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An officer for the C.D. Smith Drug Company. He was also a member of the Grand Junction Lions Club. Garrison had access to fireworks through his job at C.D. Smith, and Al Look recalls that he always kept some in his pocket. At one Lions Club meeting, he lit fireworks under the chair of Dr. Everett E.H. Munro, which frightened Munro and made him angry with Garrison for years after. He eventually went into the pizza business in Denver. He returned for...
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Person
He was born in Colorado to Stephen Barnwell Johnson Sr. and Myrtle (Lewis) Johnson. His family owned and operated Johnson’s House of Flowers on North Avenue. He grew up in Montrose and Grand Junction and attended Grand Junction High School. He was childhood friends with Al Look Jr. and William F. “Bill” Ela. He received a medical degree from the University of Colorado. He served in the US Army from 1943 to 1946, and again from 1949 to 1955....
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Person
A former employee and society editor of The Daily Sentinel, who left and started her own newspaper. She was described by fellow journalists Isabella Cunningham, Ruth (McQueen) Smith and Al Look as an excellent editor. She suggested the title “On Guard” that Look took for his column. According to former Sentinel reporter Bill Nelson, she may have left the Sentinel when it was decided that Preston Walker would succeed his father has publisher.
She...
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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 CCC in Mesa County.
This...
105) Maggie Herrick
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Person
She and her husband Henry were settlers in the Kannah Creek, Colorado area. In 1883, she left her husband during a domestic squabble, and went to her parents’ house in Albuquerque. She later returned, only to find her husband in a carriage with a woman named Margaret Thompson. She shot and killed Margaret, whom Henry had employed as a housekeeper. Accompanied by Sheriff Martin Florida, she went to retrieve livestock that belonged to her, but she...
106) John Edward Bryant
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Person
He was born in Indiana to John Strange Byrant, a farmer, and Rachel Elvira Bryant, a homemaker. Indiana marriage records show him marrying Susan Warthen on September 24, 1872, when he was 22 years old. US Census records show them living in Gage County, Nebraska by 1880, where John was a farmer. Susan died in 1889 and John subsequently remarried to Anna Soule. US Census records show them living in Nebraska in 1900. By 1910, they lived in the Appleton...
107) William Lyon Wood
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Person
He was born in Pueblo, Colorado to David and Fannie Wood. US Census records show the family living in Ouray, Colorado in 1900 and 1910, when William was 6 and 16 years old, respectively. William Wood was the editor of the Durango Herald contemporaneously to Rod Day's tenure at the rival newspaper, the Durango Democrat, a morning daily (published 1899-1928). According to Al Look, who worked for the rival Durango Herald at that time, Day was hospitalized...
108) Mike Loeffler
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Person
A Jewish man from New York who moved to Glenwood Springs, Colorado where he worked as a tailor. There he married his boss’s daughter and the couple moved to Grand Junction. In Grand Junction, he opened up a tailor’s shop and included a general clothing section. According to Al Look, he was a personable man and because of this, excelled at sales. His clothing store burnt down in 1938, at which time he rented his store to C. C. Anderson.
He was...
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Organization
A bank in the town of Grand Junction, Colorado. According to William McHurg Ela, whose father and grandfather Wendell Dennett Ela and Wendell Phillips Ela worked for the bank for many years in the early Twentieth century (as vice president and president, respectfully), the bank was founded by Orson Adams. E.D. Blodgett took over as the owner of the bank of Grand Junction after Orson Adams was arrested for embezzlement. A.A. Milne was also an employee...
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Event
Rod Day was the one-time editor of the Durango Democrat, a morning daily (published 1899-1928). According to Al Look, who worked for the rival Durango Herald at that time, Day had been hospitalized for delirium tremens. The publisher of the Herald, McDevitt, instructed his staff and editor, a William Wood, not to write about Day's condition.
Wood disregarded this instruction, and published an editorial exposing Day's hospital stay. Unbeknownst...
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Person
Former director of the Museums of Western Colorado. He was born in Riverside, California and received his PhD in American History from University of California Riverside in 1974, when he was 28. He worked for several museums and public entities as director or in a historical capacity, including the Museums of Western Colorado from 1978-84. With Al Look and Robert “Bob” Collins, he served on Grand Junction’s Centennial Committee, which celebrated...
112) Ray Peck
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Person
He was born and raised in Routt County, Colorado where he was a supervisor for the Forest Service in the Routt National Forest. He later worked for 25 years as a forest supervisor in the Grand Mesa National Forest, before retiring in 1946.
According to Al Look, Peck hired John Otto to break trails on the Grand Mesa during the summers, when it was too hot to work on the Colorado National Monument. He built the Wild Rose Trail and helped with Land's...
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Voice Recording
Frank Simonetti Sr. talks about his arrival in the United States from southern Italy in 1914 and his eventual arrival in Grand Junction, Colorado in 1918, where he began a long career with the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. He remembers a fire that burnt down the D&RG icehouse, the railroad shop strike in 1922, and working a seven-day work week for thirty years. He recalls different kinds of locomotives. Angela Simonetti recalls growing up in the...
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Person
Early 20th century Grand Junction restaurateur. Oral history interviewees Al Look, Fred Hopkins, and Howard Shults all claim that Lewis sold hamburgers made with horse meat from his restaurant on South Avenue in the early Twentieth century.
According to Shults and Look, Lewis came from Montrose and opened a restaurant on South Avenue in Grand Junction. He would apparently purchase dead horses or mules to use for meat, but Look describes him as...
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Voice Recording
Frank Simonetti Jr. talks about the arrival of his Italian immigrant parents in Grand Junction, Colorado, about his school days at the Whitman and St. Joseph’s School, and about the history of the downtown area. He speaks about working for the Citizens Finance Company for many years and about Melvin “Pappy” Due, a founding member and longtime president of the company. He describes what it was like to work for a financing and insurance company...
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Voice Recording
Clarence Prinster talks about his father’s meat market and grocery store in La Junta, and about the Prinster brothers moving to Grand Junction in the 1920’s to start a grocery store at their father’s urging. He talks about the founding of the first City Market grocery store at 400 Main Street in 1922, the Prinster’s purchase of the store in 1924, and renovations made. He speaks about the lard rendering business housed first in a shed behind...
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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 Rimrock Road: A Memorial,...
Format:
Compound
In a two-part interview carried out over two days, Howard Shults talks about his experiences as a rancher and auctioneer on Colorado’s Western Slope. In part one, he talks about the arrival of his parents in Mesa County in 1903, their teaching careers at Pear Park and in Fruita, and his father’s move to a career as an auctioneer. He speaks about his childhood in Grand Junction and Collbran, his graduation from Grand Junction High School in 1923,...
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Event
The Grand Junction Lions Club was chartered in October of 1921 and immediately began raising money to help out various projects and organizations for the betterment of our community, including the early Grand Junction Junior College (now Colorado Mesa University).
The Grand Junction Lions Club still holds its annual Carnival and Parade (which first started in 1929) as its sole fundraiser and has given back more than $4,000,000 back to the local...
120) Rex Howell
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Person
Founder of Grand Junction's first radio station, KFXJ (now KREX), in 1930. He also founded the town's first television station in 1954.
He began a radio station in the Denver Area in 1926. After visiting Grand Junction and finding it had little radio reception, he and his wife decided to move to the Grand Valley, which they did in 1930. He founded radio station KFXJ, which later became KREX. He placed the station on top of a hill in the First...
