April 27, 2005
Black Sunday

May 2^nd 1982.  22 years ago next Monday.  For those of us calling the Western Slope home back then “Black Sunday” is forever seared in our psyche.

Do I remember?  Like anyone could forget.  Sprawled on the couch in front of the tube I was half watching a Denver newscast.  Jan was cleaning up after a birthday party of neighborhood kids who earlier had celebrated our youngest turning 8.  (Yes our baby blonde turns 30 next Monday, a birthday much more traumatic for her parents than for Becca.)  The newscaster was John Neal, a name remembered by few, but forever locked in my memory.  Reading from a piece of paper handed him halfway through the newscast he reported, “This just in to News 4.  Exxon today announced the immediate shut down of their Battlement Mesa oil shale operation.  The company, estimated to be spending over a million dollars a day in Western Colorado, said it could take six months to completely close the operation but, as of today, work at the site will not go forward.”  

And in the words of Merle Haggard, we wondered, “Are the good times really over for good.”  Life had been one long upper during the late seventies and early eighties in our “Happy Valley”.  Social conversation seemed fixated on how much homes had increased in value over the previous 30 days.  Speculation was what people did for fun, buying and selling raw land for huge profits over the course of a few weeks.  Put the money in the bank?  Are you kidding, there was more dough to be made, so you plowed the profit into another overpriced plot.  After all, “There’s no way Exxon will pull out.”  

We were wrong, Exxon was gone, and the price paid over the next few years was the helpless feeling of watching our town deteriorate daily as friends moved away in droves to places offering “more opportunity.”  New home construction came to a standstill.  Magnificent dwellings, left vacant by folks not able to make the mortgage payments, were yours for a fraction of the original cost, but who had the money to upgrade?  The busiest people in town were bankers doing “work outs”.  That’s if you were lucky enough to work for a bank that survived.    What is today’s Alpine Bank building then housed Valley Federal.  For almost half a century Valley Federal’s slogan was, “Where people are more important than money.”  Federal regulators disagreed, with them money came first.  The Bank of Clifton passed out bumper stickers reading, “Tough times don’t last, tough people do.”  Great thought but the Bank of Clifton didn’t make it. 

All across our valley thousands of families found themselves living a nightmare.  Many were forced to file for bankruptcy while the rest of us hung on by the skin of our teeth. 

Trying to make chicken salad out of you know what, a group of business people gathered in ’84 and formed the Mesa County Economic Development Corporation to recruit new business to our valley.  With a ton of hard work punctuated by disappointment and rewarded with success it took a little over five years for our local economy to improve to the point where locals could once again gripe about “uncontrolled growth” and how “there’s too many know it all Californians moving here.”