Bill & Sadie Hand

Interview by Cara Doyle

Secember 5, 2005

Tape 1, Side 1

We’re ready to go. I’m sitting with Bill Hand and he’s already in the middle of a story.  It’s about a bank robbery.

Bill:  So they robbed the bank.  I think it was the Fairplay Bank, I’m not sure, you had the sheriff and Dad got in the car.

Now this is your Dad, who was Norman Hand.  Who was the sheriff then?

Bill:  I don’t remember those things.  They started chasing them and they got not quite down to Bailey and dad put a 30 ought six rifle through the back window of the car and they stopped.  Then they towed the car back to Fairplay and they put it in the garage.

And this is the garage where the old red barn is now.

Bill:  Yah, and the side over here where it’s open, where the roof fell in on them, it wasn’t strong enough to stand up and it caved in eventually.  And they put the car in there and chained it up, put chains through the wheels and such so no other crooks could grab it and use it.  And it was in there for a number of years.

An armored car.  Where would these guys have gotten an armored car?

Bill:  I think they built it in Denver or someplace I don’t know.  Maybe they built it in Chicago, I don’t know.  But it had thick glass in the windows and steel plates in the doors.

How old were you when this was?

Bill:  Oh, I was grade school someplace I guess.

Did you kids go see that car?  I think that was pretty exciting.

Bill:  Oh I looked at it a few times.  Where the red barn is now was a place where they did wagons and stuff.

Built wagons or fixed them?

Bill:  Well, it was a kind of a horse drill(?)  you knowa,  place where they kept horses.

A livery?

Bill:  A livery type of place.  And when they cleaned it out one time why dad got a bunch of the old pieces of wheels, for instance we had a hub from an ore wagon that was big enough that we just put a leather seat on the top of it and made a stool out of it.  It was a big hub, a wooden hub.  And they got other things out of there.  We got a wheel, well the  was settin’ on the front.  Dad cut part of the hub off and put a table on it.  Oh, and then my brother got a surrey with the fringe on top out of there.   And it had those isinglass windows that you could snap on the sides.  But we only used it in the summertime.  We hooked the burros to it.  

Oh, neat.  Where did you go?

Bill:  Oh just around town.

In Fairplay.

Bill: Yah, in Fairplay.  And then it was on a Saturday, Sunday.  I don’t know where to start on this thing.

I’m just putting on the tape who we are and who’s talking right now.  And you have pulled out some really neat old pictures while we’ve been talking.

Sadie:  Oh, I’ve got  (not decipherable)

How about we start where the Hand family—were the Hand’s from Colorado originally or did they come from another state.

Bill:  I came to Colorado in a baby buggy.  And then we went back to Kansas again.

So originally the folks were from Kansas.

Bill:  Yah, my dad and my grandma and grandfather had a chicken dinner place just south of Wichita, Kansas.  And they had a truck garden and farm with it.  And my grandmother was very careful about the foods that she used.  She wanted top quality in her restaurant.  So they raised a lot of their own stuff at the time.  I suppose today that would not be possible, I don’t know.

That’s a lot of work in addition to running a restaurant.

Bill:  Well, Yah.  Like they raised watermelons and they also would go out and they;d say, “there’s a big watermelon.”  And they’d pull every other watermelon off of that vine until it grew up.  Then when the melons were mature they would have a watermelon party for all their regular guests, patrons.  And they would set out benches and they’d slice those watermelons lengthwise and put a knife in ‘em and the guests could just come along and eat the heart out of the watermelon.  And if anyone was caught eating anything but heart out of the watermelon their name was crossed off the list.  So then they took…when after the party was over why they would take those watermelons and they would scrape the seed parts, you know that pulp and seedy part, into those iron pots that they used to use to scald hogs and stuff.  And then they would set there and ferment and they would stir it once in a while.  And the good seeds would fall out into the bottom of the pot and the bad seeds and the pulp would come up.  And they would, you know, take and skim it off and they would put fresh water in there with them and they would wash them for several days.  And when all the extra bad part was out why they would lay them out on a newspaper and dry them and then they would sell ‘em for seeds.  That’s how they used to do it.  Now they do it at big seed farms and hybrids.

I’ve never heard about that with the seeds.  That’s interesting.  What else did they grow?

Bill:  Oh, one time my dad kind of kept track of the agricultural college.  And one time he got part Bermuda onion seeds and he grew about five acres of ‘em.  And they grew fat and big around and so he sold them to all the hamburger stands in Wichita and Newton and all around.  The next year—he made a killing on it—the next year why everybody and his cousin decided they wanted onions and they were drug on the market.  I went to second grade in Fairplay, no in Shawnee.

You said you came in a baby buggy.  Was it a visit?

Bill:  A visit. 

Did you have relatives here or something your family was coming to visit?

Bill:  We had relatives but I don’t know whether our family knew them or not.  One of our relatives was one of the first people to mine gold in Cripple Creek.

What was his name?

Bill:  I don’t know.  I’m not a name person.

Do you remember any stories from that?  Did the family talk about that time at all?

Bill:  The family didn’t talk about it.  We’ve got a book on it some place.

So you went back to Kansas, they didn’t stay the first time.  And then you came back when?

Bill:  They got the Shawnee Lodge.  The Shawnee Lodge is built where there’s a couple of houses…if you’re going through Shawnee there’s a grocery store and the two white buildings and then there’s a little thing with a copy shop that dad built after they bought the Lodge.  And then just up the hill here this way was the Lodge.  And it had a sun porch. 

That’s not the one that has all kinds of stone down below and kind of almost like a turret thing.

Bill:  No, it had—some place she’ll find you a picture of it—it had kind of a lattice work of slabs, you know that kind of stuff.  It was built up here, see, and the ground fell away in the front of it like this.

It was pretty steep?

Bill:  Yah.  And that was where they stored the firewood for the fireplace.

Do you know around when this is?

Bill:  Oh, oh, oh.  I was in I think second grade.

What year were you born?

Bill:  1922.  I went to school first grade at five and a half.  And they might have owned it then because I was farmed out to my aunt in Kansas a lot of the time.  But then when we went to Fairplay—oh, they sold the Lodge to a guy who paid ‘em  a down payment, insured it to the hilt and burned it down.  And I think that he or another guy burned down the one in Bailey.  When you go through Bailey, you know when you’re going down the hill into Bailey you see that place out there where they’re building the log houses, well that’s where the lodge set in Bailey.  Up on that hill.  And the outfit that built the lodge in Shawnee, the lodge in Bailey and the one that’s halfway between on the river.  Towards Fairplay.  It’s past Shawnee, between Shawnee, below the high school and it’s about two miles above Bailey. 

Glen Isle?

Bill:  Glen Isle.  It was all built by the same outfit.  At that time the railroad went through there.  And the highway went, you can still drive the old highway, when you go out of Shawnee you go kind of up the hill and round like this and down into Bailey.  If you’ve got time sometime you can take that trip.  When we would come to Denver as kids, at night, why I was always sick by the time we got to Bailey. 

Oh, dear.  All those hills and curves.  Do you know what brought the family to this particular area?

Bill:  I suppose my grandmother.  My grandmother was the type of person that liked to deal with the public.  She had that chicken dinner place then they had the lodge.  When they had the lodge in Shawnee they advertised in the slick magazines in New York, back east and then the people would come out on the train.  You know the narrow gauge train come up to Shawnee and they would stay for one or two weeks.  And they would have bridge tournaments in the sun room.

Sadie:  They were big tourists out here…there’s some right here, Bill

So it seems like she was a pretty smart businesswoman.  Do you know where that came from?  Was that always in the family?

Bill:  Now see this is the coffee shop that dad built.  And you see this kind of a lattice work underneath.  There wasn’t a stone foundation up under it.  And on the back side there was a breezeway.  And then there was rooms, help(?) rooms and stuff.  And there’s a road that goes up through here.  And right over this way they owned the land, too.  And dad proceeded to blast out a tennis court.  Those people were tennis people at that time. You know bridge and tennis were the rich people’s hobbies. And dad also cut lumber. And I remember he cut one big tree up there and when he cut it, why, he cut one of the lead boughs, you know, that shot into, went into the tree, and when the cut the tree, why they cut it in half.  At least it was in one board, one side of the bough.  And then they sold it to this guy and he burned it down shortly thereafter.  We traded, he also got in trade a dryland farm in eastern Colorado which we went and lived on for a month or two or something I guess.  Then my grandmother and my grandfather bought a little restaurant in Florissant.  And so we moved, shortly after that we moved to Florissant.  And mom would work in the, wait tables in the restaurant.  I don’t know what dad did.  And we lived on the lower end of town.  When we were there, why I went to school.  And we lived on the lower end of town and the school was, like most of those early towns, when they laid out the town they had to give a half acre or something for a school.  So it was always the least wanted piece.  So we lived on the lower end of town and the school was way out a block or two out on the north end of town.

How far would that be then?

Bill:  It seemed like a long ways to me at the time.

Did you walk?

Bill:  Yah, I walked.  And I remember, the thing I remember about going to school there was the teacher wrote four words on the blackboard for spelling.  And she wrote ‘em in longhand.  And I proceeded to set there and laboriously copy them off of the board onto a little piece of paper.  And it was one of those old time desks where they had the seat for the other one in front of you, kind of stuck up in front of you.  And I stuck that paper down in the crack.

Between your desk and the next seat.

Bill:  And when she gave us the words for spelling I pulled that out and handed it in and I still missed two of those words.  That’s how ready I was for school.

Would this be a one room school house with all the grades together?

Bill:  It was a one room school house, but it was a big one room school house.

How many kids would have been in a school like that?

Bill:  See I don’t remember that.  I only remember three things about that time.  One was that missed spelling.  The other was that we walked down through town, across the river to the other side and went on down to our house.  And there was always a dog there at the river that barked, come out and yap, yap, yap, you know.  And I didn’t pay much attention to the dog until one day the dog come up and bit me in the rear.  So since then, why, a dog barks at me suddenly behind, and I jump sky high.  What was the other thing?  Oh, the other was that my dad made me rice one time.  Rice for a meal.

Was that an unusual dish for you?

Bill:  I don’t think so.  It was just that dad says, “you’re going to eat it.  Period”   And I guess I ate it.  But I didn’t eat rice again until I was in my teens.

Didn’t like it.  Or was it the principal that he made you.

Bill:  It was just that I was dead set against it.  You know.  And when I finally did eat rice it was Spanish rice in the hotel in Fairplay.

Now do you remember anything about the house in Florissant.  What kind of a house you had?

Bill:  It was a little, one of those little square houses, you know, that’s about four rooms.  Down by the river and over.  I don’t know, I think it probably had an outhouse.

What did your family do from there?  How long were you there?

Bill:  We were there for, I suppose not over a year or so.  Then they sold that and then they leased the Fairplay Hotel.  The Fairplay Hotel was closed.  And it was owned by a mining, combination of miners, you know, I don’t know what you’d call them.  And I think they built it to have a place to stay up there when they were doing their thing. 

Do you know why it was closed, then?

Bill:  No, I don’t know.  But we opened it and ran it for several years.

What grade would this put you in about?  How old were you?

Bill:  I was in grade school.  I think I must have went to about the third grade or something, or fourth grade, I don’t know.  Anyhow, I remember the stone part of the school house.  You know the old stone two-story building, the schoolhouse?  At that time it was the school, period.  And we were on the ground floor.  The high school, I guess that stuff was upstairs.  And there was about four grades on the ground floor.  The teacher would take us and set us in a circle in little chairs up in front and use flash cards for phonics and that sort of thing.  And she’d come to me and I would miss and go to the next kid and he would get it I guess.  But I just, that was one of the things I remember out there was that I never did…   My idea of school was that if I’d have waited until I was about eight or ten to go to school I’d have probably done just as well.

Didn’t like school.

Bill:  It wasn’t that I didn’t like school.  It was just that I didn’t do good.  For instance, when I went to first grade, it was in Kansas.  The teacher would have an opening song every morning.  I expected to sing the first verse.  I could read the first line.  But then I was lost because I didn’t move down the line like you would do in a song.  I wanted to do all four of those lines that were in that first section.

Sadie:  I don’t think that’s the kind thing you want to know about, is it?

No, I think that for a family to remember tells a little bit about how different now we work with kids.

Sadie:  Why don’t you tell about when they first came to Colorado.  Maybe about the hotel.

What do you remember about the hotel at that age?   Did you get to play there?  Did you help work?

Bill:  Did you see the article in the Sunday paper?  I think it was last Sunday.  It talked about the Fairplay Hotel.  And the ghost in the Fairplay Hotel.  I lived in the Fairplay Hotel off and on for ten years or more, never any ghost.

Did they just like you or there probably weren’t any.  You’re going to ruin the story.

Bill:  I’m just ruining the story.  I don’t think there were any ghosts.   Now they did have one article in there, the point about it having a fire.  And where the parking lot is downhill from the hotel, there was a dance hall in there.  And that dance hall, I think they had a dance one night or something, anyhow it got on fire and it burned down.  And the fire burned the end of the hotel.  And I remember that us kids slept in the back of the hotel behind the kitchen.  It’s the part now where they extend the bar out this way.  You go into the kitchen and out this door and you can go down the stairs to go out the back door.  And we just went around the corner and there were three rooms along there.  And that was where we our family lived.  Because my grandmother ran the desk and she lived in the rooms up in the front corner of the hotel.

How many kids were there?

Bill:  I have three brothers and a sister.  My older brother did not live there hardly at all.  He lived with my mother’s dad, most of his life, in Kansas.

What was his name?

Bill:  Norman, Junior.

Who came next?

Bill:  Me.  Clarence and Bruce and Joy.  Bruce and Joy were born up there.

You had family it sounds like at different relatives.  Did that have anything to do with the depression, or was that just what your family chose to do?

Sadie:  They just wanted to stay on the farm.

Bill:  Well, and also, his grandfather Wolf went to town to Wichita and seen the conditions there and he was in the way and stuff.  So he went back and talked to his wife and the next day he went back down and picked up my brother and took him home and kept him. 

The conditions that your family was living in in Wichita was kind of rough?

Bill:  Well it wasn’t rough, it was just that kids in hotels or eating places are kind of a drawback if you know what I mean.  Well, you don’t want a kid that is screaming and hollering when you’re serving expensive customers.

Sadie:  (showing a family tree that goes back twelve generations)  This is the family that came from England.  This one was born in 1650.

Bill:  He and his two sons came over here and then he went back to England pretty soon.  And then he died on the ship coming back over here again.  It is my personal opinion that he went over and decided he liked it here so he went back to England and disposed of his property and came back with money.  And somebody on the boat decided, “I want the money,” and he was tossed overboard.  But that’s just my opinion, I don’t know.  I can remember when we lived in the hotel.  We lived in the back.  Like I said, grandmother and grandfather used the front bedroom for their office.  And then I had a great aunt and uncle who lived in Oklahoma City, who would come out and he would be the desk clerk during the summer when we had customers.  And they shut the hotel down during the wintertime.

Who would the customers be in the summertime? What kind of folks would be coming through?

Bill:  Let’s see, there was the Stubers from Little Rock, Arkansas.  Mr. Stuber was a car dealer in Little Rock, Arkansas.  His wife and his daughter would and sometimes somebody else in the family would come out and rent the two best rooms in the hotel.

Tape 1, Side 2

Clientele—maybe they brought some of the clients from Shawnee or where were they getting these rich folks?

Bill:  I don’t know about that.  When we were at Shawnee they would have bridge tournaments and then one week they would take the touring cars and they would load the guests in and they would go up to Fairplay, over to Breckenridge, up to Climax, Leadville, Buena Vista, and back around.  Make a long trip out of it for one day in one week.  And then after the ice broke off of Jefferson Lake, why they would go and have a big picnic up at Jefferson Lake one day the next week.

Sadie:  I think that was the only kind of people left to do such things, were the rich.  Other people would sleep in their cars and they’d take a bike up and lay on the lawn.

How much did a room cost at that time?

Bill:  A dollar and a half for a single without a bath and I think about four dollars, four and a half for a good room with a bath. 

And that would include something to eat?

Bill:  Meals, you could get ham hocks and lima beans for sixty-five cents, and a steak for a dollar and half, two dollars, I don’t know, two and a half dollars.

Did you kids eat the hotel food or did you have a separate area where your mom might cook you dinner or how did that work?

Bill:  We ate the hotel food, but…here’s the kitchen and here’s this little hall.  And then there was these three rooms here.  Well this corner room was kind of used as a dining room for family and help.  And so we’d eat…and we ate when they weren’t busy.   Generally we generally ate after…

The meal was served in the restaurant.  Do you remember any of the helpers?

Bill:  Oh, Bea Whitehorn was a waitress.  She was the head waitress there for a long time.

What was she like?

Bill:  Strict.  But it wasn’t so much she was strict as my grandmother was strict.  And the waitresses…if you started getting fat, you started dieting so you didn’t get fat.  It wasn’t like today when people would say, “I’ve got a right to do what I…this is discrimination.”

Do you remember why …was that just your grandmother’s personal feeling?

Bill:  Well, a little later on dad built the Hand Hotel over on Front Street, and he—what was I going to say?  They would drive into Denver and pick up produce, meat and stuff.  Dad would order the loins that the steaks were chopped out of, he would order in December.  And the meat packing companies would hang those things in their cooler until he picked them up during the summer.  That’s what makes a steak tender, is the aging.  And so it would be aged when he got it up to Fairplay.

Would he bring it up in a truck or would it come on a train?

Bill:  The train ran when we were first kids and then pretty soon it was taken out.  I don’t know exactly when it was taken out.  I remember up the street from the Hand Hotel was an old hotel.  It was built after ornate, big city type of building.  Eaves out there and little geehaws underneath the overhang. 

And that was on Front Street, too?

Bill:  Yup, that was where the bar is now.  The bar up the street.  The Park Bar is still part of that hotel.  They tore it down and when they got down to the bottom floor, why they put a flat roof on it.  For a while it was a bowling alley.  It had…not bowling as you know it, but ten pins with small balls.  At the time it was there, why, I think my brother and I did some pin setting.  We got so much per line for pins.

Do you know what prompted your family to build the Hand Hotel?  Did they want two or did they want to get rid of the one?

Bill:  Well, they were leasing the Fairplay Hotel.  And I don’t know what caused them to…but then dad, we were still leasing the Fairplay Hotel for quite a while after the Hand Hotel was built.

And your father built it himself?

Bill:  My father built the Hand Hotel.  Dug the foundation and they poured the foundation, you know, formed it and poured it.  And then there was dirt about this deep, in the basement part, and this was during the depression.  And when anybody that would come along, hoboes and such, to get something to eat, my dad would say, “you want to work?”  And then he’d take ‘em over to the Fairplay Hotel and feed ‘em, see.  And there was this one guy come by and he says “I need to get something to eat.”  Dad says, “you want to work?”  And he says, “yah.”  So dad says, “ok” and he took him down into there, you know.  And the guy says, “Well what are you going to do with this rock?” And there was a rock, you know, four or five foot across.  And they just dug around it, see.  And dad says, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with that rock.”  The guy says, “Well have you got a sledge hammer?” Dad says, “Well, I think I can find you one.”  So he went and found him two or three, different sizes.  And so he went down there and looked at this guy to see what he was doing.  And he was down there just tapping that rock with the sledge hammer.  And so about 2 o’clock when the dining room at the hotel closed, dad said, “well, come on we’ll go eat.”  So when they came back from eating, why, the guy said, “well, I think I’m ready.”  So everybody went down there to watch.  And he took the sledge hammer and he hit that rock about three times and it just fell apart.  He had good enough hearing that by tapping it he could tell where the flaws were in the rock.

Would he have been a miner?

Bill:  I don’t know what he was.  I just know that he came by and he broke that rock up in short order, hauled it out and dumped it over the bank. 

He worked quite a bit just for that.

Bill:  It was a rock.  It wasn’t gold.  It was just a rock.  The object was to get it out of the basement, out of the way. 

What was the hotel like at that time, the Hand?

Bill:  It was still in construction.

What made the transition from the Fairplay Hotel?  When did the Hand Hotel actually open up?  He’s giving me looks.  He’s frowning at me.  Do you remember what grade you would have been in—high school or junior high?

Bill:  The Fairplay Hotel was there when dad first let us go fishing.  This was back when fishing season opened on a certain day and closed on a certain day.  There wasn’t year-round fishing season.  So we were living at the Fairplay Hotel and dad had, out where Red Hill is, on the old road there was a corner that during the summer probably about three or four cars ran over it.  Tried to make that curve too fast and rolled over the hill.  Well this guy had rolled a car over the hill and so dad bought it and threw away the body.  I don’t know whether it was a car or truck, but anyhow, he was going to use it to power a sawmill.  You jack up a wheel and use that for your flywheel and you could run a sawmill, and saw someplace with it.  One Sunday when they were busy in the hotel my brother and I got out there and got dad’s tools and we proceeded to dismantle that car to the point where dad says it’s shot. He just wouldn’t even try to put it back together.  In the stuff that we took out was a, I don’t know, a magneto or something, it had a copper wire on it that was a little bigger than a thread.  So that was kept down in the basement.  So he gave us one day, he gave us a card of snelled hooks, a little thing of split shot, and each of us about eight or ten feet of that copper wire.  So we went over to the bank to the river, took our knives and cut us a willow, put the copper wire on it and proceeded to fish.  Well, we got, the first time we caught two fish.  We were down there all day.  When we came back with the fish, we went to the Hand Hotel.  We climbed up the bank to the Hand Hotel and we went in the kitchen.

Sadie:  It wasn’t built yet.  She’s asking you how it happened to become built.  That’s not answering her question.

Bill:  You want to be logical and in order and I cannot do that for you.  Anyhow, the hotel was there.  And Chuck and I went in there with our fish and boy did we get it.  They measured those fish.  You had to have a seven inch fish and those were only six and a half.  Better be careful the sheriff will be after you.  And scared the stuff out of us.  Anyhow that was our first fishing.

Sadie:  I came to Fairplay in 1946 and the hotel had been there for maybe six, eight years, right?

Bill:  Probably more than that.

Was that serving high income clientele again?  Was that upscale, still?  Was the Hand Hotel catering to those high-end clients, too?

Bill:  Not necessarily.  They catered to everybody.  They made it a point of always catering to the traveling salesmen.  Because the traveling salesmen were there year round.  And they might lose a buck or so on a room in the summertime, because they kept a room for that traveling salesman, they knew what day he came and his room was there.  But they made expenses during the winter by having those traveling salesmen.  They knew they could get a room.  And they had routes and they made it a point of coming there because they liked it there.  The food was good.

So now we’re doing this in 2005, how does the hotel now compare to what it was like then?  Is it similar or has it changed a lot?

Bill:  Right after World War II my dad forced my grandmother to sell her half of the hotel.  She owned half and my mother owned half.  It was in their two names.

And why was he making her sell that?

Bill:  To my brother, my older brother.

Sadie:  He was getting married.

Bill:  And he was married.  He got out of the service, he came home and ran the hotel.  And by that time my grandfather was kind of senile and his memory was gone, so my grandmother just had him and they…

Sadie:  Pretty soon they put him in an institution in Pueblo.

Bill:  He was in there a while and then he was out and then he was in.  And grandmother would take him out and keep him.  And his memory was pretty bad.  He could tell you about his prize hog, that he had way back when.  How much it weighed and you know.  But he couldn’t tell you what happened an hour or two ago.  See after the war when I came home…  They sent me over, we had…  Well, let’s go back a ways.  We had leased the hotel.

The Fairplay Hotel?

Bill:  Yah, the Fairplay Hotel.  Eventually the conglomerate that owned it said we want to sell it.  And evidently my folks did not think they had the money to buy it at the time.  So it was sold to the Brown’s, I believe it was.  Who were kind of higher up, these people.  They hobnobbed with some of the people who were mining people.  And anyhow the Browns ran it for two or three years.  But their idea of running a hotel was setting back and hiring help and watching them run it and just control the help.  Well, that wasn’t the way we ran it to make money.  My mother was the waitress, one of the waitresses.  Was also a desk clerk.  My Uncle Iler(?) was a desk clerk.  His wife would come and do whatever was necessary.

Did you kids help at all?  Were you expected to help at the hotel?

Bill:  Oh, yah.  When I went to high school I took care of the furnace in the Fairplay Hotel.  We shoveled coal and filled the basement full of coal.  Put a hundred tons of coal in the basement to go over the winter.

Was your dad helping there?  Or did he have work outside the hotel?

Bill:  My dad liked construction.  My dad did the bigger part of the construction on the City Hall in Fairplay.

Did you have kind of a specialty at that time if you were in construction or did you do all of the different kinds of labor?

Bill:  Oh, dad did everything.  Before he came to Colorado he took a course in electricity.  To be an electrician.  And he wired a couple of houses.  And he went to the guy he was working for and said, “Hey you’re getting all the money and I’m doing all the work.  I want more.”  And he says, “sorry,” and so dad says, “okay, I quit.”  But he could do that stuff, see. 

What do you remember about Fairplay at that time?  Anything stand out of how the town was?

Bill:  Yah, there was a lot more of it.  There was a time when the dredge had been rebuilt.  The dredge that was down below Fairplay, down towards Hartsel.  And they put that in and we had a number of the people who worked on the dredge boarded in the hotel at times. 

Did you get to go on the dredge, do you remember what it was like when it was running?

Bill:  Oh, I was on it, but…You’ve never seen a dredge work?

Not working, no.

Bill:  Well, what they did was they had two cables hooked to the banks.  And they had winches on the dredge that would tighten up this cable and release this cable so they could make the dredge swing a little.  Then the scoops on the dredge, were running on, they could raise and lower it, too.  So when they got done with a spot, they would turn the dredge over here—raise the arm up—turn the dredge over here and then start in and take the…the buckets took the stuff up to the top of a sieve, a cylinder that was as big, you could walk through it.  And it had holes in it and the rocks tumbled…you pumped water through it continuously, too.  The rocks tumbled down through there and the rocks then were, when they got to the bottom of this, they got on the conveyor belt.  And the conveyor went way back out here and as that turned, it made those piles of rocks.  And then the fines of that would go across a table, with things on it to catch the gold.  And then every so often why they would stop and clean that table off and melt down the gold.  And they had a cart, an iron pot that was like this, it was about this tall, on wheels with a long tongue that you could move it around.  And this gold would end up in a little cone-shaped thing down at the bottom.  I never saw any of it.  But I and my brothers got one of those things.  I don’t know where it came from.  We got it off of the Briscoe Ranch.  On the dump on the Briscoe Ranch.  And we had it until they sold the Fairplay Hotel.  When they sold the Fairplay Hotel I don’t know what happened to that stuff.  Because it was out where the post office is, there was a log shed that dad had built out there.  It had a two-car garage, another room and on the end it had a room that was the ice house.  And they would go up to the pond that was, if you go out past the new court house, what used to be the ball diamond there, and then up in this corner is a little ranch…

Wasn’t that the Buyer place, the white house?

Bill:  Yah, up in the corner of that was a pond, and that was the pond that they cut the ice off of.

Was that a pond that everyone could use?

Bill:  I think so.  I don’t know.  I never was involved in it.  But the ice house had sawdust in it and they would cut the ice and put it in there and leave a little bit of space between the blocks and then they would put a thin layer of sawdust, fill those cracks up and then set another layer of ice in there and keep going.  And this is where we cooled drinks and stuff during the summertime. 

You mentioned your dad bringing back meat from Denver.  Would that have been kept in the ice house?

Bill:  No, we had a walk-in cooler on the corner of the hotel.  In both hotels we had a walk-in cooler.  They did not have milk up there.  There was no such thing as a dairy that would deliver milk like today.  So my dad arranged with the ranch that’s out at the foot of Red Hill.  You know the one that used to have the elk.  At that time you got to that ranch by going back around like this through the hills.  Anyhow, he arranged with that rancher and he bought milk cows, took them up there and they milked them and brought the milk in in five-gallon pails into the hotel.  This was not pasteurized milk.  And you put it in ten or fifteen gallon cans in the refrigerator.  We had a set of shelves that were just for the milk, you know.  And they’d bring that in and they’d dump ‘em in those gallon cans and they’d set ‘em in there.  And they would skim the cream off of those for coffee. And used the milk for whatever else you needed milk for.  If you wanted a glass of milk there, why you go in …there’d still be a little cream in it, you’d stir it up and drink a glass of milk.  That’s the way we got milk up there and that’s the way we got ice.  These are the things the Health Department would scream and holler about today.  But my grandmother would do all sorts of things to have good food in the hotel.  For instance, my dad would take the truck and go over on the western slope and buy a hundred bushels of peaches.  We would after lunch on the day after we got the peaches after lunch we would set up an assembly line and can a hundred bushels of peaches in one sitting. 

And everybody helped, all the kids and adults?

Bill:  It was set up, you know, they had a stove that was as long as this table, maybe a little more.  And so they’d put dishpans on there and one pan was for scalding peaches, one can was for sterilizing jars and then two or three pots to cook peaches.  You just canned them open pot.  And so one person would just put peaches in the dishpan to scald them.  Take ‘em out and put ‘em in another pan and take ‘em over here and somebody would just set there and skin peaches.  Put the peaches that you skinned over here and somebody else would pit ‘em.  Then they would put ‘em in the pots and throw in some sugar, cook them until they were done.  And then somebody else would be putting them in half-gallon jars.  And so we’d do them up in short order.  My grandmother would bring home like down someplace above Shawnee..let’s see, near Santa Marie.  There used to be choke cherries.

Tape 2, Side 1

Bill:  She’d just chop off the berries.  Instead of picking the berries she’d just take and chop off the branches that had all the berries on them, toss them in her car and bring them home.  And then she would make jam out of that.  Generally she mixed choke cherries and apple juice to make the jam.  But she made…when we cooked the peaches, bruised peaches and so forth, you know.  Then we’d throw it in a pot and…peach jam, peach preserves.  And so she cooked a lot of her stuff. 

Really from scratch.  What was she like as a person.  What do you remember about your grandma?

Bill:  She was a heller.  She wanted things perfected, perfect.  There’d be times when things weren’t going to suit her and her and dad would just rant and rave at each other.  But, what do I remember about her?  She would go huntin’ every year and she generally got her deer.

Was this typical of women at this time?  She sounds like a very strong lady.

Bill:  She was.  No there weren’t that many ladies that went…see my mom was the one that stayed in the hotel and seen that things happened.  She was the waitress, desk clerk, chambermaid, you know.  And she waited on dad.  If dad was, we were out working or something and didn’t get in until 3 o’clock, she waited until 3 o’clock to eat with him.  And dad and grandma would take like I said they went up to Jefferson Lake with parties when they had the Shawnee Lodge, why dad and grandma took those things.  And my grandfather usually went along.  My grandfather never learned to drive.  Shortly after they invented cars, why, my grandmother went to town one day with her checkbook, went into the car dealer and bought a car.  Took the book, sat out in the car and read the book and drove it home.  My grandfather never did learn to drive.  My mom never learned  drive until after my dad had a stroke and couldn’t. 

Do you know what made your grandmother so driven?  Was that something about how she’d been raised?  Did she talk about her past?

Bill:  When we were in the hotel, why we had various…see my Grandma Spell cooked in the Fairplay Hotel.

Was that the grandma on your mom’s side, Grandma Spell?

Bill:  No, that was my dad’s grandma.  I guess that would be my great-grandmother.  And I remember when I was little why she used to make hot cross buns.  You know they had the stove this long and at the end of the stove there was kind of a steam table.  And there was things in there and after the dining room had shut down us kids would go in sometimes and get a hot cross bun or two.  Then, now you talked about did I know any, I remember we had a dishwasher named Jiggs who used to come up every summer and wash dishes for us.  He lived in Denver in the wintertime and come up there and washed dishes.  And he would take us kids, after two o’clock when he got, you know, he’d wash up the dishes at two o’clock for the lunch.  And then he’d take us kids and we would go out in the hills someplace and have a picnic thing—a hike and a picnic.  Sometimes we’d have hot dogs and sometimes we’d take bacon and fry bacon.  Generally we had a can of pork and beans along with that.  Bacon or hot dogs.  We’d build a fire and have that.  At first we walked, you know, we’d just hike out where dry lake is.  That’s the one that’s just across from the cemetery.  We’d sometimes go out there.  Or maybe up Beaver.  We’d go across the river and up Sacramento.  Then later on, why, he bought a Model A Ford and so then we would go in that out in the country and go further away.

That sounds like fun.  What did kids do for fun?

Bill:  Oh, I don’t know, we had ice skates and we used to go down on the river behind the hotel there and we dammed it up a little bit there.  And we would go down and we didn’t bother to shovel the snow off the ice, we would just go up to where the river was open and throw in big rocks until it filled it up to where the water would flow over and then it would flow out and make us a nice big smooth place to ice skate on.  Then at times they would go ice skating up to where the spring was for the water supply.  Take an old tire and throw it down and have a fire, a rubber tire fire, and ice skate.  And up Beaver there was a place where they run the sluice box and one day us three boys were up there and they had cleaned out their sluice boxes and they had two wash tubs full of dirt.  And you could take a can, open a can of peas and use that can, and you could have reached in there and picked out nuggets the size of peas until you probably filled that can full.  Of course they wouldn’t let is touch it, but that was…

A lot of gold.  Did you interact much with the miners?  Or were they more up in the hills?

Bill:  Well, the miners came to town when we had dances.  A lot of the miners lived at the boarding houses up at the mines.  Then we had truck drivers, some truck drivers, that stayed in the hotel.  One of him his wife worked in the kitchen, I forget what she did.  But they worked there when the mine, you know where that mining place about half-way, two-thirds of the way down is?

Which direction?  Towards Alma?

Bill:  No, I’m going from Fairplay to Alma.  And about two-thirds of the way up on that side there’s a gate, well, that’s where they were, at that time they were mining there.  And they would just go in there and load trucks.  And they would take them over across the highway, Highway 9, and they would build up a ramp there and they dumped them in a cylinder that turned, and run water through it, and they proceeded to take the gold out there.  Now you can see the rock pile is still there.  And then the sand, the fines went out then and made a big sand pile(?) down through there and for a long time that’s where you’d get sand.  I can remember once there was a, where the bus stopped in front of the hotel.  It would beat the pavement out so there was a hole there about a foot deep.  So I got tired of the hole.  And I went over into the, this was before they built the office across from the hotel.

An assayer’s office or something?

Bill:  Not an assayer, a title company’s office.  Now it’s got the drivers’ license, all that junk there.  At that time the Fairplay Hotel, that originally was a couple of tennis courts.  So I went over there…

That’s how big tennis was.  You don’t hear about that anymore.

Bill:  Well, when I was in fourth or fifth grade or someplace in there why they really stopped playing tennis because we weren’t getting that kind of people.  And then grandmother and grandfather and dad and Uncle Ira(?) would go out and hunt for arrowheads instead of playing tennis.  And we’ve gone down towards Twelve-mile. There used to be a schoolhouse down there, and there was an area in there where we used to find a lot of arrowheads.  And then we’d go, I can remember going down Tarryall looking for arrowheads in different places.

Did you keep ‘em or sell ‘em, or what did people do when they found arrowheads?

Bill:  They kept them.  There is a picture someplace of the Hand Hotel with arrowheads in the front of it.  After a while, why, they sold the Hand Hotel  my brother, half of it.  And then he moved away and, see something like this (pointing to a photo) would be the…

Oh, the picnic with everybody up on the mountain. 

Bill:  A picnic with the people from Shawnee.

Look at ‘em, they’re all dressed up, too.  Suits and dresses, all on a mountain picnic.  This is Jessie, is that your mom?

Bill:  Emma is my mom.  Jessie is my grandmother.  And that’s my dad.  That’s my mom. 

Emma Jane Wolf, is your mom’s maiden name?  And Jessie was the grandma that we hear so much about now.

Bill:  See that’s the kind of watermelon they had.  When they would cut those lengthwise and lay ‘em out on the bench and just eat the hearts out of ‘em. 

There’s the hotel sign in this picture.

Bill:  And that’s a little house next to the hotel.

My friend’s mom is staying in that house now.  She’s quite happy there.

Bill:  My dad built that.  Now see this is us hunting by Gunnison.

What did you usually go hunting for?

Bill:  Elk and deer both.  These cases were put around the side of the fireplace in the Hand Hotel.  When we first started collecting arrowheads.  Things like this stuff, guests that would come, some of those guests traveled quite a bit.  And they’d go someplace and they’d find something like that, they’d buy it and give it the grandparents.  Spears and stuff.  And there’s a picture of grandmother with fish.  We have seen her in the Fairplay Hotel with fish like that.  She’d come in from fishin’ and she’d have a fish on this finger and a fish on this finger and she’d come in to put ‘em in the cooler in the Fairplay Hotel; their tails would be draggin’ on the floor.  She did get people’s attention when she went through the dining area. 

I’ll bet she did.  Bet your mom wasn’t so happy with that either.

Bill:  Oh, it didn’t bother her.

Did they get along pretty well?

Bill:  Yah.  Grandma was the boss.  That was the whole thing.

What was your favorite thing about growing up at the hotel?

Bill:  I don’t know.  Us kids bell-hopped in the hotel.

Did you get to know the guests pretty well, where they became friends?

Bill:  Occasionally some of them, but not enough.  Now that is a picture of the Hand Hotel before it was remodeled.  See they put a wall through here and chopped it in two.

So where the little shop, the shops are on either end here, looks like that was a lunch counter kind of thing.

Bill:  Yah, this was a counter and over in here was a half a dozen tables.  And back here is the kitchen.  See that’s an early one because there’s a fireplace and there’s no arrowheads and no cases.

Now tell me this.  One of the big stories that I heard when I lived here were there were tunnels underneath the hotel.  Is there any truth to those stories?

Bill:  No.

You’re ruining all the big stories.

Bill:  This is in Kansas.  This is a picture of mom and her sisters.  See those nice hats that my grandmother and the Hand family had, those type things.  This is my Grandma Wolf, she was a little lady.

Your other grandma being a fisherman, hunter.  If she went fishing would you serve the fish to the guests or was that just for family?

Bill:  You weren’t supposed to sell fish that you caught.  So sometimes if we caught a bunch of fish they were generally put in the freezer.  We had an ice cream case in the corner of the dining room that had four holes in it, you know.  And we’d put the fish in there and freeze ‘em.  But when we wanted to serve fish, when we were going to Canon City for coal, we stopped at Salida at the fish hatchery and buy fish.  We’d go down and we’d say, “I want five pounds of three-to-a pound fish.”  Then we’d sell ‘em.  I guess my dad’s gone, it wouldn’t hurt if I told you about that.  One morning dad and Joe Derr had went fishin’—I don’t know if you’d call it fishin’ or not.  You’ve seen these foot tubs that are about this long.  Well they came in with one of those full of fish.  And a gunny sack full of fish.  A little more than they were supposed to have. 

So they had fishing limits then, too?

Bill:  Oh, Yeah.  When they brought those fish in, they cleaned them and put them in the freezer, so when I went to Canon City, I bought five pounds of fish so then we could sell fish. 

How did you meet Sadie?

Bill:  Sadie--After the war…

What did you serve in in the war?

Bill:  I was in the Signal Corps tasked the Air Corps and went to India.  By way of Australia and China.  I got to be in Australia.  They let me get off and do cool sort of drill on the dock.  When we got to China we just out in the bay refueling.  In India we went in about to New Delhi.  Then we got off and got on a train and it took us a week to go to Calcutta.  The train would go forward at five miles an hour, then it would back up a mile.  A slow motion trip, I’ll tell you.

What do you remember?  You really hadn’t been that many places until then, had you?

Bill:  When house trailers first come out—travel trailers—dad proceeded to build one.  And so we would take the family and, let’s see, the first time we went, dad took a little flat trailer and a tent and we went to Yellowstone Park.  And we would go down and rent a boat.  And he would take two of my brothers and go fishing in the morning.  They’d come in with their limit of fish, which was ten fish a person.  He’d come in with thirty fish.  And most of the time there was thirty, maybe twenty-eight.  Then he would take the other two brothers, myself and another one.  And we would go fishing in the afternoon or vice-versa, whatever.  So at the end of a day we would have fifty, sixty fish.  And we would give fish away to anybody that wanted fish around.  We weren’t too much of fish-eaters.

Just enjoyed fishing?

Bill:  Oh, yes.  We enjoyed fishing.

You were telling me about India.  What were your impressions?

Bill:  India.  The thing, one of the things that turned me off most there was—one time we was in this compound, a different compound than I was generally in.  And there was a half a dozen GI’s there.  And they had bought, changed their money to the smallest coins, which would be like a tax token, you know, just a tenth of a cent or something.  And they went over to the fence, and they’d take one of those coins and flip it over the fence.  And there was eight or ten kids there.  And they would…and when one of them finally got the coin, to protect it, the only way you could protect it to keep the bigger kids from just taking it away from him, was to pop it in his mouth.  So he had a handful of dirt and a coin in his mouth at once.  And the guys would laugh and watch this.  And I guess I laughed and watched it, too.  But afterwards I got to thinking about it, that was terrible, you know, to make those kids eat the dirt just for a pittance.

So how long were you in the service?

Bill:  Three years and three months. 

Then you came back.  And you were telling me you met Sadie when you got back from the war.

Bill:  After the war I went to…there was a Doctor.  Dr. Gerringer.  And he bought the old hospital.  Which is, if you go up the street past the schoolhouse, you know, that is made into apartments now.

It’s actually for sale right now.  A big, huge brown building.

Bill:  When he bought that and came up there he had big ideas.  And he wanted a nurse, and he was down in Fort Morgan where Sadie was, and so she said, yah, she would come up there.  She was a registered nurse.  And she come up there and helped him clean that up and run it.  And they had the youth center which is the adult center there now across from the schools.

The Senior…

Bill:  The Senior Center.  At that time it was a youth center.  And the Reverend Hillhouse had put that together out of two or three old school buildings that they had boughten.  One was there and then they bought a couple more and moved them in, fastened them on.  I think, maybe they’ve added more since then, I don’t know.  And he would have record hops, you know, dances there, I think every Friday night, unless there was a ball game or something in Fairplay.  And so I’d go there to dance.  And after a while I danced with her and pretty soon I took her to a picture show and then we went to the other dances that the American Legion…when you think about dances I always think of the ones in Alma.  When we went to a dance in Alma, we generally always came home in the sunshine.  And at Easter time we would generally have a sunrise breakfast someplace because we had been to the dance all night. 

When did you get married?

Bill:  ’47, I guess.

Where did you get married?

Bill:  Fairplay Hotel.  She was working at St. Anthony’s there in Denver and I was up there.

So she didn’t stay with the Doctor who had started the clinic there then.

Bill:  No, the Doctor’s wife got mad at her and fired her.  There was two reasons:  One of them was me, because I would go up there and see her and stay too late.  And the other was that Sadie was doing the nursing and the Doctor’s wife was having to do some of the cooking and cleaning and stuff.  And that was not in her lifestyle, if you know what I mean.  She had been brought up to be a classy woman and so pretty quick they…I don’t know…afterwards I don’t whether they sold it or just what they did, but anyhow they left there.

And we had talked about the Hand Hotel.  What happened after your grandma sold or gave her share to your oldest brother; what happened to the hotel after that.  How long was it in your family?

Bill:  My brother ran it for pretty close to two years, I guess.  Then he sold it and at that time they sold it all, you know, my mom’s share and his share, too.  And he come out of it smelling like a rose.  You know, for the time he’d been there, he almost doubled his money.  It made my grandmother very angry.  Oh, and while my brother was running it, why, we had both hotels then.  In due time they’d bought the Fairplay Hotel and we owned both of them.  One Sunday my dad says, “go over to the Hand and get a sack of sugar.”  We were out in the Fairplay Hotel.  So I went over to the hotel, drove around back, and went down and got a sack of sugar and I started to carry it up the back stairs.  And my grandfather come by and said, “That’s Jessie’s sugar, put it back.”  And I ignored him, and he literally tore the shirt off my back.  So I put it back.  But I mean the shirt was no good after he had jerked me around.  So I went back and told my dad and he said, “Well, grandpa’s forgot it by now, so go get the sugar.”  And I did.

So this was when grandpa was kind of failing and wasn’t quite himself any more.

Bill:  Yah, that was for a long time.  He was that way before I went in the service and quite a while there.

It would be scary for a kid to see their grandpa like that.

Bill:  Well, you know, you’re used to seeing him like that.  So it wasn’t such a drastic thing.  If you see him…you know, if you haven’t seen him and you see he’s a grandpa that’s up and coming and going and then all of a sudden you see him and he’s not remembering much, why, it makes a difference.

What did your grandma do after she sold her share?

Bill:  She took care of grandpa.  She went fishing.  She went hunting.  And when grandpa died he was buried back in Kansas.  Then she kept on fishing and hunting there at Edison. 

She stayed up in Fairplay then?

Bill:  The doctor told her, “you gotta go down lower.” And she would…she had a sister that lived in Oklahoma City and she would drive to Oklahoma City which is eight hundred miles or more.  And she’d do it in a night.  When she went out and drove, she drove.  Most of the time she was at eighty miles an hour or something, unless the traffic was in the way.

Were you close to her or was she more distant because she was so busy?

Bill:  Yes and no.  She would go to Oklahoma City and she’d stay for six weeks or two months or something, and then she couldn’t stand it and she’d come back.  After we were married, why, we were over in Grand Junction, so she came over when the tomatoes were just barely starting to get ripe when she came over.  And her and I went out to the tomato patch, you know, the people over there grew tomatoes for canning, so they got the Mexicans to come in and pick them.  So she got permission to pick tomatoes.  And we had to cover half of maybe an acre of tomatoes to get a couple bushels.  And she brought them back and canned them.

What did you do in Grand Junction?

Bill:  Well, I taught school there a little bit.  And I helped build a church there. 

Was teaching your main career?

Bill:  No, I taught for four years.  The teaching was fine.  It was the discipline that got to me.

Do you have kids?  We better put the kids in here at the end.  You and Sadie have children?

Bill:  Six.

Where did you raise them.  Here in Denver?

Bill:  Well, my wife’s got nursing licenses in eight states.  Washington State, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, South Dakota.  Where else—I don’t know.

Was that because that’s where the work was or because you really enjoyed traveling?

Bill:  Well, I taught school in Fruita, in Cripple Creek, in Washington State.  Then I built churches in either by myself or under somebody else in Colorado and Texas and South Dakota and I don’t remember.  So that’s why all the moving around was.

How many grandkids do you have?

Bill:  Oh, twenty some.  Five and two-thirds great grandchildren.  I mean I’ve got five existing and two on the way.

Do you have anything to add?

Bill:  What I started to say, when I moved to Fairplay there was one sheriff, one forestry man.  I and my brothers could go most anyplace without getting in trouble.  What I mean is, we roamed the country.  And now you go up to Fairplay and if you go someplace, you can’t be here unless you’re with a real estate person or some stupid thing. 

What other changes stand out to you?

Bill:  The corruption in Fairplay.  When my dad was up there, he was instrumental in getting a ski tow putting in Alma before there was any…there was one over on the other side of Hoosier Pass.  Just down on the other side. 

Where that little cabin sits now.  That little tiny cabin.

Bill:  That cabin was kind of the warming space for that run.  There was just one run down through there.  And I remember I went over there one time and we took a toboggan.  We got up there and run that toboggan down through there, you know, and the snow was flying up in your face.  And pretty soon we just rolled off of it.  And about ten feet after we rolled off of it, it smacked into a big tree.

So your dad is the one who helped get that one going in Alma.

Bill:  Yah.  He was an instigator of some of those things.

They called it Mercury…

Bill:  Is it still there?

In that area, the cabin is still there.  They’re talking about trying to make it a town park or something.  You were talking about the corruption in Fairplay.

Bill:  Well, how many cops have been put in jail.

A couple just recently.

Bill:  That and the fact that the people who run Fairplay are very dogmatic about what they want.  They don’t give a damn about nobody else.  Just what we want is what’s going to happen because we’re in charge.  So I’m glad I’m out of there.

Sounds like you still keep up on current events up there.

Bill:  Well, my son called me when he was living up there.  He called me and says, “Come get me out of jail.  I need $750 bail.”  And so I went up to find out what it was all about.  And by the time I got there they had taken him up to the court house and he went before the judge and the judge had said, okay, you don’t have money we’ll give you work hours.  And so instead of just saying okay, you can go.  He went back to jail.  And I went down to the jail and set there for forty-five minutes before he could even get out of the jail.  And when they picked him up he had been back east.  He told them he was going back east and when he come back, let us know.  Pay the fine.  Well, he come back to town and he got into town one night, way after dark at night.  They came by and handcuffed him and his wife and took ‘em to the jail and left his—I forget just how old his son was then—left him in the little house there by himself.  They finally called some friends to go and get him and take him overnight.  But they just were down on him.  Part of it was, some game warden went out to his land and just—he was there—and they unlocked the gate and come in and he says, “This is my land, Get off.”  He says, “Oh, I got a right.”  He says, “I got a right, too. If you come on my land, I’ll make my day.”  And he would have.  He would have killed him.  So the game warden left.  Then the game warden was down on him all the time. 

Now which son was this? 

Bill:  Roland.  So he moved away. 

When was that in time?

Bill:  Two or three years ago.

Oh, that recently.  That’s terrible.  Anything else you want to add?

Bill:  While I was gone they had the Nights of ’63 that they started.

What was that?

Bill:  I don’t know exactly what it was.  All I know is I’ve got a couple pictures of dad and mom in Chinese costume in the hotel. 

Did your folks stay in Fairplay until their deaths or did they move elsewhere after the hotel?

Bill:  They moved to Fruita.  First they moved to Ames, Iowa, and helped my older brother do the motel.  Then they moved to Fruita and helped my younger brother in the motel.  And someplace along the line my dad had a stroke.  Then they moved back to Kansas.  That’s where they both passed away.

What brought you back to Denver?  Have you been here very long?

Bill:  We’ve been here fifteen or seventeen years.  The longest we’ve been most anyplace.

Tape 2, side 2

Bill:  You know, I told you about that bar that was a hotel, a two-story hotel. And I went over there and the guy that was running it had a son when I was, well, far enough back when the narrow gauge railroad was still in.  Because his dad was the station manager of the station at the, not at Alma, but at Alma Junction.  And I remember that the hotel was so old that the toilets in there had a little lever on ‘em and you just pushed the lever and the stuff went straight down.  And I often thought that if I’d have been around when they tore the place down, I’d have tried to save one of those.  I think those were collectors’ items, those toilets.  And then my dad got rid of where the little house is that your mother lives in…

Friend’s mom.

Bill:  Where that house was, was a greasy spoon.  It had a bar and a restaurant and what you might call a flop house, because it had a little wing out this way that had four or five bedrooms in it.  And they had, when we tore it down we took out the brass bedsteads, the old iron bedsteads, you know that had the little hunks of iron, we took them all out and threw them in the trash.  We put the iron in the iron pile and the brass in the brass pile.  Those things weren’t quite collectors’ items yet, I guess.  The people who were renting it, running it, left, I don’t know just why, and it set there empty for a little while.  And the cockroaches that were in it just moved across to the kitchen in the Hand Hotel.  And it took us about six months to get rid of those cockroaches.  And then dad bought the place.  What’s the guy that had Prunes?  Mayer or something.  Anyhow, when he died, why,I think his two sisters inherited it.  And they lived back east.  And there was no running it or anything.  So to avoid paying taxes, the banker wrote to them and he bought it from them for $1.  And then he sold it to my dad for $10.  And I’ve still got the slips that says so.  I thought about giving them to what’s his name at the hotel.  And then us kids proceeded to tear it down.  All but the main dining room part.  And that was what was the shed out there on the back, which he tore down.  Bulldozed, he didn’t want it.  And we was making it into a workshop and then finally I guess it sold and everything and we got out of there. 

That house, was that built for your family?

Bill:  That house—we tore the old building down and we saved the dimension lumber and some of the one-by-fours, I mean one-by-eights, whatever the boards.  Anything that was of decent shape we saved.  The rest of it we sawed up into wood and burned it in the fireplaces.  There was a time when we had a pile of wood out there that was, I think it took us about four truckloads to haul it over to Fairplay Hotel to burn there.  And then dad had a friend who was a chiropractor and he lived, he had his business up on the road that goes between the old court house and the hotel.  The one that goes up the hill.  Up on that hill he had his office there.  He was renting it or something.  So dad proceeded to build a place for his chiropractor friend.  And why the house is such a stupid arrangement.  Well, you know, he had it fixed so he could put his table, his adjustment table and stuff back along that little hard bar(?).  And then after he moved out, why, my grandma started living there.  Fishing grandma.  I don’t know where these people have gone.  There was Pete Peters who was the jeweler.  Then there was the other guy who was manager of the dredge.  There was a time when, I guess when I was in high school, there was three dredges.  And the town was going great guns.  We had, let’s see, two bowling alleys—a theatre and two bowling alleys—a bakery, a drug store, two liquor stores, three bars (three or four), two car dealers.  Aherns had the Ford dealership and I forget who owned the Chevy-Dodge.  Ahern told us, he said, that he made more money when somebody came to Denver and bought a Ford and brought it back up there and had him undercoat it and stuff.  He made more money on that than if he’d have sold the Ford.  When I come home from the service on a furlough, he always managed to give us a tank full of gas without coupons so we had something to drive with.

So you had coupons for gas in the war.  Like ration coupons?

Bill:  We had coupons for sugar and coupons for meat.  My younger brother Bruce raised rabbits all during the war because we didn’t have any meat to sell in the restaurant.  So every Sunday they sold fried rabbit.

If you had coupons for a family, how did that impact the hotel?  Did you get so many coupons if you were in a business?

Bill:  I don’t think they got coupons for businesses, I don’t know.  Someplace I’ve still got a couple coupon books.

I just wondered how the war affected operating a restaurant or hotel.

Bill:  Sometimes… Pocock’s had the grocery store across of us at that time, in the Hand Hotel.  Not the one that’s still there, but the one that was in that space between what used to be the drug store and…

That antique kind of store now.

Bill:  Yah.  There was a building in there and they had a grocery store in there. 

In the album somewhere you had a picture of the grocery store.

Bill:  And before that Pococks had a grocery store up just north of the Flume.  You know, the newspaper office.  On the other side up the hill from that on that side of the street they had the grocery store in there when they first started grocery stores.  And then pretty soon he built the rock store.

And that’s where the Wood’n Hammer is now?  Is that what you’re calling the rock store?  It’s on the corner and it’s literally made with rocks on the whole wall on Main Street?  There’s a hardware store and a grocery store.

Bill:  That was all one store at one time.

And that was a grocery store then also.

Bill:  It’s still a grocery store.  At that time the whole thing belonged to one guy.  When I was a kid, they didn’t have a lot of things.  For instance, my dad had a bucket full of keys.  And when somebody wanted a key made of something, they would come and see my dad.  Not a lot of people, but every once in a while his friends.  And they’d dump that bucket out and sort through it until they found the key that was the right slots in it.  And then they would file around on it until they made a key that worked.  And I don’t know whether I finally threw that bucket of keys away or whether it’s still someplace.  And then dad had a floor sander.  And he would sand floors for people in Fairplay and Alma.  When us kids got bigger, why, somebody wanted their floor sanded, we said we’ll take the sander and go do it for them and we got the money.

So you learned some of those things from your dad.  Is that how you ended up building churches?

Bill:  No, I had worked in construction.  Then I stopped that and went to school teaching for a little bit.  Then I met a guy that did this, worked in churches.  So I got into it.  The churches I built were churches of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Is that your family’s faith?

Bill:  No.  My dad and mom were Baptists.  And my wife was a German Congregationalist, then she joined the catholic church, and then after we got married, my dad says, if you get married in the catholic church don’t come home.  So we got married by the Reverend Hillhouse at the Fairplay Hotel.  And had an elk steak dinner afterwards.  Then I moved to Denver and went to DU.  No, first we moved to Colorado Springs and worked in the mill down there.  Then I moved to Denver and went to DU and worked construction on the side. 

Enough for the day?  I sure thank you for all your time today.  I appreciate your sharing all your memories.

Break in tape.

Two barbers in Fairplay?

Bill:  Yah, we had two barbers when the town was really going.  We had a lot of miners and stuff.  And I don’t know.  We had two shops, I should say. And probably about four barbers.  And after the one quit, why then we had just one.  So dad would go to him and he would go to dad.  And then when he left town, why, dad would cut hair when he was in Shawnee, too.  He’d just go over to that store, the white store building, about once a month and half a dozen guys would come in and he’d cut their hair.  Then when he got us four boys, why, he said when haircuts went from 25 cents to 35 cents why he bought a pair of clippers.  Then he cut our hair.  And the clippers were still around, so when my wife and I went back up to watch the hotel in Fairplay and there was no barbers.  So I said, “well, cut my hair.”  She said, “I don’t know how.”  We had a gal that was doing maid service. She said, “I cut hair.”  So she started in on me and she was really butchering me and I said, “I think you’ve watched enough.  Now you do it.”  And so she started cutting my hair.  And then we had three boys, so she cut their hair.  After the boys was gone she said, “You can go back to the barber shop now.”  So I went back about three times.  And I finally said, “Your haircuts look better than theirs does.”  So since then she’s been cutting my hair.

Thompson, was he one of the barbers?

Bill:  I think so, yah. 

We were talking about Gene Howey after we turned the tape off.

Bill:  He was one of the guys that, his older brother I went to school with.  And there were two Thompson brothers and the one I went to school with got in the war and flew planes and was shot down.  But their dad said—he went to work up in the mines, the older boy did—save your money and we can get a car.  They had a beat up car.  So they saved their money and pretty quick they had enough money to buy a new Chevrolet.  I think about it now, you know, then it probably cost about a thousand dollars and now twenty thousand minimum. 

Let me get the six kids names down.  Do you call him Roland?

Bill:  That’s his middle name.  He’s a junior.

He’s William?

Bill:  William Roland Hand, Junior. 

Who came next?

Bill:  Teresa Ann.

T-e or T-h?

Bill:  T-e-r-e-s-a, I think.  I don’t know.  She don’t like the way we spell it.

Ok.  Who’s next?

Bill:  Christine.

Who’s next?

Bill:  Nancy and Mike and Fred.

Okay.  Got the whole gang.

End of Tape