Great Depression
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Glenn W. McFall relates a tale of riding the rails during the Depression as a teenager and getting food and help from a prostitute in Salida, Colorado. He also talks in general about prostitution in Grand Junction and the American West. He discusses the Land's End Hill Climb auto race, prominent physicians and businessmen of early Grand Junction, the shoe trade, button shoes and women's fashion. He then talks about Chipeta's visits to the McConnell-Lowes...
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Voice Recording
To mark the centennial celebration of the town of Grand Junction, Colorado in 1981, the Mesa County Oral History Project wrote and recorded several radio plays about local history. Beginning on September 26, 1981, local radio stations KSTR, KREX-AM, KREX-FM, and KMSA broadcast the plays. Authors of the plays used interviews recorded by the Mesa County Oral History Project as inspiration. This archival recording contains the play The Great Depression.
This...
Format:
Voice Recording
To mark the centennial celebration of the town of Grand Junction, Colorado in 1981, the Mesa County Oral History Project wrote and recorded several radio plays about local history. Beginning on September 26, 1981, local radio stations KSTR, KREX-AM, KREX-FM, and KMSA broadcast the plays. Authors of the plays used interviews recorded by the Mesa County Oral History Project as inspiration. This archival recording contains the play The CCC in Mesa County.
This...
Format:
Voice Recording
Howard McMullin discusses the history of early Grand Junction businesses and buildings, and biographies of early Grand Junction business people. The interview was conducted by the Mesa County Oral History Project, a collaboration of Mesa County Libraries and the Museums of Western Colorado.
*Photograph from the 1916 Grand Junction High School yearbook of Howard McMullin as a sophomore.
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Voice Recording
Frosty Tilton describes his career as a banker in Palisade and Grand Junction, Colorado. He talks about bank closures and runs on banks during the Great Depression, the economic impact of the peach industry, and the history of local fruit grower cooperatives. The interview was conducted by the Mesa County Oral History Project, a collaboration of Mesa County Libraries, the Museums of Western Colorado and the Mesa County Historical Society.
*Photo...
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Voice Recording
Thomas and Helen Williams, he a Greek immigrant and she the daughter of Greek immigrants, discuss early life in Grand Junction, immigrant life, owning a grocery store, financial hardships due to the Great Depression, and selling ice cream during the summers from a small horse-drawn wagon.
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Voice Recording
Alfred Flagg discusses his life in early Mesa County as a barber owning his own beauty shop, how the Great Depression affected local businesses, and the social activities in Grand Junction during the 1920’s and 30’s. The interview was conducted by the Mesa County Oral History Project, a collaboration of Mesa County Libraries and the Museums of Western Colorado.
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Compound
Lorene Roice talks about her childhood growing up on a farm in Kansas, childhood chores, music, dances, dating, holiday celebrations, and her involvement in 4-H. She also discusses her life in Grand Junction, Colorado, her husband Joe Roice, and their cofounding of the Roice-Hurst Humane Society, Grand Junction’s first animal shelter. The interview was conducted by the Mesa County Oral History Project, a collaboration of Mesa County Libraries and...
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Voice Recording
Gladys Gross, who grew up on an apple farm at the intersection of North Avenue and 12th Street, talks about her father’s residential development of their farm land. She discusses old businesses in town, including the icehouses utilized by the railroad near Third Street and how they burned down. She also talks about the desperation and hunger of people during the Great Depression, her work with New Deal programs, the route of the Little Book Cliff...
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Voice Recording
Harold Zimmerman describes packing fruit during harvest time in the Clifton area, spraying for codling moths, the end of early apple farming in the valley, the train of wagons used to haul fruit on the Midland Trail at harvest time and about a flash flood that devastated Cross Orchards and destroyed 31 Road. He also talks about his career in bookkeeping for Mesa County Valley School District 51 and other organizations, the run on local banks during...
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Voice Recording
Local historian David Sundal talks about the history of Grand Junction, Colorado’s First Church of the Nazarene and about his father Olaf Sundal, a clergyman who presided over the church for many years, beginning in 1930. He talks about the role of local churches in providing food relief to local people and to Dust Bowl migrants during the Great Depression. He also speaks about the row of churches on White Avenue and about the history of churches...
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Compound
Mabel Hart Johnson talks about life in Meeker, Colorado in the early 1900’s, Teddy Roosevelt’s mountain lion hunting trip in the area, and what the life of a woman was like in Meeker. She also discusses her battle with the illness St. Vitus’s Dance, using scrip during the Great Depression, homesteading near the White River, raising a family in Grand Junction, and bowling. Her husband Murl Hazen Johnson talks about working as a truck driver for...
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Voice Recording
Dick Williams talks about the games he played with children as a boy in the downtown area of Grand Junction, including hide and go seek and kick the can. He remembers playing sandlot baseball and other games in a vacant lot on 9th Street between Grand and White Avenues. He recalls swimming in ditches and canals, and ice skating in what is now Lincoln Park. He speaks about competing in athletics in high school and college, and in Pioneer Clubs, which...
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Compound
Oscar Jaynes discusses childhood memories of Clifton, Colorado, including life on his family’s homestead, a time he climbed inside a giant tire and rolled down a desert hill, and a boxing match at school with future Colorado Supreme Court justice Jim Groves. He then relates tales of traveling the country on freight cars trying to find work during the Great Depression. Oscar also talks a great deal about the fruit business, specifically the peach...
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Compound
Cordelia Files talks about the history of her family as early homesteaders in Mesa County, Colorado. She remembers life in Fruita in the early Twentieth century. She recalls working on a ranch near De Beque for her first job at the age of fifteen. She speaks about her life as a teacher instructing all eight grades in a one-room school house, about different episodes from her career in education (including the time a cat came to school), and about...
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Compound
Earl Laycock talks about working in the Laycock Motor Company in Delta and Grand Junction, Colorado from 1918 to 1970. He remembers the Great Depression, bank failures, World War II, and the effect on automobile sales. He recalls the various makes and models of cars that Laycock Motors sold over the years. He talks about his birth in a log cabin in Ohio, on the Kentucky border, in 1895. He remembers his family and other tobacco farmers that organized...
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Compound
Helen Johnson talks about helping teach a WPA-funded dance class during the Great Depression. She speaks about other government programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, and how they helped the people of Mesa County, Colorado during the Great Depression. She describes working for Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles to manufacture airplanes during World War II, where she became the lead in her section. She talks about her brief career teaching...
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Voice Recording
Louis Balliger talks about his boyhood as the son of Swiss immigrants in early Twentieth century Telluride, Colorado. He also discusses his family’s struggles during the Great Depression, the influx of dust bowl refugees during that time, his career as a machinist, and his amateur woodworking hobby. His wife Elizabeth Balliger offers her occasional insights. The interview was conducted by the Mesa County Oral History Project, a collaboration of...
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Voice Recording
During a lecture on the history of St. Mary’s Hospital (at a Mesa County Historical Society meeting), Pat LeMaster talks about the history of the St. Mary’s Hospital’s founding agency, the Sisters of Charity. She recalls the history of doctors in the Grand Valley and the conditions they dealt with. She tells the history of St. Mary’s from its inception in 1896 until 1983. She speaks about hospital services during the Great Depression. She...
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Video
Evelyn Kyle, the first coordinator of the Mesa County Oral History Project, discusses her role in expanding the program shortly after its inception in 1976, and describes colorful personalities that she met through the project. She also talks about her life in the performing arts, establishing and acting in community theaters around Western Colorado, about her experiences during the Dust Bowl and World War II, and about her marriage to Jim Kyle and...
