DAN WILSON. Born 1925.

TRANSCRIPT of OH 1789V A-B

This interview was recorded on April 20, 2012, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program and the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks Department. The interviewer is Vicki Quarles. The interview also is available in video format, filmed by Liz McCutcheon. The interview was transcribed by Joan Nagel.

NOTE: The interviewer’s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets.

[A].

00:00 (My name is Vicki Quarles, and I am interviewing Dan Wilson today. Today’s date is April 20th, 2012, and we are in Boulder, Colorado. So Dan, tell me what’s the date and year of your birth.)

The date and what?

(The year you were born? The date and year.)

Oh, I was born on March 25th, 1925.

(Okay. And where were you born, Dan?)

I was born in my mother’s bedroom.

(Wow. In Boulder?)

Out in north Boulder on what was then Seventh Avenue.

(What’s the address of that house?)

Oh, at that time it was 802 Seventh Avenue.

(And that street is now?)

802 Hawthorne.

(Okay, so you were born in your mother’s bedroom?)

Yep.

(Wow. So no hospital?)

No hospital. Boulder Community Hospital was just a little building at that time. It had, I think maybe room for nine patients.

(Wow.)

Had a big front porch on it.

(So it was pretty.)

Yeah. It’s at the same location as the hospital now.

(Okay. So what year did your mother and father come to Colorado?)

Well, my mother and father came from Iowa, and they had five children. My father bought a one-ton Model T truck brand new and put all the stuff in it and put a canvas cover over it, kinda like a covered wagon, and come through—it was all muddy roads it came through. And when he came to Boulder, he came in on Arapahoe, which is _____ seven, and there was no bridge across Boulder Creek at that time.

(Wow.)

And they had to ford Boulder Creek and they camped out in what is now Eben Fine Park. You know where that is?

(Yes.)

And they met some people there in Eben Fine Park that lived on Seventh Avenue and were moving and they were camping out there. They said they knew of a property out where they lived that was—somebody wanted to get rid of and move out someplace else and so my parents went out and looked at that property. And they wound up trading the one-ton truck for the whole thing. And there was a house and a barn and a chicken house and a couple of other outbuildings. I think there was eight acres with grapevines and berries and apple trees and cherry trees and pear trees. It was a really nice place. And then it had a pasture, I think, also in it. And a lot of the ground was available for planting crops and stuff.

(This was the 802 house?)

Well, at that time, it was still the same house that’s still standing there at that address. But we owned property on both sides of that house and behind it down almost to the next street. (Okay, and do you remember how many acres that was?)

Oh, I think originally it was around six to eight acres. And then my mother was instrumental in having Grape Avenue built. So she could sell some of her property that she—that couldn’t get access to from Hawthorne or from the other street below it. So anyway, she put in Grape Avenue and sold some of the property.

(Wow. Now what year did they come here?)

I don’t have any idea—after the war sometime.

(After World War I?)

World War II.

(World War II they came—when did they come from Iowa to Colorado?)

In 1917.

(1917? Okay.)

Yeah.

(And they had five children already?)

Yeah.

(By the time they came here?)

And then there were—there were, well, I think they had six children. ‘Cause I had brother who died in Iowa, so he died as a baby. And the other five came and there three more born here—my sister and I and one of my brothers.

(Okay.)

So I had five brothers and three sisters.

(Wow. Big family.)

Yeah.

(So what kind of chores did you have to do? Do you remember?)

Oh, I had all kinds to do. I was in charge of the chickens. And we had no water in the house, so we had a well, _____ built it. We had forty-gallon hot heater sitting on top of a coal wood stove in the kitchen, and I had to fill that up to do all the hot water for all the use of the whole family. So I’d usually fill that up a couple of times a day. And I had to cut all the wood and bring in the coal and stuff for the coal stove. ‘Cause the coal stove had to go all night and day, summer and winter to keep the water hot, you know.

(Okay.)

05:27 And that was also the heating source for the kitchen and dining room. And we had another big circulating heater in the living room that heated the living room and my mother’s bedroom and the other bedrooms in the house. And in the winter when it got real cold, everybody would bring out their mattresses and put them on the floor of the living room, and sometimes the stove would get red hot when it was on a real cold night. It was kinda fun.

(So how many rooms were in that home that you grew up in?)

Oh, there was a real large kitchen and there was a front porch—a big front porch—not big by today’s standards, but it was maybe 8 by 12 or something like that. And you entered the front porch into a dining room, which was basically a combination library and dining room. We had a big library—er, dining table which would seat thirteen people—had seven leaves made out of black walnut. And we had a black walnut library table that matched it and a black walnut bookcase that went in an L-shape that was full of books. My father was an avid reader.

(Really?)

And we had—and then you went from that room into the kitchen, and it was a big kitchen. We didn’t have a bath in the house at that time. We had an outhouse. And then you went from there into the living room, which was a fairly large room. It had a big window looking out—you could see the Flatirons from out the window. And there was a couple of double glass doors that went into my mother’s and father’s bedroom. And then you went through another door into another big bedroom and through that bedroom into another bedroom and through that bedroom there was a sleeping porch where I used to sleep.

(Nice.)

And sometimes I’d wake up with my covers frozen to the wall. [laughs]

(Really!)

[laughs]

(Oh my! [laughs])

So it wasn’t the warmest room in the house [laughs].

(I’ll bet not [laughs]. Wow.)

So I was kinda—I had an interesting life—childhood especially—because I brought up during the Depression and nobody had any money to do anything. But all the schools were open for recreation in the evening—you know, after school was out, and in the summer.

And the people on WPA or NRA or some of those people were school teachers and artists and all kind of people. And they would give you music classes and art classes and recreation classes. And, you know, they were professional—things and the school was open like from 5 o’clock until 10 o’clock at night. So all the kids had something to do, and nobody got into trouble and there were no gangs and no fights, and they just had a wonderful time. You know, nobody needed anything or wanted anything, so they knew how to get along with one another.

(What was your favorite activity when you were—)

Oh, I was into everything. I loved baseball and track and mountain-climbing, roller skating—I was a great roller skater. I was into some plays and stuff that they would put on—different ____of the recreation department. And I used to sing a little and dance a little. I was voted the best dancer in Boulder at one time.

(Wow. Very good. So was music a big part of your life growing up?)

Well, I didn’t really start in music. I always liked to fool around with music. I never had any professional teaching. I was never taught anything. I learned all the music on my own. And I used to pound around on pot and pans with drumsticks and stuff like that. And when I was in the Navy, I was in Miami, Florida, teaching Russians electronics, and they had a U.S.O dance that the Navy band was going to play for.

10:16 And that bus that they were on got in an accident and a drummer broke his foot.

(Mmmm. That’s not good for that.)

And so they asked, “Does anybody know how to play drums?”

I said, “Oh sure. I do.”

I never played them in my life. [laughs] So anyway, I went up and sat in with them and they liked the way I played. [laughs] And I played with them for about six months until I left there. So that was my first introduction to music. It was a lot of fun.

(You had some natural talent.)

Yeah, I did have. I was—I had a great feel for how music went and I always considered a drummer not a musician, but a more or less of a—setting the tone of the music, whether it was Latin music or waltzes or, you know, hot music or blues or whatever. A drummer had a lot to do with how the music was performed, and he had set the mood to the music. And I was never a flashy drummer. I was just a solid drummer. And I played all my life and I played—after the war I played with a country western band. And I played in a lot of little buildings from around here from, oh, Platteville and Longmont—a lot of towns east there—I can’t remember their names. Frederick was one of them.

(Do you remember—)

The guy had a tavern called LePore’s Tavern, and they had big dances out there on the weekends. We had a little thing called the Colorado Playboys, and we played for them. Had a big attendance.

(So when you were a kid, was there music in your house a lot?)

My father was a fantastic musician. He could play—

(Your grand—your father?)

My father.

(Your father was a musician.)

Yeah, he was a—he could play piano, organ, violin and flute, clarinet, bag pipes.

(Did he play all of that as a child?)

I think so. He used to play for different dances and weddings and parties and he was a, he was an adventurer. His family originally came from Virginia, and they were—they had a land grant from Lord Baltimore in Virginia. And my part of the family, my father’s part of the family moved from Virginia to Iowa. And my grandfather I’d never met—built a big ______farm there and built a big red brick house on it. And he raised Pole and China hogs and he raised a lot of other crops as you know to provide food for them. And he was also a cattle broker. He, you know, bought and sold cattle and he was quite a prominent person in that area. And my mother came from German immigrants, and they had a farm also in Burlington, Iowa.

My father came back from the Alaska Gold Rush, and my mother was a maid in my father’s house. And so they met each other. I guess they liked—my father was twenty-two years older than my mother.

(Wow.)

My father was 57 when I was born, and my mother was 35. [chuckles] And so you know he was kind of an old man when I was a little boy, and he was a real stern person, you know—real—

(Real strict).

Real strict, and you know—something went on between my mother and father after I was born that they never stayed together anymore. They never showed any affection to one another.

(Okay.)

And they respected one another, but you know that was about the size of it. And I don’t know. That’s none of my business anyway, but something happened between them.

(Okay.)

15:03 And so most of my brothers didn’t get along well with my father ‘cause he was a quite a disciplinarian and—

(What kind of work did your father do?)

My father raised flowers.

(Really!)

And when he came, he bought the land to raise gladiolas and peonies and things like that. And the Long’s Gardens was down on Broadway and Hawthorne and when he came back he saw the gardens there, and so he says, “Well, maybe I’ll go and check that place out.” And he went down and talked to Mr. Long, and Mr. Long had a seed store in downtown Boulder at that time. And he was quite busy in that, and he had a catalog business also, and he needed a foreman to run the gardens. And when he, you know, greeted my father, he said, “Well, you’re it.” And he went to work for Long’s the next day.

And so then he wanted to raise flowers on his own so he bought a lot of gladiola bulbs and things from Long’s, and we planted probably five or six acres of gladiolas, and then we rented some other land and planted some more. And my father retired from work—wanted to be on his own. And he raised flowers and bulbs and sold them in his little truck in the summertime. And he’d sell glads for a dollar a dozen or something like that. And he went to Estes Park and Grand Lake and all—a lot of the other places where the Texas people came in in the summertime, and they had money to buy flowers. And so that’s where he sold them. And he had put his little truck down in the streets in Boulder and sell flowers there during the week. And he had a pretty good income from it.

He fell off of a house putting up a radio antenna and broke both of his feet. And he was unable to work anymore, and that was during the Depression. He got a job with the WPA—something down on 7th Avenue and Broadway counting the cars that went up the highway [laughs] to North Boulder to see if they was ever going to improve the road.

(Okay.) [laughs]

So you know, it was something to do and eventually—you know he was walking on his knees for a long time—he was finally able to walk again, which surprised the doctors.

(Yeah, I bet. There’s an old shed in the 900 block of Hawthorne Street currently that’s still there. And I was told that that shed used to be—that there used to be bulbs were stored there. Do you know what—)

The what?

(The bulbs from the gladiolas. Do you know the shed?)

Not on Hawthorne. Not on 9th and Hawthorne.

(Somewhere in there there’s—do you know of any old shed in that area where bulbs were stored?)

No, see I was on 8th and 9th was the next street down.

(Okay.)

And there was a person—people called Crowley that lived on that corner and another person named Damon lived on the other corner. And then there were some people called Barrs that lived after that. And none of those were involved with Long’s at all. One was a milk distributer—Crowley distributed milk from the farms. He had a truck and would bring the milk to the dairies. And Damon was a realtor and an insurance man and raised chickens for eggs. And I worked for him cleaning his damn chicken house. [laughs]

(That’s rough work.)

What a stinking job that is. Chickens are dirty, dirty animals, and I made a nickel an hour for a ten-hour day. (Wow. How old were you when you were doing that?)

I was ten years old. And that’s when my father was hurt and couldn’t work, and so at one time I was making $12.50 a week and supported the whole family.

(Wow. And you were the youngest?)

I was the youngest.

(Of nine? Is that correct?)

Yeah.

(Okay. So that was around the Depression time?)

Yeah, that was in the thirties probably. _____, you know, maybe ‘35.

19:55 In ’39, my oldest brother—his name was Samuel—he was a guard for the railroad up in Oregon, guarding a trestle. And they were concerned about sabotage from German people, because we were giving war relief to England, and we weren’t involved in the war yet. But he was shot there—on guard duty one time. And they never have really determined how it occurred. Or whether someone shot him or he shot himself. They haven’t ever really found that out. And my other brother went up to investigate it at the time, but he didn’t find out anything either.

But he was buried in Boulder in a big ceremony. He used to work for Kress’s, which was a ten cent store, and he used to be the stocker at Kress’s and he knew a lot of girls—he was 6 foot 4” and a very handsome guy. I’ve got a picture of him. And this place was just packed with young women—his funeral. I couldn’t believe it. [laughs] You know, I’d never thought of my brother as a romantic. [laughs]

(How much older was he?)

Oh, he was considerably older than I was, and I didn’t hardly know him at all. He came home and stayed for maybe six months at one time. And he didn’t stay in the house. He built himself a room in the chicken house—the chickens were not there anymore. But he fixed it up into a nice little room. And then he moved on. And after that he was up in Oregon, and I didn’t know much about it. Nobody ever told me anything.

(People kept things more quiet back then.)

Yeah, you know, I was the last to know anything. (Yeah, okay).

You know, I didn’t know much about any of my brothers really. I had one brother who was in the National Guard when the war—this was before the war broke out—and I think 1940 they drafted him or recalled the National Guard in, and he went down to Fort—I don’t know what there was that thing is in Colorado Springs—what is it call it?

(The Air Force Academy?)

No.

(Fort Carson.)

Fort Carson.

(Fort Carson.)

And he did his training there and he made himself a top sergeant. He was a top sergeant in the Army. And he was in the invasion of Italy and somewhere in Africa and the Battle of the Bulge and he had six Purple Hearts.

(Wow.)

And he was in the hospital for seventeen years and didn’t even know who he was. And they came out with some new treatments, and I think he went through electric shock and insulin shock and all kinds of things. They came out with some drug and he started remembering things. And he was finally able to come home and live with my mother. And he lived with her until she died, and then he kind of reverted back a little bit. He lived with me for a while and he got to the point that he started drinking some. And my daughters were kind of afraid of him, and so I had to do something else with him. And he went back into the VA Hospital.

(Yeah, that was a hard—)

And he died in the VA Hospital. But he declared my mother as his dependent when he was in the service, and when he became hospitalized, she was his dependent, and so she was able to get money from him all those seventeen years he was in the hospital. So he took good care of my mother. And when he passed away, he had a pretty good—he had a conservator that put his money into the bank and given it to him as he wanted it.

He had several hundred thousand dollars in the bank when he passed away. And I inherited some of that which enabled me to buy a house and a few other things, which was good for me, you know. So actually he was a guy that really never had anything but gave a lot to the whole family. And his rewards will be somewhere else, I think, you know.

25:26 (So tell me more about your mother. It sounds like she was a good person.)

Oh, my mother was an angel. She attended a Lutheran school when she was a young woman, and she studied Home Economics and English. She was a beautiful writer. And she studied sewing. She made all the kids’ clothes and stuff.

(She made all the clothes?)

And she made quilts and all that other stuff—rugs. And then she did all the cooking and canning. It was all—one woman could work so hard and still have time to have me sit on her lap and read me Bible stories.

(Wow.)

Which was a real joy for me. And she used to bake bread, you know, and that was one of my first memories of us—going in the kitchen and smelling a fresh baked bread, you know.

(Nothing like it.)

Once in awhile she’d take some of the dough and put it in a deep fryer and fry it and roll it in sugar and we used to call it sopapillas, I think. And give me one of those—a tasty treat.

(So she worked hard. Her life—)

Oh yeah. She worked awfully hard. And my father was, you know, pretty crippled for all the times during the war. And she became very active in the American War Mothers. She had four children in the service. On of my daughters—or one of my sisters—was General Patton’s secretary and my—I had one brother that was in the Air Force, and he never got out of the United States. He was down in some little Air Force station around Lamar, Colorado, or some place down there. He spent all his time there. And my sister was in the WACs. I was in the Navy, and my brother Ed was in the Air Force. I can’t think who the other one was that was in the service. One of ‘em.

(So you have a well on your property.)

Yeah.

(What about for irrigation on the land? How did that work?)

Oh, well, I don’t if you know anything about the Silver Lake Ditch. (Mm-mm. Tell me about that.)

The Silver Lake Ditch was the main—Boulder’s main water supply at Silver Lake. For irrigation purposes, a lot of the farmers got together and built this ditch that comes along Boulder Creek up along the side of the mountain above the creek. Sometimes it’s an open-ended ditch, and sometimes it’s in a pipe. And you may have seen it if you’re driving up Boulder Canyon along—going along the side of the canyon. And it comes out of the canyon about Third and Pearl Street and takes off—you know where Red Rocks is on Mapleton? Well, it goes around there and then back along above Third Street all the way north to—it used to be a lake called Woodland Lake, I think, out there and it dumped into that.

And the city—all the property owners like my folks had water rights out of that ditch. And Long’s had a lot of water rights out of it. And we had little gates, they called them—you’d open up the ditch up on the top of the hill and the water would come down the little irrigation ditch on each side of Hawthorne—or Seventh Avenue—and one was Long’s ditch it went _____his water and the other one was for our property.

30:03 And so we irrigated all our things through that ditch. It was all—we’d had no sprinkler systems for city water or anything. Everything was irrigated through that ditch. That’s where I played when I was a little boy—you’d play in the ditch. And down at the gravel road, where I’d make little dams and stuff and lakes and play with my cars and trucks. It was an interesting time.

But that ditch was really, really an important thing for people in North Boulder because, see I think the water rights only started maybe—maybe on our street and went up to Eighth and Ninth Street and those were the people that were doing all the irrigating and raising vegetables and things. And then Long’s.

(Did you have a garden on your property?)

Oh we had a huge garden. We had probably two or three acres in garden, and we’d have corn and radishes and celery and, you know, everything—beans and strawberries and all kind of berries. And we’d can all that stuff. My mother would can all that stuff. Oh, I was telling somebody about that today at a thing we had. We had an Earth Day thing we were talking about. Under the house we had what they’d called a cellar, and the entrance was from outside. You opened a cellar door and go down some steps, and they had a concrete thing in there. It was a fairly large room. And it had shelves in there, and we’d store all the canned goods that we canned. And like in the fall when the peaches season started, we probably canned five bushels [?] of peaches, and she’d can carrots and beets and corn and, you know, tomatoes and beans and everything. Strawberry jam and berry jam. We had no freezers. There was no freezers at that time. We didn’t have any electricity in our house originally. And we had coal oil lamps, and so that was, you know they don’t put out too much light. So people went to bed fairly early when we were young. We did get electricity, and I had water put in after I got out of the Navy and had a bathroom built on to the house.

(So you lived in that house as an adult after you—)

Pardon?

(You lived in that house when you grew up.)

I was born in that house, and I lived in it ‘til I went into the Navy when I was seventeen.

(Okay.)

And I came back and lived in it after I got out of the Navy. And then I went up to Estes Park the summer that I got out of the Navy, and I stayed in the National Park Hotel up there and worked for a grocery store. And I decided that—I’d been in Portland, Oregon, when I was in the Navy. We had a ship that was hit by two kamikazes in Okinawa and we came from Okinawa up the Columbia River to Portland, Oregon, to have it repaired. And I met a girl in Portland I thought was a pretty special person, and so I decided that—I had a friend that—my brother had a girlfriend that was working in Estes Park that was going to go to Seattle. So she said that I could help her drive, and she’d take me up to Portland. So I went with her and got in Portland, and I couldn’t find that girl at all.

Well, I got a job with the Internal Revenue Service as a deputy collector of taxes. And I didn’t like that so I didn’t stay long at that. But there was a girl that worked there that had a liking for me and she—I was living in a rooming house, and I got the flu one time and all these girls come knocking on my door and giving me stuff to eat and what not, and this one girl says, “Well you should—we got an extra bedroom in our house. You come and stay with us.” That was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.

35:11 She wound up telling them that I was her boyfriend and that we were going to get married. And that came about not to my liking, but it happened. And I had two children that I gave up for adoption that—which, you know, I had—was just out of the Navy, and I didn’t—had never done anything. And on my wedding, I’d never ever been to a wedding, and I missed the wedding reception. [Laughs] You know, I took off, and we had a cottage where—the people that I was working for had a cottage down by the seashore. And they let me have it for my honeymoon, and I took my wife out of the church and hopped in the car and took off. [Laughs] Missed a big reception. [Laughs] She never told me anything about it ‘til after it was all over. So I’m pretty—not very worldly along those lines.

(That’s okay. So at some point you came back to Boulder.)

Yeah, I—I, well after I came down from Estes Park, I came back to Boulder, and I got a job as a cost accountant for the Austin Company that was building Rocky Flats. And I worked out there as a cost accountant for Rocky Flats, and they wanted me to go overseas and take over some of their plants and do their accounting and stuff for them. I told them I had to take care of my mother and so—.

My father died two days before I got out of the Navy. And so when I came home I had saved up considerably a lot of money to go to college on. I always wanted to be a minister. My father had a mortgage on the house and a lot of—so I paid off that with my college money and gave some money to my mother so she could be all right then. Then she was getting money from my brother after he got put in the hospital.

So she was being taken care of, so then I decided to move on. And that’s when I went back to Oregon. And then I wasn’t happy in Oregon at all. It was very depressing, and I worked outside with the telephone company.

(Not much sun there.)

I’m not talking too much about Boulder, am I? But—

(We’re getting there.)

Well, anyway I’m talking about everything besides Boulder.

(That’s okay.)

I can tell you a lot about North Boulder.

(Well, tell me more. What else do you want to tell me about North Boulder?)

Well, like I used to walk to school.

(And what school was that?)

At Washington School and Casey Junior High School and Boulder High School. But along Broadway at that time, from Seventh Avenue—the sidewalks started at Evergreen and they would go down and there used to be a—by the--you know where the Farmer’s Ditch comes across Broadway? Well, there there was a place the Moss Rock Cottage Court and they had a lot of little cabins that were made out of moss rock and, you know, on the corner there was a big brick house that they had apartments in and the family that owned the place lived there. And they had a Skelly filling station there. And across the street was the grocery store called Boland’s Grocery Store. And you know there was kind of a little neighborhood grocery you could get bread and potatoes and butter and stuff like that there. And my mother had a charge account there and sent me to the store to get something once in awhile. I’d give ‘em a note and they’d give me the stuff and I’d go home.

40:08 But then, one further down, right across from Washington School is a big wooden house with a garage behind it—it’s a four-car garage—and this guy, his name is Brown, and he was a Pierce Arrow and Duesenberg Automobile dealership in Boulder. And I can remember going to school, walking by this thing and he’d have his big Pierce Arrow parked out there in front and a Duesenberg. Have you ever seen a Duesenberg?

(No. I don’t think so.)

They’re the most classic car in the world ever made. And they had a big long hood and they got big chrome things coming out of it like the exhaust pipes, and then they go down into the fenders and it was a convertible. They were all convertibles with a rumble seat. They are worth like three, four million dollars if you could find one. At that time you could buy a Deusenberg for about $3,000. And you could buy a Pierce Arrow for $1,500. You could buy a Chevrolet for $700 and a Ford for $500.

So, you know, things have just gone crazy from when I was a little kid, money-wise. Like I bought a Buick. It cost me $30,000.

When I got out of the service I bought a—made by Cadillac—called a LaSalle, and it was a 12-cylinder thing. It had a hood this long on it—and it was a convertible, and it was the fanciest car you ever saw. And I drove it to Denver one day and parked it next to a store I was going to. And I looked out and there was a bunch of people looking at it. So I went out there and I says, “You like my car?”

And he says, “Yeah. You want to sell it?”

And I says, “So, I don’t know. I don’t think you got enough money to buy it” [laughs]

And he says, “What do you want for it?” And I think I bought it for $1,500.

And I says, “Oh, I’d take $5,000 for it.”

He says, “We’ll buy it.” And they were gypsies. And this old gypsy lady come out and reached in between her breasts and brought out a roll of hundred dollar bills and starts peeling them off. [laughs].

(No kidding?) Yeah. They had somebody else to sell it to and they’d make more money off of it. I was sorry I ever sold that car, because it’d be worth a ton of money today if I’d have kept it. But I’ve had a lot of cars—and a lot of dogs.

(Speaking of dogs, did you have animals and pets growing up?)

Yeah, I had a little dog named Jeff—a little black mongrel dog, a wonderful little dog. And he was a jumper. He could jump an 8-foot fence and he was with me all the time—until I went into the Navy. And there’s a neighbor of mine that took him.

But the dog that I can remember—there was a woman named Mrs. Miller that lived across the street from us—and she had a big house and a big barn—you know a regular farm barn. And she had a couple of cows. But she had this dog named Woolie that she had chained up to her--by her chicken house. And this was the meanest dog in the world, I think. But anyway, once he’d broke that chain and he come out and he bit me—bit me twice—and I still am carrying the scars from that. He bit me on the butt, on the butt. And the doctor had to put things way into it and clean it out. He says he never saw such deep dog bites in his life.

(How old were you? Do you remember?)

Oh, I was—couldn’t have been—probably maybe in the second grade or third grade. I got polio when I was in the third grade, and I had to go down to—they sent me to St. Luke Hospital, and I was down there for a year.

45:05 My neck was all twisted over my shoulder, and they’d put hot packs on me for twenty minutes and then they’d take those off and put ice packs on me for twenty minutes, and they did that for months. And one day they took one off and put the other one on, my neck snapped back. [laughs].

(Really?)

Yeah, and I’ve been all right since.

(Wow. That was the treatment for polio at the time?)

Well, that was the treatment for the kind of polio I had. I didn’t have the type that was really crippling. There were some people that I went to school with at that time that had the crippling polio. You know, they were really crippled. But I was never crippled.

(Terrible disease. So when you got bit by the dog, did the doctor come to your home?)

Yeah. We didn’t have a telephone. And I fell out of an apple tree one time and broke my arm. And I fell on a rock and the ladder come down and hit me and broke my arm here and here. And my arm looked like this. And my dad wanted to grab a hold of it and set it for me. I said, “No, no, no, no!”

So my mother went over to the neighbors’ place, the Damons, and they had a phone, and she called our doctor, and he came out and he said, “Boy, that’s pretty bad.” He says, “You got a magazine?”

And my mother says yeah she had a magazine and so he took a magazine and folded it over, taped it around my arm, and put me in his car and took me—he had an x-ray machine which was just recently came out.

The guy that invented x-rays, within a month after he had invented the x-ray, they had x-ray machines working for diagnostic work and broken bones and things. And he just gave all his findings to the medical profession, which was a wonderful thing to do. But anyway, I found that out when I worked in physics at the university.

But anyway, he x-rayed my arm and set it, and it’s been in good shape ever since. And I had a cast on it when I was in one of the schools—in grade school—and “Whizzer” White was a big football hero at C.U. at the time, who later became a Supreme Court Justice—and he came out to school and he autographed my cast for me. I should have kept that. So that was kind of interesting to have been autographed by a Supreme Court Justice. Well, anyway, that’s another story.

(So what do you remember about your father working for Longs and—?)

I really don’t know much about that. I was real little at the time. I was born, the third child born in Boulder, and he had been working for them for some time. And by the time I was ten years old, he was—he was 57 when I was born—so when I—ten years later he would have been 65 or, you know, 67. Well, he was an old man, and I know he threw a baseball for me to catch when he was 75, and he’d throw so hard I couldn’t catch it. And I was maybe 12. And he was a fantastic rifle shot. He would put a nail in the barn and get back by the house, which was like a hundred yards away, and he’d hit the nail and drive it into the barn. He’d go to turkey shoots and win the turkeys all the time. Have you ever heard of a turkey shoot?

(Mmm-hmm.)

Well, he was quite a guy. I never saw anything he couldn’t do. But he was a mean man, too.

(So he had a temper?)

He kicked me one time, and I shook my finger at him and I says, “Don’t you ever do that again.” And he never—he respected me after that. You know, because I stuck up for myself, I guess. And so I got along well with him and worked well together, and he taught me how to drive his little truck and pick flowers and we’d go sell them together and stuff.

50:12 I got a telegram. I went down to join the Navy, and they sent him a telegram saying that I was too young. I had to get his permission to join, and he wrote back on the back of the telegram. And I still have that someplace—that he gave my permission to join the Navy. But then, I went to work for Longs.

(Yeah. I was going to ask you about that. I heard that.)

So I worked probably from the time I was thirteen until I was seventeen for Longs. And I used to cut all the gladiolas at 3:00 in the morning and bring them in for them to sell. You know, they had little vases on double shelves. And I’d fill all those vases with gladiolas in the mornings and people would come by and buy them. I’d do the same thing everyday. And I had a new Ford truck that he gave me to—that I’d bring home with me at night so I could go out early in the morning. And you wouldn’t have to go down there and wake them up to get the truck.

So actually, J.D. Long was probably the finest man I ever knew in my life. He was a—oh, I don’t know how old he was when I first went to work for him. But he was white-haired, and he’d drive a car, and he’d take me to school and he’d never get out of low gear. He’d be talking to me and driving down the street and putting along maybe five miles an hour. And there was a place called Alba Dairy just across the street from the seed store—and Long’s Seed Store—you know where Pearl Street and Broadway is?

(Mmm-hmm.)

Well you know where Reinert’s Clothing Store was?

(I think so.)

Well, then if you go on up to the street, there was a book store, I think, after Reinert’s, and then there was Long’s and then there was a Jewel Tea company or something else. But across the street from there was the Mercantile Bank and Alba Dairy where they sold ice cream and milk shakes. Well, he’d take me in there. I liked banana nut ice cream. So he, “Oh, you’re sure you don’t want more than one ice cream cone?” And he took me up into his office one day, and he had a great big roll-top desk, and that desk is still out there in the old office on Longs’ property now. And he opened up one of the desk drawers and reached in and he pulled out a Hamilton Railroad Watch—you ever seen what a railroad watch is?

(A pocket watch?) A pocket watch. And you’d the press the top and the thing opens up. And you had to wind it with a little key. And it was a beautiful thing. And he says, “Here. I want you to have this.”

And I says, “Whoa! Boy, that’s an awful fancy watch for me.”

And he says, “Well, I want you to have it.” So.

Then he told me later that—you ever heard of Tom Mix?

(Mm-hmm.)

He used to be a cowboy in the movies. But he was also a big game man, and he went to Africa and got all kind of big game and stuff. He had a circus called the Tom Mix Circus. And it came to town one day and J.D. says, “Well, I gotta take you to the circus.”

So he took me and introduced me to Tom Mix, and I watched the circus.

You know, he was always reaching out to somebody, you know. He was just a wonderful man.

(Almost maybe a father figure for you, I wonder.)

Well, possibly he was, because my father and I weren’t—you know, we’d talk to each other, but that was about the end of it. My father gave me a quarter once and that’s all I ever got from my father.

55:00 (So Mr. Long was very kind to you?)

Yeah, he was nice to me. And then he, you know, gave me a pretty good income. And when I went in the Navy, I think I was making $30 a week, which was quite a bit of money for a young guy 16 years old, you know. And during the Depression, it was a lot of money. But anyway, there’s two men that I really admired and one was my seventh grade home room teacher—his name is Bishop—and--you’re running out of time?

(A few more minutes).

Do you have any questions you want to ask me?

(Well, tell me more about—did you work for Long’s anytime later in life? Did you come back?)

Well, when I got out of the Navy, I—you know I was working for Long’s when I went in the Navy—and I came back and worked for him two, three days. (Two, three days?)

And I wasn’t too interested in that anymore, and I went and got a job at J.C. Penney’s. I worked for them for three or four days. And I didn’t like that too well, and I decided to go to Estes Park, and I worked up there at the grocery store for someone. Then I went to Oregon. And when I came back from Oregon, I worked for Rocky Flats, and I started playing music and—

Coming back from Denver one time, I was listening to the radio and they said they were looking for air traffic controllers to work in Alaska, because they thought, you know, the Korean War was going on, and they thought that China may come across the Aleutians Islands like Japan did. And they—if Japan had a-kept coming when they came, they would have taken over west coast of the United States. But they didn’t know that at the time. But they would have. So they started the North American Air Defense Command.

And I answered a telegram. They said send a telegram to Washington, and I sent it and I told them my qualifications. And they sent it back, and they said, “Report to Will Rogers Field in Oklahoma City to come to school.”

And so I borrowed some money from my mother and caught a bus and went to Oklahoma City and stayed in a rooming house there. It cost me $15 a week room and board, and I had a real nice little apartment and good food. And there were several other guys that was going to the school that was staying at that same place so we were able to go to school together. And when we graduated from that school, we went to Alaska, and I worked for them. And that was an interesting time. I enjoyed that. And then I made a lot of money when I was in Alaska. Everything I touched turned to gold.

(Good for you.)

And—[pauses]

(So, I have one more question before we wrap things up. What do you think that our modern society can learn from the past? What do you think that we’re missing today?)

Oh, I think personal values. People don’t have any values anymore. They don’t want to do a good job for anybody or they don’t care if they start anything or are on time or anything. They just don’t have any real good values anymore. I was taught by this teacher called Bishop that I was going to mention. And he had me recite—or memorize the poem, “If.” [by Rudyard Kipling]

(We have one minute.)

Well, this had a lot of, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it or not. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” Well it had a lot of goals in there, and if you could think about something to make a decision, it helped me make a lot of good decisions through life.

(Well, thank you so much. This has really been interesting and we so appreciate your time and knowledge).

Yeah, I got lots of stories.[chuckles]

(Well, maybe we can come back another time.)

60:28. [End of Part A. Interview continues for approximately four minutes with filming of and discussion about photos in Part B.]

[B].

00:00 (So Dan, tell me what picture we’re looking at here.)

Well this is my 3rd grade class at Washington Grade School.

(And where are you in that picture?)

I think this is I right here.

(Okay, is there anyone else in there that you remember?)

Well, I remember these two guys. They were Jack and Lois Johnson. And this guy I think was John Parker. This was Mrs. Hocking. And I don’t remember who the other people were.

(Okay. And what about this picture?)

This was a picture of my children. This is my daughter and my son and my son and my niece and her brother.

(Okay.)

That’s in my mother’s backyard.

(Okay).

Where I was born.

(The same house?) Yeah. This is a picture of my mother standing in her front yard by the cedar tree.

(That’s a cedar tree?)

Yeah. This is a picture looking from our driveway up to Mount Sanitas and this is Hawthorne Road over there—a little black, white spot. And this is Mrs. Elliot’s house, I think.

This is a picture of my father. And that’s me and my mother and my sister Virginia and her husband who at that time was named Wayne Hockett. And I have no idea who these people are.

(It’s funny how that happens over the years. Well, we have names on the back. [pause] Danny, Aunt Clara, Wayne, Mel, Virginia--.)

Something’s been cut off here and I don’t know what it was.

(Something’s been cut off? And that was August of ’39. 1939.

(This is an adorable picture.)

Oh, this is a picture of me, and that’s an old Studebaker touring car and this was a garage and barn. This was a cherry tree, and I was getting ready to go sing at Mackey Auditorium in the Christmas concert.

(Oh my goodness. That’s a great picture).

Yeah, that’s an old one.

(That is an old one.)

I used to have a good voice. And this is Mount Sanitas which is kind of at the head of Hawthorn Ave. I used to hike up this little draw and go up there.

(Very nice.)

And this is a picture of my son Steve in the back yard of my mother’s house where I was born.

(And one more picture.)

And this is my beautiful mother, sitting in the dress—she was president of American War Mothers, and she was going to a convention. She made herself a nice dress and had a corsage and white gloves. (Very nice. And what was your mother’s name?)

Clara Caroline.

(And your father was Dan Wilson.)

Yup.

(And that’s the end of the pictures.)

04:04 [End of Part B. End of interview.]

Page 1 of 23 Transcript of oral history interview with Dan Wilson, OH 1789V