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June 25, 2008 |
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I’ve been lately thinking, about my lifes time All the things I’ve done and how its been And I can’t help believing in my own mind I know I’m gonna hate to see it end. John Denver’s lyric takes one back to June 23, 1968, a 97-degree Grand Junction Sunday. The day Jan and I rolled into Happy Valley for the first time. To think we’d still be here forty years later was laughable. Hey, we were coming west for a two-year hiatus from the career path. The skiing bug had bitten plus Jan and I were tired of the Midwest. We’d spent our entire lives in either Iowa or Illinois and thought it exciting to stretch our wings in another part of the U.S.A. Plus anyone telling you 1968 was a great year to be alive speaks from ignorance. Forty years ago saw Rev. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated. It was also the year of the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre, and coast-to-coast campus unrest. We were living near the Mississippi in Moline, Illinois, approximately 150 miles west of Chicago where radicals promised to take it to the streets in the upcoming Democratic National Convention. (They succeeded.) Today some Front Range clown is heading up “Re-create ‘68” and promising 25,000 demonstrators around Denver’s Pepsi Center during the Dems August gathering. It’s hard to find someone who walked the earth in ’68 longing to see the year re-created. So for the Maynard two a small town, close to world class skiing, but still in the middle of nowhere, seemed like a great place to hang for a couple of years. We rolled into Junction where a job as General Sales Manager of KREX-AM-FM-TV awaited. I tuned in my new station; they were playing Exodus by Ferrante and Teicher. Twisting the dial I discovered KEXO where the dj segued out of the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” and into the Lemon Pipers “Green Tambourine” and wondered if it was possible sell the virtues of a station I wasn’t going to listen too. We motored Main Street on a sleepy Sunday and were enthralled by the downtown shopping mall plus the “All-American City” placards hanging from the light posts. This appeared to be the perfect place to live, at least until it was time to sleep. The new employers put us up at the Royal Inn, across from Lincoln Park. We were sleeping with the windows open. But, the first night in Grand Junction found us jolted awake after midnight by a lions roar. And we learned first hand of the Lincoln Park Zoo. Zoo? It was more like five monkeys and an old moth eaten nocturnal beast with a thunderous roar caged beyond the right field fence. We knew we’d moved way out West. We just weren’t aware the ambiance included a lion roaring thru the night. Forty years later, Jan and I look back at a family raised and a life loved. Today it’s a Happy Valley retirement filled with grandkids, decades long friends, a passion for all things Colorado and ample time to enjoy our original reason for heading west, skiing. What we didn’t anticipate June 23, 1968 is just how sweet the next forty years would be. |