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Merrill
Wright September 10, 2002 We’re recording, and I’m with Merrill Wright, who obviously has the absolute devil in him. (MW—chuckling in background) He’s already giving me an incredibly hard time. It’s September 10th. – it’s kind of a foggy, rainy day at Merrill’s place at Jefferson; well, it’s actually not your place, you’re renting it now ‘cause you sold your place, but we’ll get your story on that. So! Tell me when you were born. I was born April 22nd. in 1923. Where were you born? In Jefferson down here. So, was there a clinic or something, or were you born in a house, a farm house? Well, I guess a farm house…well I guess it wasn’t a farm house, it was a house right here in town. Okay. Is that where your folks lived? Yeah. Okay. Now, tell me what they were doing that time. Oh, my dad was a rancher, he built some ranches at that time. But, now…the house was right here in town, how come you were livin’ in town? Well, he worked out of the house, doin’ a lot of things. And, he done other jobs. He shoed horses, he had a place over there in Jefferson where he shoed horses, and he could’ve been livin’ there, I really don’t know. And he did ranchin’ too … anything he could find. Okay. Let’s see, this is the 20s. Tell me, do you have any idea of what things were like around here durin’ that time? Economy-wise, with the trains coming up? No. Not when I was born, but you mean when I was growin’ up? When you were little. Oh, yeah. All about it. There was somebody on every part of the land around here and even though it was 160 acres instead of being 5000, there was a family everywhere, and the kids… And the farms were that little? The ranches? Well, in some places. Yeah, they were a lot smaller than they did later on, y’know. Why, people’d buy ‘em up and then went with more acreage. Yeah, some of ‘em was 3 to 4000 acres, some of ‘em was 160 acres or whatever. Tell me your mom and dad’s names. My mom was Oliva Wright, or Taylor. “Oliva?” How do you spell that? O-l-i-v-i-a, I think… Oh, “Olivia?” “Oliv-i-a” – her maiden name was Caylor. Is that with a “K”? “C” – “C-a-y-l-o-r.” And, she was raised around Lake George. Do you remember any stories from there that she talked about? No, not really. I mean, I know there was ten of ‘em in the family and one year they had a credit there at Lake George store and all they bought was flour, sugar and coffee, and they raised everything else on the ranch. At that time I heard it was about $120 a year is what they spent on what they didn’t raise. That was pretty cheap, y’know, for ten people, actually. Did her folks homestead that area? No… I don’t know if they homesteaded, but they was there a long time. It could’ve been, I think they could’ve homesteaded there…yeah, they mighta done it. The Caylors…I remember her dad got killed on the railway and she went ahead raised the family and Uncle Harry was the oldest, he went in there and helped raise the family. Do you remember her folks’ name? Whose folks? Your mom’s folks. Stahl (? Unclear name) I think. I think they come from Germany. Your grandmother and grandfather… I guess her mother come from, Mom’s mother I guess come from Germany, from Stuttgart. Do you remember her first name? Emily. Emily Caylor. What about your grandfather? I don’t know much about him. He died…I never heard much history…a kid that size.. Do you remember his first name? No, I don’t. Ben! I think it was Ben. Okay. Unhuh. Ben. Okay…then, your dad. Where was he from? My dad was born, I think, around Florisant down there. Okay. Near Lake George, you know where Florisant is. Unhuh. What was his name? My dad was Artie…Arthur Wright, Arthur Roy Wright. Okay. And they called him Artie. What did his family do? They come up and ranched right down below Jefferson here on 77. They called it Windy Point in the 1800s and there was, I think there was four brothers but no daughters. They actually pert near homesteaded down here, and that was in the early, er…the late 1800s. Can you remember your grandma’s and grandpa’s names on that side? Your dad’s folks? Their names? I’m tryin’ to think … But, he was a Wright. Yeah. He was Wright. I didn’t know much about my dad’s side. They were dead before I knew…when I got older, why, they were all gone. Were they killed, or did they die naturally? I don’t know. I don’t know much history about his part, but Mom’s part, why, she was still livin’. She lived to be around…I could be wrong…around 80, 82 or somethin’. We used to go down there all the time. What do you remember from visiting their ranch? What were it like? They were just common old ranchers. Yeah, but think of a kid from the city now…we don’t even know what that is. Yeah, well, they grew their own stuff. They had turkeys, and chickens, and cattle and everything and they raised potatoes and sell a few potatoes. They just about raised everything they ate. mmm. Those were the folks that didn’t have to spend much at the store that we talked about. Yeah…and they ate good (chuckle), better’n most people. You said they sold potatoes and things. Where did they go to sell stuff, do you know? Well, it was hard. People’d come through the country every year, every fall, and he had some customers… So they’d come right to the ranch? Yeah, they’d come to the ranch and haul ‘em…pick ‘em up and haul ‘em…pay him. I remember it was 50 cents a hundred… A hundred…? Pounds. For potatoes? For potatoes, yeah. And they thought they was doin’ good…and probably they were for that time. Sure. Did you do chores when you were down there, did you ever help? No, not too many times. We ate, and run around there in the rocks and played. What’d you do for fun. Did you go horseback riding? Did you go skating Just run around. No, we never done that, we’d hike and build tree houses and stuff. How’d you get down there? How’d we get down there? Yeah. Oh, when we was livin’ up here we had an old Dodge, Dad had an old Dodge, and we’d leave in the mornin’ and get down there and stay all day and maybe all night and then come back the next day. Where’d you sleep when you stayed there? Oh, we’d sleep upstairs…there was a bedroom upstairs, and we’d sleep on the couch, or wherever, y’know…. Squeeze in. Yeah. I know that a lot of the farm houses where I grew up had big attics that I’d sleep in; that was quite an adventure for us. Yeah. Well, they had an upstairs. They had a pretty nice house there. There was five of us in our family and we’d usually all go down and that was later on. Their kids was growed up and gone, and they’d put us up wherever they could find a place for us. Do you remember how it was heated? Was there a woodstove? Yeah. Woodstove. Were they cooking on that stove too? Yeah. My Grandma cooked on the woodstove and they had a well and a pump inside the house. Now, that was livin’ up high, and it was good water. Did they have kind of a fruit cellar, where did they keep all the food for the winter? Big cellar. They had a good cellar and they’d go down there and put everything there, and she’d can and everything, and boy, they ate good. And then, they raised pigs and feed ‘em potatoes and they got big…boy, they had a good flavor. They had all the meat…turkeys…all they wanted to eat. Was the climate different, were they able to grow more? Yeah. It was a little better. It was lower down at Lake George and better. It was a lot better climate than up here at Jefferson. You could raise more down there. Better weather, too…you didn’t have the wind that you got up here. This wind goes all the time (chuckle). Yeah, that was the hardest thing I learned, getting here. I wasn’t worried about the winter, but the wind…! Oh, I tell ya, it bothers me. Now, when I was a kid I used to go skatin’ down here at 40-45 below zero and we didn’t have too much of a jacket…but when that wind come up, it was “goodbye.” Where’d you ice skate? Oh, all the way on Jefferson Crik and some of these lakes out here, and wherever we…that was our main thing was to go out and ice skate and build a ole big fire with tires. We’d come home and Mom and Dad couldn’t stand us for the smoke. (Laughter). You were stinky, huh? The tires…we’d smell like old rubber. Did you hike down there, did you ski over or did you have a car? Oh no. It was right there in town and close. We’d skate down to different places in the crik. Yeah. Did you have horses here? No, we didn’t have horses. There were horses, but we didn’t have any. A lot of the folks mention doing horseback riding when they were kids. Yeah, well, we never went into horses. I was about half scared of ‘em. Was there a place to go sledding? Oh, you could sled anywhere in town. The drifts used to get so high back there in Jefferson that we’d sled…Dad had a snow fence later on when we lived on the north side of the highway, and we could sled from there clear to the railroad tracks. Isn’t that amazing…now it’s dry and just blowin’ away. Yeah. Tell me what you’ve seen in ranching from that time. People talk about what it looked like then, that everything was so different. Well, then, everything was done with horses and they had the old C&S and they’d haul a lot of… Wait a minute. Now, what was the C&S? The Colorado and Southern Railroad. Okay. And a lotta…they just shipped a lotta hay to England for races horses. This hay was really noted for... They’d get one of these little small railroad cars and they’d get about 85-90 bales in there and that was pretty good, y’know. And, y’know durin’ the Depression, durin’ the 30s, why there was hoboes that’d come up on the C&S and they’d camp out here, and they’d milk …Dad caught ‘em milkin’ his cow one time. Yeah (chuckle). What’d he do? Nuthin’. He couldn’t do nuthin’…he felt sorry for ‘em. He was wonderin’ why his cow wasn’t givin’ any milk…he was walkin’ over the bridge and he heard ‘em arguin’ about who was gonna milk that next mornin’. Tell me…that would’ve been around the Prohibition time, wouldn’t it? Yeah, it was Prohibition. You’d mentioned a few stories earlier…tell me about your uncle comin’ to visit. Well, yeah. Mertin (?) Wright, he’d come up and he had an old Chrysler. He had a 30 gallon drum in the back. He’d come up with an enema hose and some fruit jars… An “enema” hose, did you say (laugh). Yeah! An enema hose to use for siphonin’… (Both laughing). He’d used get out and he’d siphon some for my dad and everything…they all knew him and word would get around that Mert was comin’ up …about the third or fourth jar he’d draw, he’d sucked on that hose and he’d pass out, and then everybody’d helped themselves! Free drinks! Free drinks, yeah. Mert’d get up the next day and wonder where his whiskey was. (Laughing and MW Chuckling). Now, what about the barn up here where they kept some. Where was that? Oh, that was one time up here toward Sheep Rock. They had a still up there. They didn’t really know who but they THINK they knew who were at it. Anyway, one time the horse fell down inside the (word unclear) … fell down and stepped into the top of a barrel of whiskey. They got to lookin’ and they found four or five and it was really good whiskey. It was aged and… Huh. D’you have any suspicions as to who it might have been? Well, I know…but they’d name some names and I didn’t know. But everybody was in the business and you never lacked…everybody had the whiskey. Alcohol whiskey, 180-190—(chuckles) they called it 190 degrees…190 proof, yeah. It was somethin’ else. So, d’you think that you would’ve been just getting into your teens then? When the Prohibition was goin’ on? Well, I can remember that from when I was small. Did people have parties, d’you remember that? Your folks, maybe? People never had too many parties, but my dad would get with all the guys and they’d get a few drinks and start tryin’ to sing (Laughing) It sounded somethin’ else, y’know. One was gonna sing alto, one was gonna sing bass, and the other’n was gonna sing tenor…they’d git lit and I tell you, it was somethin’ else. They thought they could really sing and the more they’d drink, why the louder they sang. (chuckling). Yeah… (Laughing) Now, did the ladies drink anything, or was it just the guys? No…there weren’t too many women that I knew that drank. No. Would it have just been inappropriate, or were they just not interested…? I don’t know…it mighta been that…but I never knew too many women that drank around ranches and stuff, y’know. Now, when did the kids start drinkin’ … did they try to sneak in. Kids? Oh, Dad used to make homebrew and we used to git into it. It was potent stuff, and Dad’d wonder where his homebrew went and… (Laughing) and MW (joining in with chuckles). I just wondered because kids today get, you know, they have such an issue with drinking now and everyone tryin’ to keep ‘em from drinking. It seems to be an age old…. Well, our big fad was smokin’. You know, we’d smoke Dominoes (you never heard of them) No… Camels, and all them, and Chesterfields and…. Where’d you get ‘em? Stole ‘em. (some sort of exclamation!) From where? (laughing) (joining in with chuckles) Over here at the store. The store…what was the store called then? uhh…just…Jefferson Store. Okay. Did you know the people that owned it then? Oh yeah, yeah. What was their name? Oh…Hents (Sp?)…Youngs Head? Yeah, Heads. Yeah , Heads were over there, yeah. The store was over on the other side of the street from where it is now and it burned down. Okay. So, didja sneak in at night? No, we’d do it durin’ the day. The guy’d go out to…I never stole too many, we never really stole that many but we’d steal a little bit, y’know. I remember when the store burned down. It all burned down but just part of it and there was a bar on the window and there was a Hills Brothers pound of, two pound of Hills Brothers coffee up there. Harry (?name unclear) Bartman, my friend, we smoked coffee. My mom… You “smoked” coffee? Yeah! That’d kill ya. I never heard of that. Oh, yeah! It burned good…it just burned like ashes. (giggling in background) Mom’d let us smoke that but she wouldn’t let us smoke tobacco, and it was harder on us than tobacca. So…he put me up there and I reached up there and got that Hills Brother coffee and went over and ditched it in a car over at the County Shop and about three days later Glen Young said to me, “Merrill, when you gonna bring that coffee back?” I didn’t know he’d seen me. Oh oh. I said, “I’ll go over and git it now.” And I went over and got it, but we’d already smoked quite a bit. ( chuckling) Were you in a lot of trouble? Nah (unclear) Yeah…I don’t know how he knew it but somebody’d seen us doin’ it. Where’d you go to school then? Right there. I went to school twelve years right there in the school… The school we see now that’s all fixed up? Mmmmhmm. Over there. Is that like a one-room school house or did they.. Well, once for a while, and then they divided it. I think it was from eighth grade up to eighth grade down, I think it was. Like, in two rooms? Yeah, two rooms, yeah. Do you remember some of the kids you went to school with then? Oh, I remember most all the kids. Can you tell me some names, friends… Ohhh, there’s Frank Stihl, George Stihl, Harvey Bartlett, Billy Horn, Ralph Miller, Corky Miller (they’re still around somewhere) I think I’ve got Corky on my list somewhere…I think someone brought that name up. Yeah…Corky Miller, that’s my cousin. Oh really! Yeah, first cousin. You’ll have to tell him not to be too scared when someone comes to talk to ‘em. Oh yeah. Oh he’s like…when him and I git together we’re quite a couple everybody says. We was raised together. See, that was my mother’s sister’s boy…. And…Ethel Miller, and Beth Alder (last name?) and, I don’t know…a lot of people. Do you remember anything about school…do you remember the teachers’ names? Oh…I can. Let me see…I’ll think of it pretty soon… I didn’t ask you about other kids in the family. You said there were some siblings. You mean my brothers and sister? Mmmhmmm. I had three brothers and a sister. The oldest was Ben Wright.. Ben Wright? Now that’s not the Ben that has the London now, is it? The what? The London. That’s not the Ben Wright in Denver, right? Oh. No…he’s dead. Yeah. And then there’s Florence Wright, she was my sister. Okay. And then there was Ray, Raymond Wright. Okay. And then there was Merrill Wright, that’s me. Mmmhmm. And then there was Silas Wright. They’re all dead. All of ‘em? I don’t have any…my family’s all dead. Well, you’re lookin’ pretty good. Well, I don’t know… (chuckle) How are you doin’? (chuckle)…about half…I would say about half…(chuckle). (chuckle) “Half?” (chuckle) I don’t know…like I say you have a lot of devilish spark there… Well, yeah. I’ve always been that way…with Corky and… Didja get into trouble, didja pull pranks? Well no…we never got into serious trouble…we done thing that wasn’t “kosher” sometimes. Like what…what would that be as a kid then. I don’t know… (laughter) You can tell me, c’mon. No…no… If you don’t, Corky will…I’ll get you somehow… Yeah. Old Corky, he’s quite a guy…you gotta talk to Corky. Yeah, I’d love to. Yeah, he’s in Canyon City now. Okay. I’ll figure that out. (something unclear) his family and we grew up together. So…did you graduate from Jefferson School? Yeah. Well, I think there was three that graduated that year. Who was in your class? Well, there was Ethel Miller and, (I’m tryin’ t think)…Ethel Miller and Billy Whitehorn. Yeah, we all graduated at the same time. Humm. What year was that? 1940. Okay. Tell me what the impact of the war was around here. Well, when it started it was bad. Do you remember when they declared it? Yeah. I was in Lake George then. What were you doin’? Well, my dad…we were goin’ to Lake George. We stopped at my grandmother’s place and she said, “They just bombed Pearl Harbor.” And I knew we were all gonna git called. At that time, were you helping on the ranch? No, we didn’t have the ranch then. We just moved down there that, I think it was that summer or spring. Dad was tryin’ to find some work so… Did he work on different ranches instead of owning? Well, yeah. Dad didn’t work…he worked a little bit, but he was a carpenter, good carpenter, and he run the South Park Cattle Company out there, that was the name of it. What was that? That was a big ranch out here that my uncle used to have, 5000 acres. Wow. And we worked on that all durin’ the war. What uncle was that? That was my Uncle Eli Portis. I called him uncle. That was my mother’s (I gotta think) my mother’s sister’s sister’s husband. So we worked out there, it was turned over to Wall, Wahl? (unclear) durin’ the war. Wahl? Is that the Wahl Ranch they talk about? No no. The Wahl Ranch is right over the hill there. Okay. And … somethin’ I was gonna say… Yeah, that war kinda made a lotta city people outta country people, y’know. Tell me what happened. Why do you say that? Well, I mean they went to war…we lived around here, we never went…we never got “out”…I didn’t even know how to run a elevator or anything in Denver until I was 21-22 years old. So, your family didn’t go to Denver for outings or anything? No. We didn’t…we very seldom got out of here. I remember me and my brother was talkin’ one time….when we seen the C&S, the Colorado and Southern, comin’ well that was where our life started, and when it went outta sight, well, that was the end of the world…that was it, that was the end of all the new era. When did that run up here? Well, it run all in there…I tryin’ to think…it run ’34 or ’36 they took it out, but I, y’know, I can’t… I remember I took a ride from Como over to Breckenridge, all us kids in May and they started takin’ it out in June, so I can’t remember when it was. Do you remember what it cost to ride the train? No, I can’t.. Was that a big splurge, to go over to Breck? Well, for us, y’know. I don’t think I’d ever been in Breckenridge before. What do you remember? I ‘member that ole train goin’ up there. It was May and the snow drifts was still there higher’n the box cars, and when you made a couple curves you could dang near shake hands with the engineer. Did they have food or anything on the train? Naw…they never furnished that. I s’pose they did but we never did eat it that time. I don’t know if they served meals or not. Someone talked about there was some kind of man who sold candy and they had a funny name for him. I can’t remember now what they were called. Where’d they sell candy at? On the train. They used to come through sometimes…but I don’t know if that was this train up here or not. Well, I don’t know. Do you remember the day in Breckenridge…what you did? We jest went there and then they hauled us back over. We didn’t get off… You didn’t walk around town or anything? Naw. Do you remember what was over there at that time? Naw. We never paid much attention. You know, there was nuthin’ over there at that time. I remember we coulda bought the whole town of Breckenridge for taxes. We had a mine up here up here on Mt. Guyot, we used ta have to go over there to file a claim in Summit County. You go over there and you could’ve bought any building over there for taxes. 1948, that was. Now, look at it now! Yeah. Lucky you can buy lunch. (chuckle) Yeah! That place is busy, boy. Tell me, I’m wonderin’ when you were here with your family in the 30s…how did you get fed, how did you guys have enough food? Well, it was pretty skimpy sometimes. My dad, I remember, had a insurance check from his brother that got killed in World War I, for $53 and some cents. We lived on that a lot of times. I remember people here were good. I never went hungry, but I used to go to the store and watch the oranges and apples and all that. We never had any but only on Christmas, you know. We’d have an orange and a apple and a popcorn ball and a little ribbon candy and old fashioned chocolates and one toy…and that toy had to last us for a year. I remember people over here…people got sick, there was no doctors. Everybody had a enema hose and a hot water bottle! And everybody died of the same thing. It was the flu or something…they didn’t know. I remember they took me to the dentist, and they didn’t have no novacaine…pull your teeth, and Mom’d (laugh)…we’d never hardly go to the dentist we’d probably git a fillin’ and we’d come home and she’d make taffy and pull every fillin’ right out! (Loud laugh!) Now…wait a minute…what was that logic. I’m surprised you mom would do that. Ye..ah. I don’t know. Her sister, Aunt Minnie, and Corky…that was the same thing. We’d never git to see a doctor, I mean a dentist. I remember we’d just go where they’d just ulcerate clear down and your tooth was lower than the gum they’d take big balls of cotton and that hot stuff (can’t think of it) stick down there and pack it. I tell ya, that was somethin’ else. My Uncle Dan told a story…they lived down toward where my dad did below…he had a tooth that was real bad and it got to achin’ … so his dad took a spike and a hammer (now, this is true) and tried to knock that tooth out. The spike went inbetween and they couldn’t get the spike out. So they hooked up the horse and buggy and went to Fairplay to a vet to get the spike out. End of tape. |