature. There's absolutely nothing in the world like sittin' on the back of a horse all day long; sleeping out under the stars at night.

I wrote one called "Full Moon in the Cow Camp" it was written about a time we were out doing branding. The neighbors would come and help. You get out in the middle of nowhere where there's absolutely no electricity, no light and you can see the stars and the moon very clearly. So I woke up at midnight thinking I'd overslept but it was the full moon that was so bright that we could have actually gotten up and gathered the cattle in at midnight.

TRIBUTARY

You also do some preaching from time to time?

SCHAFFNER

I do a cowboy church service but I'm not a preacher. My dad's a preacher. I do some fill in preachin' at our church. I like to preach and I always do a short one. Cowboys have a short attention span. I recite some of my gospel-type poetry. I tell people that just like we like to watch our kids and grandkids have fun I think God enjoys watching his kids have fun. You can't have more fun that being a cowboy. He puts cowboys out there to watch the animals. Cowboys have a dry sense of humor. After a bad wreck on a horse it's maybe not very funny but after you've recovered from it you can look back and make a humorous story about it.

John Schaffner's phone number – 970-630-3402  
jschaffner51@yahoo.com  
Order CDs directly or schedule a cookout.

YouTube video featuring John Schaffner cooking and reading his poetry.

Related links

 Chuckwagon cooking and recipes

Colorado Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Durango Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Origins of cowboy poetry

A Mount Evans fixture

Karl Snyder, Mount Evans explorer and photographer

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Karl Snyder has been driving from Boulder, Colorado (5,430 feet above sea level) to the top of Mount Evans (14,264 feet ASL) to shoot photographs ever since he got his first driver's license way back when. The Forest Service rangers know him. The staff at the  Echo Lake Lodge know him. And anyone who has searched the Internet for information on the trip up the highest paved road in North America knows his website. Coming out of the Ram's Room, (men's restroom -- the women's restroom of course is named Ewes) he says good morning to Barbara Day, the proprietor of Echo Lake Lodge. She ran the  Crest House on top of Mount Evans until it burned in 1979 and before that the café and gift shop on top of Pike's Peak (14,110 feet).

After the Army and college, Snyder moved to the Silicon Valley in California (sea level) working as an accountant, computer programmer and Internet startup entrepreneur. He did a lot of early work with bar code technology. When his mother got cancer, he came home to Boulder. He started designing websites for lodges in Estes Park and that led to a new site promoting Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP), which today has more than 300 pages. In 1998, he started the Mount Evans site, which now has about 90 pages. That effort brought him up the highway more than 20 times a year for the first two years.

SNYDER

I feel like an explorer every time I come up here. I've been a photographer since I was ten. You would think by now I have shot everything on Mount Evans that I can shoot. But I think there are still 500 pictures I haven't taken yet. Every time you visit, even the same place, the weather is different, the trees are different, the animals are different. By about June 20 the mothers and babies (mountain goats) will be up here. The kids are as cute as a button. They play king-of-the-rock with each other, whatever animal games they play. I love taking pictures of the babies.

TRIBUTARY

What do you tell people who have never been up here or are starting to take their photography more seriously.

SNYDER

I tell people to go as early as you can or late in the afternoon. The really good light is in the morning since the route faces basically east. That's when the bigger animals will be out. Anytime between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. up here the place is a zoo especially on weekends. It's the same way in Rocky Mountain.

I break animals up here into two categories. LHMs (large hairy mammals) and CFCs (cute furry creatures). LHMs typically eat early and sit down and chew their cud during the day, eat again before nightfall and then sit down. They are most active during the first two hours of daylight and the last two. And wherever they decide to sit down, they will just stay there and ignore humans until someone's bow wow bothers them. I've been sitting on a rock and goats get so close I can't shoot them anymore because my lens won't focus. The bighorn sheep, as opposed to the mountain goats, will actually come up and bang on your car. People hand them Doritos or cookies, which is not good for them, but they will go up and beg for it. So I honk my horn when I see people passing out goodies.

TRIBUTARY

And what do they do?

SNYDER

They give me the Boy Scout sign. I don't mind. A lot of people from Denver consider this their mountain. When I first did the website people who contacted me were hostile. "You're going to bring all the tourists up here. This is our mountain." Because of that they think feeding the animals is OK. Their parents did it. Their grandparents did it. They feel it is their God-given right to feed the animals. One interesting fact about the goats; they were imported. This is the only place in Colorado where they exist in large numbers that I know of. I think they were brought down from Yellowstone or Canada.

TRIBUTARY

You have explored many aspects of Mount Evans that no one else documents or discusses in their sites.

SNYDER

The Mount Evans website is a labor of love. The Rocky Mountain National Park site is where I make my money. I'm hosting about 70 websites for the Estes Park area. I tried to do the same thing down here but the commercial setting is different. You know the original idea for the Mount Evans Highway was that it would be part of a peak-to-peak system from Long's Peak to Pike's Peak. After building the road from Idaho Springs to the summit, the promoters gave up the idea. This road was meant to drop over the west side to Grant on Highway 285 and continue to Pike's Peak.

Some people say Mount Evans has the only true arctic tundra south of Alaska. I'm not sure how you define tundra. Is it the existence of permafrost? I have to believe there are other areas. I've studied about the alpine zones, and the trees. On the RMNP site I did a whole section on the trees and shot a lot of photos of the bark and needles. Surprisingly in September and October that is one of my most popular pages. I found out that colleges are using them for reference material because my pictures are so good. Many of the trees in the higher alpine area, say above the  Mount Goliath Natural Area, are Engelmann Spruce. The  pine beetle doesn't attack them like they do the Lodgepole Pines. So we are going to have this green frosting all around the top of the timberline in areas where the Lodgepoles have been killed by the beetle.

The bird watching here is limited to your normal five camp robbers which are the  Stellar's Jay, the  Clark's Nutcracker, the  Gray Jay and  Magpies. Also the ravens. Those are your big birds. The rest are your basic small songbirds and God they are impossible to shoot even with a long lens. You will see one on a rock and before you can even aim and focus they've taken off. I have this desire to shoot more birds. It is one of my 500 targets of opportunity.

TRIBUTARY

What keeps you so involved with Mount Evans and the website?

SNYDER

I define relaxation as total involvement. I don't care if you are playing golf or skydiving or motorcycles. If you are totally absorbed in what you are doing then you have the ability to relax. Often when I am out shooting in the dead of winter I don't realize I'm cold until I get back in the Jeep. My photography is my excuse to be in the mountains. I've had days where I've shot several hundred shots and I didn't have one keeper. I started to look at what I thought I was doing wrong. Now, I have my own rules of photography. When I was in Korea (U.S. Army, Taegu area, 1973) we were out on a two-week exercise. At the end of this the colonel of our unit got up and mentioned, not the 10 things we did wrong, but the 10 things we did right and we should make sure we do them again next year. It's that way for me with photography. I will put a picture I think is good on my computer screen as the wallpaper. If I don't get tired of it after two or three days then I consider that a good picture. When I am out looking for photos, I always have my long lens on the camera.

Another rule. Shoot animals at eyeball height or below. If you shoot an animal above you, then he is more majestic. A lot of times I don't even look downhill to see if there are shots. I often drive 10 miles an hour and if people get upset then they aren't on vacation yet. I just wave them around. There is a phenomenon I've discovered above timberline. There are rock formations that mimic animals. You'll find pika rocks or bird rocks. You get a closer look and discover someone has put a rock on top of another rock. I don't think they do it to actually imitate a bird but boys in the mountain only know how to do two things with rocks. Throw 'em and stack 'em. (Pointing at rocks on the edge of the road). Now most kids know what kind of rocks these are. Do you? They are "leaverrights" because mom has told you more than once to, "Leave 'er right there."

I usually set my camera on burst mode (multiple shots in a row). I don't know how many times I have shot single shots of animals and I get him with the jaw twisted sideways, half a tongue hanging out or an eye closed. So now I just do a burst of three to eight pictures and in one of them you will get a good expression on the face. The other thing I do after a day of shooting photos up here is stop at the lodge for one of their seven homemade pies. My favorite is cherry.

Related links

CDOT daily Mount Evans open/close report

How to photograph mountain goats by Jay Ryser

 Mount Evans Ranger Talks Schedule

Historic postcards of Mount Evans

 Albert Bierstadt painting in the Mount Evans area

Thad Roan's photo of Bristlecone Pine

 Creation of the Castle in the SkyFriends of Mount Evans and Lost Creek Wildernesses

Growth increases for Bristlecone Pines

 Early photography by visitor to Summit Lake

Jesus in my knapsack

Lawrence Egan was a Maryknoll priest in Guatemala during the turbulent 1960s

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Lawrence Egan is fluent in Spanish but his Queens, New York, accent still comes through. His second-generation Irish father was not enthused about Larry becoming a priest. He became decidedly less enthused when Egan told his parents he had signed up to be a Maryknoll missionary.

Father Egan arrived in Guatemala in 1964, just as the anti-government revolutionary movement was beginning and as the government was increasing its brutal reaction. While Egan was trying to help Maya Indians in the hills of western Guatemala, the government began to bomb their villages in the eastern regions trying to suppress the guerrillas, many of who were ex-military and former government officials.

By the time he transferred to El Salvador in 1967, observers estimated between 3,000 and 8,000 Guatemalans were killed. It was only the beginning of what would become known as  The Silent Holocaust.

He recently published "Maryknoll in Central America, 1943–2011" which chronicles the difficult work of Maryknoll personnel to navigate the treacherous paths through the jungles of politics, ethnic struggles and Catholic church policy.

He left the priesthood in 1977, married a former Maryknoll Sister and came to Colorado where he worked in bilingual education for the Colorado State Department of Education.

In 1991, he went to Vietnam, and later Myanmar (Burma) to serve as the Country Director for International Development Enterprise (IDE), a non-governmental organization specializing in the transfer of low-cost technology to developing countries.

TRIBUTARY

Your first parish was in Guatemala in the western highlands at Huehuetenango. What was it like?

EGAN

It was the end of the line. We were on the border with Mexico. We had no electricity except for a small generator, which we used for a short time at night. There were no health services and no schools. But I was 26 so it was an adventure.

Our parish was made up both of Maya Indians and Ladinos. Ladinos are a socio-ethnic category of Mestizo or Hispanicized people. The Indians speak a native language, wear traditional Maya clothing, many without shoes.  Ladinos speak Spanish, do not wear Maya dress and can afford shoes.

The Ladinos exercise economic and political control at all levels of government throughout the country. They are the townspeople. The Maya are subsistence farmers. They exist on a daily diet of corn and beans. They were mostly illiterate.

For the Maya, religion was a vital part of their everyday life. The Ladinos were what we called "cultural Catholics" who for the most part appeared for baptisms and Holy Week and not much else.

The Maya were already baptized Catholics but the in some of the villages practiced "la costumbre" a mixture of folk Catholicism and pre-Columbian Maya rites. They had their own "chimanes" or  shamans, who were part healers and part religious leaders. As you would expect there was some antagonism between the established shamans and us as new priests. We had some compromising to do in order to coexist. It was an old conflict dating to the Spanish Conquistadores. The farther away the villages were from the central towns, the more traditional was the religion.

TRIBUTARY

The chimanes could have stopped you in your tracks if you had not been careful.

EGAN

One of the new ideas that came out of Vatican II was that the "seed of God's word was already present in cultures before the coming of Christianity." This caused missionaries, professors and church leaders to question the need to challenge the beliefs, practices and understanding of the indigenous people. So we adapted. The U.S. model for how the church works could not have succeeded in this setting. We learned from each other and found common ground, even friendships.

I went with Jesus in my knapsack to give Him to the people but I discovered he had already beaten me there and he was a different Jesus than I knew — the Jesus of the poor and dispossessed.

TRIBUTARY

You spoke Spanish but the Maya didn't. How did you overcome the language barrier?

EGAN

Each village had Mayan lay people who were all volunteers and they basically did all the teaching. They knew everyone and they knew who was more Catholic or more costumbre.

I tried to visit each village once a month. Our area had 10 villages, five of which had to be reached by horse or donkey. I would say Mass, teach and help the local lay people with daily routines. Some of the Maya within the parish spoke Spanish so we would teach them and they would teach others. We had to use the local people as translators until we got better with the native language.

We were also training, and empowering, local parishioners to be lay ministers who would assume roles such as administering communion, preaching and baptisms, tasks that had been reserved for us as priests.

At the same time the church began the development of central training centers where people could come for courses in agriculture, basic adult education, community development and leadership training. It also stressed the role of women. From this gradually developed a number of Maya political activists who got involved in local elections.

TRIBUTARY

So the Maya were beginning to feel respected, the chimanes were tolerant and some of your American coworkers were adapting to these new ideas. Was the government supportive of this work?

EGAN

The Catholic Church for years before then was perceived as a key government ally. The Maya didn't trust the Ladinos, the government, and by association, some of us. So that was one factor.

In 1960, a group of junior military officers pulled an attempted coup that failed. They went into hiding and this became the nucleus of the forces that would fight the increasingly autocratic government rule. By the time I arrived (1964) the movement was growing but it did not include the Maya.

From 1966 to 1968 the government forces, led by  Col. Carlos Arana Osorio, carried out the brutal killing of around 8,000 peasants in order to eliminate 100 to 500 rebels. For years the government tried to maintain the status quo and was suspicious of any groups that organized people. They labeled the insurgents as communists and declared a crusade to promote the "survival of Western Christian civilization."

In reality it became genocide. The military began to perceive the Catholic Church as the enemy because so many church workers stood with the Maya, defending their rights to land and life. Many native priests and thousands of church workers were killed. During this period more than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed, 90 percent at the hands of the military.

TRIBURARY

It sounds like what started as a modest effort to encourage the poor turned into a nightmare.

EGAN

The Church had been moving gradually away from its role as an indirect supporter of the established power groups to a role as the voice of the voiceless. The government started accusing us of being "involved in politics" but the church had been in politics for 400 years. But now we were changing sides.

This cost many of our friends their lives. The lay leaders who we had been training became prime targets for the death squads. Many would give valiant service in the midst of genocide. They truly were the unsung heroes of that terrible time.

TRIBUTARY

Isn't this ethnic and political pattern of conflict being repeated time and again all over the world, even now in the Middle East?

EGAN

That's true and the moral decisions for the missionaries, the church and the non-governmental organizations are being repeated too. Does one support a revolutionary movement with all its faults and excesses against a clearly unjust government in the process of persecuting its own citizens? What are your options?

Active nonviolent resistance when faced with entrenched military dictatorships is one option. Armed resistance, or active support of the opposition is the other. And even if you choose nonviolence, as we did in Central America, that will not stop the government from making church workers their main opponents. Non-violent resistance is still resistance. The problem is you are a foreigner in someone else's country and that only complicates matters.

The best presentation of the nonviolent option is Tom Melville's biography of Fr. Ronald W. Hennessey, "Through a Glass Darkly: The U.S. Holocaust in Central America."

TRIBUTARY

You were transferred to El Salvador in 1967 and spent five years there. Were the conditions similar?

EGAN

Yes and no. I went from the mountains of Guatemala to an upper middle class parish where 60 percent of the men had a college education, many educated in the United States, and all the women had a high school education. The community wanted American priests and there weren't any in San Salvador (the capital of El Salvador) at the time.

Here it was not Maya against Ladinos. It was poor against the rich and middle class. The government was military-run like Guatemala, and it was also the peasants who were massacred by the troops. And also similar, there might have been 50 or 100 guerillas in the area but thousands of the locals were killed in the attempt to get at the resistance fighters.

We took this parish because we felt the president of El Salvador might come out of this parish someday. These were the people who eventually would be running the country at various levels and if you wanted to see change you had to work with them.

TRIBUTARY

Why did you leave the priesthood?

EGAN

Well, celibacy when you are in a place like Central America with all this stuff going on, not being married is a plus. You don't have to think about family. But when you are back in New York at a desk job, celibacy has less appeal.

Practicing retirement

Robert Schultz devotes his time to helping people think about retirement

_________________________________________________

More than 10,000 baby boomers a day are turning 65, a pattern that will continue for the next 19 years. Many expect to keep working since 40 percent are not sure they will have enough money to retire.

Robert Schulz saw the trend when he started researching retirement issues and making a plan for him and his wife. After attending several retirement seminars he realized many of the programs were trying to sell him products he didn't need.

The corporation where he worked had more than 900 employees over the age of 50 and he was one of them. He talked with his boss about the idea of a retirement planning seminar for this group and after more research he presented his first class. It filled up immediately, as did the next one and the next one.

Presenting information about the complexities of retirement has become his life calling. "I connect people with information and with resources. That's what gives me joy. I am a connector, not a financial planner. I have lots to give and nothing to sell," Schulz said.

TRIBUTARY

What do you see people struggling with during your seminars?

SCHULZ

They are overwhelmed. When I finish different segments I ask if there are any questions and it's kind of like a deer in headlights. "Oh my gosh I had no idea what was involved in this, not only financially but also how complicated Medicare can be." We tend to think that Social Security is one plan and one benefit and it's not. There's more to it.

And then we discuss the steep costs of long-term care. Then I ask them what are they going to do when they quit work. Guys especially, who have worked all their life and never had any hobbies, they suddenly realize, "Oh my gosh how am I going to fill my time?"

Then they start to realize how much money it's going to take to retire. That in itself is the real shocker. They realize that because of our consumer economy that they have been spending the money they should have been saving for retirement.

There are more than 75 million people who will be retiring in the next few years and Social Security will not be enough to pay their bills. What are these people going to do? People can't ignore this anymore.

Many say, "Well my plan is to keep working." Today most people are not able to make that choice. It's made for them. It's not a choice. You will either be laid off, or your health will become an issue. You need to have a plan for when that happens.

TRIBUTARY

How did they get so far behind?

SCHULZ

The problem is this. We haven't become good money managers. More simply, we tend to spend more than we make. We all got caught up in living the good life due to the relentless marketing to the consumer to buy more and more.

It's a discipline issue. If you don't save today, you won't have that money for tomorrow. If you have a marriage with one saver and one spender that is certainly better than having two spenders.

In my parent's generation, you quit working and you died. There wasn't a need to have all this money to last you all those years. Now everyone is living much longer, which requires more savings.

In the past you had what's known as the three-legged stool: a pension, Social Security and individual savings and that was enough. The pension has gone the way of the Dodo bird. We are the first generation that didn't go through the Depression. We aren't a generation of savers.

TRIBUTARY

So planning and saving have become a key life discipline?

SCHULZ

I don't have answers to what are very unique individual situations. All I want to do is give them some things to think about. At least they can start to make educated decisions and not have somebody come in and say you need to do this, or buy this, or here is how we can make your investment double over the next few years.

Retirement doesn't work that way. Life happens, right? Health changes; you need a new car; kids move back home; replace a roof on your home. You are constantly adjusting for these things based on a fixed income.

Many people that come to my classes can still turn this around but they have to make some really hard decisions about their lifestyle. A person can save significant amounts of money in the five or ten years they have left before retirement.

My message to the participants is, if you get your act together, you can dramatically change the quality of your retirement.

Ask yourself what are you spending now? We'll my experience is that if you don't change your spending habits you will end up spending that same amount in retirement. So if you are not saving 20 percent of your income now, you are going to need 100 percent of your income in retirement.

That's why I say you have to start practicing for retirement by starting to limit spending to needs and not wants.

Let's say it costs about $50,000 a year to live, just for the necessities ($4,200 a month). Where is that money going to come from in retirement? Social Security might give a couple $25,000 to $40,00 a year depending on their earnings history. So some will be in pretty good shape.

But a lot of people aren't in the $40,000 benefit category. Maybe there was only one wage earner, and no pension. So if you are counting on Social Security for half of the $50,00 in expenses, you will come up short.

Even for at the high end of the wage scale it can be serious. The average income in the county where I live is $75,000 a year and let's suppose you want that much a year for retirement. To maintain that lifestyle, Social Security might give you $40,000. Where's the other $35,000 going to come from? You can only safely take three to four percent a year from your retirement savings without running out of cash during retirement. If you had a million dollars saved, four percent of a million dollars is $40,000 a year that you could withdraw.

People don't have anywhere near that amount of money saved. The average 401(k) has accumulated about $90,000. The average amount of savings for Americans is $25,000. This is going to last them 30 years in retirement?

So now we are seeing people move to another country, or back to the Midwest where the cost of living is lower. Or, try and stay employed, or start their own business.

TRIBUTARY

You ask the participants what they will do for the rest of their life after leaving the workforce? What are they considering?

SCHULZ

I have a lot of hobbies that I knew I wanted to spend more time at when I retired. I'm busier than ever but now I get to choose what I want to do. But there are many people who have only worked and have few hobbies. Golf? It's not an end-all for living and it's expensive.

I tell a lot of people: practice your retirement before you retire. Start thinking about what you will be doing. If you are thinking about relocating, start visiting there at different times of the year. If you think traveling the country in a mobile home would be fun, then rent one and see what's it's like. Traveling can be expensive so do it while you have income — and your health.

TRIBUTARY

How does one know when they are ready to retire?

SCHULZ

Finances are one indicator. You are at a point where you think you can afford it.

Another is that the frustration of your day job starts to grate on you. It's not enjoyable anymore and you start thinking am I ever truly going to get to enjoy the things that I want to do?

It may not be a choice. It may be made for you. Then people are resentful, angry, scared. It's always a shock and they need time to recover from that.

Maybe you have a vision for what you want to do. Slow down enough to look around and listen to your spirit. I recommend reading  "Claiming Your Place at the Fire."

TRIBUTARY

You continue to pursue your research on retirement.

SCHULZ

I started out clipping newspaper articles like my mother had done. She was one of those people that clipped newspaper articles to send to her children. She would send us articles on various issues that she wanted to get our attention about. I tend to be a guy that before I get into something I research the heck out of it.

I have decided to raise chickens so for the last two years I read every book I could get my hands on about raising chickens. I tend to be a little bit to be a perfectionist. I want to do it right.

I send a list of new retirement articles every week for free to the people who have been to my seminars. A new article I just found is called "Seven Misconceptions About Retired Life" by Emily Brandon.

I had been doing these classes for about a year and I thought, wow I really love this. I had found my passion. My goal was never to make a lot of money. So what could I do? So I started doing some of the classes for free. And I also approached companies to see if they would pay me to present my program to their employees. That is actually what has worked out.

If you want to be added to my email distribution list and receive free referrals to other information about retirement every week, send an email to rhschulz2000@gmail.com and give me your personal email address. Using your work email may not work because companies tend to block incoming personal emails.

I will also notify you of upcoming seminars.

__________

May you always have work for your hands to do.  
May your pockets hold always a coin or two. May the sun  
shine bright on your windowpane. May the rainbow be  
certain to follow each rain. May the hand of a friend  
always be near you. And may God fill your heart with  
gladness to cheer you. — Irish Retirement Blessing  
(author unknown)

___________

Schulz was born in Abilene, Texas, the son of an Army officer. He attended 27 different schools before he attended college at the University of Iowa. After two tours in Vietnam as a fixed-wing pilot he got an MBA at the University of Texas. He spent his career in corporate human resources positions.

Related links

 The Smartest Retirement Book You'll Ever Read

 The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read: The Proven Way to Beat the "Pros" and Take Control of Your Financial Future

Shulz's library of articles for retirement planning.

"Taking the Mystery Out of Retirement Planning" Free retirement planning workbook from U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration

Retirement Living Information Center

Retirement resources from MSN

Are boomer's ready for retirement?

Social Security Administration Retirement Planner

Pursuing marriage

Lisa Anderson, Director of Young Adults/Boundless at Focus on the Family

_________________________________________________

Lisa Anderson asks her young adult listeners why they aren't pursuing marriage, questioning their dating styles, their cohabitation and their infatuation with their careers, trying to give them a vision for marriage and help them understand that it is critical to their future.

Anderson sees her role as encouraging her 39,000 listeners to move beyond "adultescence", an ambiguous developmental stage between adolescence and adulthood. Along the way she is challenging parents and churches to define the point at which the child needs to take on responsibility, especially for marriage.

As Director of Young Adults/Boundless at Focus on the Family, she hosts "The Boundless Show", a weekly internet podcast that discusses issues relevant to young singles such as allowing career to define one's marriage plans, why dating today is dysfunctional, weathering rejection, the effects of pornography and answers to dating questions submitted online. Nothing is held back.

She graduated from Trinity International University in Chicago and lived and worked everywhere from Paraguay to Capitol Hill. Lisa says she knows a disproportionate amount of hip-hop lyrics for a white girl, and loves Jesus, people, ideas and guacamole, in that order.

TRIBUTARY

You can relate to your audience because you are single. What happened to marriage for you?

ANDERSON

I say jokingly that I blame my singleness in my 20s on myself and in my 30s on men. In my 20s I did exactly what everyone told me. I went and got my education. I started pursuing a career. Employers had me moving all over the county. I wouldn't get plugged into a community long enough before I would uproot and move for the next job.

I woke up one day and I was 30 and I said, "What happened? I thought I was going to be married." And I thought it was going to happen to me and that I would just know. It would hit me on the side of the head. It really made me step back and look at some of the patterns in my own life.

I found that I was so busy on that hamster wheel doing what I thought was good. Even in ministry I was an overachiever. I was involved in the church, I was volunteering places, and I thought I was doing great things, and I was, but I wasn't living like I was planning to marry.

What we're doing here at Boundless is giving young adults a vision for marriage and family by inspiring and growing that desire within them. Then showing them how marriage is critical to their future. If you really want to change the world, you start a healthy marriage and a healthy family. You plant yourself in a community and you allow your family to grow.

TRIBUTARY

Are they looking for something that somehow prevents, or excludes marriage?

ANDERSON

No, but they're often doing things that will sabotage their path to it. For example, there's a "hanging out" phenomenon among so many young adults. No one wants to call it a date or make any kind of commitment. The dynamic is that one of the two, usually the woman, is hoping for something more to develop. "If I just hang out with this guy indefinitely he will see how great I am. He will realize that he can't live without me." Meanwhile the guy is feeling, "No, we're just friends."

I call this a "friendlationship." The couple's not intentional about the relationship and it's a recipe for disaster.

I had a friend who spent seven years in one of these waiting for the guy to come around. He never had any intention of dating her. He just loved that she was always available when he wanted to get pizza or talk on the phone. He was just using her for attention, to be a buddy when he needed someone to hang out with.

We've allowed this period of time between the teen years and adulthood to be a wasteland. There's no timeframe for it. We allow kids to "find themselves," have fun, do what they want while they're single and we say, "Don't worry, marriage will come along down the road." Well, sometimes it doesn't.

TRIBUTARY

What caused the diversion away from dating and marriage?

ANDERSON

Today's young adults inherited divorce, fatherlessness, hyper-feminism and more. What they didn't inherit are good marriage role models. Churches have been distracted trying to address many of these issues, failing to see the trend and provide guidance to their young adults.

I think everyone has told them, "Okay, we'll make sure you are getting those degrees, then the advanced degrees, then you're going to get a home, then you're going to get financially stable, then you can consider marriage."

We're not seeing the accountability and mentorship that is so necessary for young adults. Instead we're kind of relegating singles and young adults to generational peer groups, you know the blind leading the blind, whether it's in relationships or life in general.

A great number of key life decisions are made during this period of life. We know they will find a mate, choose a career and get an education; most young adults are being left to their own devices to do that.

Well at that point you're 30, 32, 35 years old, meanwhile we're giving them the message "but stay sexually pure." So they are supposed to make it from 18 to 35 remaining sexually pure? Those two goals are diametrically opposed and it's just not working.

The idea of getting married at a young age and maybe living on those apple or orange crates for a few years, you know it's not even heard of in this generation. It's have a great job, fill your home with Ethan Allen furniture and if you can't have that story it means you're not ready for marriage. When are conditions going to be perfect?

For the women especially it is hard for them to realize that there is a certain struggle at the front end of a marriage and when you marry young, you're going to have that struggle. We've actually seen in the research that that kind of experience of the early struggle is actually more strengthening to a marriage. Ultimately if young adults can get through those first few years of struggle, their ultimate marriage success is much higher.

_______

"The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man

and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children."

– G.K. Chesterton

_______

This interview was adapted from interviews by Marian McNamara for "Better Off Wed", a film on marriage by the Oregon Family Council.

Related links

Guy's and Girl's Guides to Marrying Well (free download from Boundless)

 Just Do Something: How to Make a Decision Without Dreams, Visions, Fleeces, Open Doors, Random Bible Verses, Casting Lots, Liver Shivers, Writing in the Sky, Etc.

 Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations

### Rehabilitation is gone

Jerry Agee, former Director of the Colorado Division of Youth Services

_________________________________________________

Juveniles sentenced to institutions no longer receive offers of help, only punishment, according to Jerry Agee, former Director of the Colorado Division of Youth Services, who retired after 42 years of trying to ensure the system did not lose its focus on helping.

AGEE

Now we fill up more and more prisons. It used to be we couldn't put a juvenile in a jail. Now we lock kids up we would never have locked up in years past. No counseling, only punishment. We used to train the staff who worked with the kids to help, to counsel; to give the kids a new perspective and a second chance. Most of that is gone.

Study after study has shown that teaching a person to think about the perspective of others and stop thinking only about himself starts the change process. We saw it work. But the public and the legislators today want retribution. Now we have more prisons than we've ever had and nothing is changing in the life of the kid.

We had a great deal of success with such change. In Ohio, I had a group of 42 of the worst juvenile offenders. Rape. Robbery. Murder. We worked with them, retrained them, gave them vocational skills and got them interested for the first time. Their rate of return to crime was very low.

Agee ran youth programs in Ohio and Georgia in addition to Colorado. For 10 years, he taught one of the few correctional officer training programs that introduced helping skills.

The change started in the late 1970s. Sociologists published theories about punishment and declared the juvenile justice system a failure. Not one in 100 had ever talked to a juvenile delinquent or convict. They didn't even talk to staff at institutions. Legislators bought it and started changing the system. Rehabilitation became a dirty word.

Lawmakers became enamored of the idea of mandatory sentencing laws. This took away all discretion from the people who had to work with the offenders. It forced us, as an example, to take a 17-year old who had sex with his 16-year old girlfriend and declare him a sex offender. Why would we do that to someone if we thought he would benefit more from counseling and a second chance?

There are some very bad juveniles who deserve punishment. But that is not an indication of a trend that can only be corrected by mandatory jail time."

Related links

 Thoughts on "Restorative Justice" for youth Studies by Yochelson and Samenow

Documentary film: Race to Nowhere

School lunch for 35,000

Jason Morse is part of the "Chefs Move to Schools" program

_________________________________________________

Jason Morse was following a narrow snow path to his neighbor's house for Sunday brunch. It was one of those crunchy, my-breath-almost-froze-in-front-of-my-face Minnesota winters. The couple treated him like their grandson.

Using their finest silverware, silver pitchers and china they covered the large dining room table with pastries and salads, meats and vegetables. It was all very elegant.

Jason watched his reflection move up and down on the side of a silver pitcher as he tilted his head back and forth. He asked his neighbor if he could help her in kitchen where the laughter and the aromas came from. Wow! This is cool, he thought to himself as he worked alongside her.

Helping with Sunday brunch got him thinking about being a chef. His neighbor was the chef for the governor of Minnesota. Jason was in sixth grade.

By the time he started high school he had worked in a starter restaurant job and wanted to learn more. He found a local restaurant to sponsor him for credit through DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America). By the time he graduated, he had become the youngest kitchen manager a local chain had ever had.

He moved on to a large volume conference hotel where the head chef mentored him for three years. With support from his mentor, and grandparents he decided to attend the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales University, Charleston, S.C.

From there his career took him as a head chef to high-end hotels, restaurants, resorts and country clubs and landed him in Denver. And then in 2010, he was one of seven head chefs from the Colorado Chef's Association, and more than 3,000 American chefs, invited to the White House by Michelle Obama for the kickoff of the "Chefs Move to Schools" initiative — an opportunity for chefs around the country to adopt a local school lunch program to help solve the childhood obesity epidemic within a generation.

MORSE

I was sitting there about five feet from Mrs. Obama and listening to her speech and I thought wow, I think I'm being asked to do something different with my career.

"We are going to need everyone's time and talent to solve the childhood obesity epidemic and our Nation's chefs have tremendous power as leaders on this issue because of their deep knowledge of food and nutrition and their standing in the community," Obama said.

Soon after I came back to Denver it was Christmas bonus time. I'm driving home with my bonus from the country club where I worked and thinking about starting my own business. I had gotten to a point in the country club world where working 80 hours a week was keeping me away from my two children.

So I took the money and formed 5280 Culinary, and became a consulting chef and developed my own line of spices.

Through the American Culinary Federation/Colorado Chef's Association, I got involved with the Wendy White at the Colorado Department of Agriculture and that led to developing recipes for their newsletter and local media. I also work with the Beef, Potato and Lamb Councils. I love agriculture. That's like my niche in life. I love going to the farms and helping. I've worked on a dairy farm and in potato fields. I wanted to know what life on the farm was like.

I've done recipes for eight years now for the Department of Agriculture's "Colorado Proud program." I also teach apprentice chefs for the Colorado Chef's Association Apprenticeship Program.

After the trip to the White House I met the folks at Douglas County Schools (DCSD) and began consulting with them to get the Chefs Move to School lunch program underway. And then in 2011, I joined the staff as Executive Chef and we now plan and prepare meals for 74 schools -- 35,000 meals a day.

TRIBUTARY

What's different about creating school lunch recipes?

MORSE

Kid friendly. Easy for parents to produce at home. Chefs are notorious for 800 ingredients in a recipe and methodologies that people look at and say, What?

We need to keep kids in mind when we are trying to eat healthy and find recipes. If mom can make it, and kids love it, that's a smashing success.

So I have to take a cool recipe that I want to do and make it work with fewer ingredients. My experience with coming up with recipes for the various statewide agricultural groups has taught me a lot about writing recipes for consumers.

Prior to the Chefs Move to Schools program, schools were just serving meals. Now, the staff does a wonderful job of getting inside the kid's head to figure out what they might like. We're not happy just serving food. We want kids to have a good experience and enjoy our product.

Who suffers when mom and dad are working and taking care of business are the children. Kids are left to their own devices and mom and dad load up on what the kids want. If I can have a student go home and say, I want what we had for school lunch. Holy crap! That is incredible. There is no better rush for me than that. Who tells their mom they want to eat the same food that they eat at school? That is humbling. That is a huge honor for me.

You would think that going to work for a school lunch program would restrict my creativity. Well, it does not. Kids come up with new games on the playground. They are constantly crafting new things among themselves. We are just like them and the kitchen is our playground.

Here's an example – grapesicles. The kids said this tastes like candy. It was just frozen grapes. If you freeze a grape it tastes different than a fresh grape. So I am always testing and trying to get better products and recipes for the consumer. And here at DCSD, I have to work on keeping the kids interested in new tastes. So I use my two kids (ages seven and nine) as testers for the school lunch program to see what they like. They are brutally honest with me.

I just try all kinds of things, like the pickled cantelope recipe. I held a competition with my 18  ACF apprentice students. I was teaching them how to write consumer recipes. Let's use cantaloupe and you can only use what we have here in the school kitchen. You don't want to write recipes that people have to go out and buy 20 ingredients for because no one will do it.

They had everything from cantaloupe salsa to roasted cantaloupe. One of my guys knows that I love everything that is pickled. I love the complexity of it. So he came up with picked cantaloupe. So he knew his audience and wrote a recipe for that audience.

With my ProStart kids we developed a full artisan pizza line that was able to replace the commercial pizzas that were being brought in. Now we do our own pizzas in the school lunch program and they have been beyond well received.

TRIBUTARY

Has this increased your budget?

MORSE

There is some federal reimbursement but the rest is up to us. We still have to do this to make money. We lose or make money literally by pennies a serving. Imagine if the 35,000 meals we do a day cost five cents more. That adds up in a hurry. We did raise school lunch prices by 25 cents and have the support of the parents. They are saying, this is what we want our kids to eat. We need this change.

It cost money to eat healthy. My family of four spends $600 a month on groceries. If you want to buy junk food it's cheap because there is usually a bunch of garbage fillers in it. It costs more to buy local rather than just accepting what gets shipped in. The yellow squash I buy locally costs maybe twice as much as what I used to buy shipped in from California.

But now the local growers realize they have expanding local markets. And what I see is that when people find out you are a Colorado company, they will buy locally. Colorado is a wonderful place for supporting the local economy.

TRIBUTARY

There is a commentary about a culture from its cuisine. Is our American cuisine shifting in relation to fresh food and home cooking?

MORSE

I truly believe our economy right now is righting itself because we have been foolish in thinking that everything has to be cheap, cheap, cheap. Cheap means garbage. You look at what other countries eat. They spend 20 to 30 percent of their income on food – fresh, wholesome, delicious and grown locally. Then you look at us and I think the figure is 12 percent spent on food. That contributes to childhood obesity. Cheap food is not always healthy food.

TRIBUTARY

The grocery stores have greatly expanded their promotion of local produce. What's going on?

MORSE

It's what the consumers want. There is no better way to drive the local economy than to embrace and support the local economy. These growers work their butts off to give us beautiful products. We produce gorgeous things here and we want it to stay here.

Several years ago the San Luis Valley didn't grow enough potatoes to sustain our usage for a whole year. When we (the Colorado Chef's Association) began talking to the growers they would ask, well what do you need from us? We need an uninterrupted supply of potatoes. If I am going to declare on a school lunch menu that we only serve Colorado potatoes then I better have Colorado potatoes year round. Now we are sustaining potatoes for the whole year. They reacted and have really increased their production for us.

TRIBUTARY

There are many recipe sources on the Internet. Can you recommend a site or two?

MORSE

One of my favorite recipe websites is All Recipes. This recipe website is driven by the consumers, mom and gramma house maker that have been making their world famous apple crisp for 60, 80 years and now they are passing them down. In general their recipes are simple and when you need some inspiration or that favorite blue ribbon state fair recipe, that's the place to go. I will take those recipes and tweak them to make them mine. Like, I'm a vanilla junkie. There is always vanilla paste in every kitchen I have ever had. It's very complex and for me is the epitome of vanilla. So I am always trying vanilla paste in my recipes.

______________________

A happy home

4 cups love

5 spoons of hope

2 cups loyalty 2 spoons tenderness

3 cups forgiveness

4 quarts faith 1 cup friendship

1 barrel of laughter Take love and loyalty, mix thoroughly with faith.

Blend it with tenderness, kindness and understanding.

Add friendship and hope, sprinkle abundantly with laughter.

Bake it with sunshine. Serve daily with generous helpings

from A Taste of Home.com

___________________

Related links

 Recipe for carrot cake pancakes

 Colorado three onion soup

Gas, coffee and quinoa: A life changing pit stop.

Ernie New, one of the first growers of quinoa in the U.S., examines maturing plants.

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The San Luis Valley is a high-altitude agricultural basin covering approximately 8,000 square miles in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. The average elevation of 7,664 feet above sea level is similar to the Altiplano regions of Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile and Peru where 90 percent of the world's supply of quinoa (keen wa) is grown.

The valley is home to the Great Sand Dunes National Park, the tallest sand dunes in North America, the Colorado Gators Reptile Park, and  SunEdison, one of the largest solar electric facilities in the United States. It is also one of the  top five largest potato growing regions in the U.S. and home of the The Mosca Pit-Stop, a convenience store owned by Ernie New and his family.

NEW

My wife's dad and mom was trying to retire from the farm so we came down and I tried taking the reins. I taught school in Denver for nine years but I decided raising a family in Denver was not what I wanted to do. I would prefer to raise them on the farm.

My wife's dad was going to do a lot of the management and I was going to do the work out on the farm and so on. That lasted about six months and then he got cancer and died in the next four or five months. It was a way for me to get my feet wet in a hurry.

In the early 1980s, we were producing grass-fed beef and stone ground wheat flour. As I started trying to farm we were trying to do everything organic — sheep and cattle and small grains.

TRIBUTARY

Then the economic depression struck about that time and you went broke. Is that when you went to work as a mechanic at the Pit-Stop shop?

NEW

Yes. I leased the farm out to a potato operation and I told him I didn't want him using any chemicals. I decide from the beginning that organics was the way to do it if we could. That was before any organic certification of any kind was out there. My family had already been growing organically for years.

After a while, I was then able to purchase the Pit Stop.

TRIBUTARY

So now you were a gas station/convenience store owner trying to survive.

NEW

Well, in 1984, a guy name Dave Cusack came into the Pit-Stop and of course we had coffee and so on and he was needing some gas. We set down and we visited and I found out he was doing some project with this new plant, which was called quinoa, that I'd never heard of and no one else had either.

David Cusack, was a history professor at the University of Denver. He had been trying to grow quinoa down here. He discovered when the seeds were planted on a field that was following potatoes, the herbicide they had sprayed on the potatoes in the last year to kill the weeds had enough residual value that it killed the quinoa this year.

So Cusack told me, while we drank coffee, that he was looking for an organic farm with no chemicals on it. So I said, sure we'll try some, and that was in 1984. But he was gunned down in Bolivia that summer. So that put the project on hold.

We soon found out that his sister in Denver had some quinoa seed which she gave us and I planted two rows about 100 feet long and it did just beautiful.

Meanwhile we had found a market for our whole grain wheat through organic grocers like Vitamin Cottage, Alfalfas and gourmet restaurants in Denver. In 1987 we hadn't grown enough quinoa to even talk about. At this time we had a chance to payback some of the loans to FHA and start farming again.

TRIBUTARY

When did you start growing potatoes?

NEW

I had not done potato farming, row crop farming, before I got involved in the quinoa. We were actually into the small grains, cattle, sheep and alfalfa more than anything else.

Being an organic farm you can't plant the same crop on the same field year after year because the bugs and diseases take over, the nutrients aren't there and so on. So we had to come up with some kind of rotation so we decided we would add potatoes to the rotation. We tried about seven or eight different varieties of potatoes on about five acres.

The next year, I said, everyone else down here grows reds and russets. I had in mind a good tasting purple potato that stays purple when I cook it. I wanted yellow potatoes. I wanted all these different varieties. We wanted something else that everybody else wasn't doing.

Over time the production of potatoes increased and we do about 130 acres of specialty potatoes. The organic industry a few years back said that you have to plant organic seed to grow organic food. So we wound up selling  organic seed potatoes to organic farmers across the nation who grow for farmer's markets, or gourmet restaurants or natural grocers. So we wound up in the seed business.  Most of our potatoes that we grow now actually go into seed production.

My favorite is the Purple Majesties and we grow a lot of them. We plant about 130 acres of quinoa a year, about the same as the potatoes. Quinoa, depending on how bad the wind is, or how bad the bugs are, how hot it is, may not produce that much.

TRIBUTARY

When did the quinoa sales start to take off?

NEW

(Turning to his son Paul who is in charge of operations) Have we made any money on quinoa yet? ("Not yet," Paul replies laughing). Quinoa has been kind of a burden and why do we stay with it? I don't know. I guess I'm just bull headed. Quinoa was really tough to learn to grow.

TRIBUTARY

How do you market it?

NEW

It's word of mouth more than anything. Chefs call us and when you get it into the hands of a chef, the word spreads quickly from one to another; same way with fingerlings and Purple Majesties.

Because quinoa is gluten free, there is quite a group of people out there that buy from us and have been for several years. Early on, Kellogs, General Mills — the cereal companies wanted to use quinoa to improve their cereals. Well we couldn't grow enough for them. So we said no. We get a phone call every few days trying to buy quinoa. Ok, how much do you want?

Oh, we want a semi load every two weeks.

No way. It's just not possible.

TRIBUTARY

What is preventing you from meeting the demand?

NEW

Well, I'm out of time. At 70 years old, I don't have that time left. Seriously, you never know when you can grow it from this year to the next. Are the bugs going to get it or is the wind going to take it. Last year we have one field that the  wind and sand damaged the growth point and we didn't get anything out of that field. So you get it almost ready to harvest and a hailstorm comes through and wipes it out. It's a real gamble.

TRIBUTARY

And all this started over a cup of coffee with a stranger at the Pit-Stop talking about an unknown edible seed from the Andes. You became one of the first growers of quinoa in the U.S.

NEW

It's been a real ride! And I don't thinks it's over with yet. There is a lot of interest in quinoa all over the world now. They are starting to grow it in Egypt, England in all kinds of places. There is also a lot of research being done now about how to grow it.

TRIBUTARY

How would you define your success?

NEW

It is very satisfying to get out there and dig around in the earth and plant and see how God lets it grow and how good it tastes. But what I'm most proud of are my kids.

I raised three great kids and they have great families. None of the grandkids are in jail. One is a freshman at the Air Force Academy. One is a senior at the School of Mines studying chemical engineering. Another granddaughter is in CSU studying dance. Two of my younger granddaughters are into gymnastics and doing very well in competition.

TRIBUTARY

Can our readers buy quinoa and potatoes from you directly?

NEW

If you want to write about us, we appreciate it, but you also have to state that no one will able to order any quinoa because we are constantly sold out. Period. You may have a better chance of getting the specialty potatoes. They are in a lot of the super markets but they may not say White Mountain Farm on the label. We package for companies like New Sprout Organic Farms so that bag goes to North Carolina for sale and people have no idea that they are ours, and that's all right.

### About the author

Charles McNamara was a journalist for a number of years. In 2012, he started an on line interview magazine called Tributary. One Flows Into Another. During his career as a publisher he has produced publications for the National Cattleman's Association, Children's World Learning Centers, Ski Card International, Metropolitan State College, Allied Jewish Federation of Denver and Manville.

He was the publisher of Vail Magazine/Beaver Creek Magazine and produced the Mountain Commuter, a monthly newsmagazine serving the residents of Evergreen, CO. He was the President of the Evergreen Chamber of Commerce.

Other Books By Charles McNamara

 The Joint, a documentary on Colorado's prisons, 1974.

Connect with Charles McNamara

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Smashwords author profile and interview

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