Can You Go Home, Again?

Eighty-three years and one month ago, I was born in Cañon City, Colorado.  My mother had all of her children at home, so I was born in the apartment in which we lived.  My father worked for the WPA (Works Progress Administration, a Franklin Roosevelt New Deal program).  That program put food on our table and a roof over our head.  We (not me, of course) lived in that apartment over the Christmas time of the previous year, and my three older sisters all came down with the measles at the same time.  To keep them occupied, my mother gathered up the Sears Christmas catalogs that had been left at the doors of apartments that were not occupied.  Ethel, Jackie, and Marie each had her own catalog to cut out paper dolls of the models dressed in the clothing that was for sale.  And, they had paste (probably made with flour and water); and they played paper dolls.

The WPA workers built many things for the town and county, but my father helped build the rock wall around the cemetery.  He was a big machine operator.  Back hoes.  Drag lines.  Shovels.  All of my life, I’ve said, “My father helped build the rock wall around the cemetery.”  Yet, in all eighty-three years, I’ve never seen the evidence of his handiwork.

Today, I am in Cañon City because friend and journalist Mary Jane and I really like riding trains, and, tomorrow, we will board the Royal Gorge Train about noon and ride it one direction to Parkdale and the other way back to Cañon City.  I arrived in Cañon City early to check with the historical society and locate the cemetery and its wall.  There are three cemeteries in this town, but only one has a rock wall around it – Lakeside Cemetery.

The rock wall is a thing of beauty.  A wall about three or four feet high of blocks and blocks of well-positioned rocks.  I envision my father using one of those big machines to dig the trench where the foundation for the wall would be poured.  And, after the concrete set up, other workers would fashion the wall by placing just the right stone in just the right place.  Big stones, they are.  Some of them twelve inches across.  That rock wall also is eighty-three years old.

The photograph shows the rock wall that protects the grave markers.  I found reading the headstones was interesting.  Some couples were both identified on the same headstone.  Other couples had a headstone for each person.  I wondered if that was the way they had lived their married lives.  Some very much together; and some very separated.  Each headstone of couples that I examined showed the husband preceded the wife in death – sometimes by as much as thirty years.  That is a long time to be without the person to whom you pledged your love and support!

After driving through the cemetery, I looked for the house that my Aunt Beulah and Uncle Lester Tatman lived in; it was directly across the street from the women’s prison.

During the summer, I was allowed to go to see their daughter Janice who was about the same age as I.  We would take picnic lunches to the park we called “the prison park” and spend an hour or so there, comfortably safe in the park that was taken care of by trustees from the prison.  My kid diet, at home, didn’t include soda pop on a regular basis, but each time Janice and I went to the park with our lunches, we took the drink Orange Crush with us.  Being somewhat inexperienced drinking fizzy drinks, a lot of that Orange Crush went up into my nose.

The park was later fenced in and no longer accessible for picnics.  Now, part of the park is open.  The women’s prison has been moved to a location on the eastern edge of the town; the old facility now belongs to the historical society and is a museum.  But, the Tatman house is still there, across the street from the, now, museum.  It is exactly the same shape that I remember; however, it was getting a new coat of shingles – white – as I drove by.  I’m sure that Aunt Beulah’s thirty-inch diameter Christmas cactus is no longer in the house.  It was the largest Christmas cactus I have ever seen and had hundreds of blossoms every year.

When I was in about the seventh grade, my family, again, lived in Cañon City, this time without any older sisters.  Just mother and father and sister Clara and me.  I remember really liking the house we lived in.  IT HAD AN INDOOR BATHROOM!  Most of our houses, up to that point, did not.  I remember a fire place – our first.  I remember a black walnut tree in the yard.  My mother really liked black walnuts, rather than English walnuts.  She would spend hours taking off the black hull (getting the black stain on her hands), cracking open the nut on a shoe last with a hammer, and getting the nut meats out of it.  (As kids, Clara and I also shelled the nuts, getting that black all over our hands.)  Then, our mother would use them in divinity, one of my favorite candies; my father’s favorite ice cream was flavored with black walnuts.

I think we lived about a mile from the school I attended.  One cold, snowy day, as I walked home from school, I was so cold that I was forced to stop at a schoolmate’s house to get warm.  It was about half of the way home.  I think, but am not sure, that her mom made hot chocolate for us to drink to warm us up.  I remember that it may have been the best tasting food I’d ever tasted!  I don’t remember if I was so cold because the storm came on us without warning, if I didn’t have warm clothing, or as with a lot of kids, I simply had not worn the appropriate outer clothing, that day.  I just remember being very cold.

Larry and I would drive through Cañon City when we traveled from Gunnison, where we attended Western State, to see my mother in Pueblo.  It has been fifty-nine years since I’ve visited the city of my birth.  .

Can you go home, again?  Of course, but be ready for major change!

Be safe and be well.

The Cranky Crone

If you have thoughtful feedback or questions, please let me know with a comment below.

A note:  The employees at the historical society were incredibly helpful in finding the information I needed to find places I wanted to see.  Information about the WPA came from a 1989 article in the Canon City, Colorado Daily Record about Joe Chapman who kept records of the WPA workers’ hours and the projects they completed.