Showing
41 - 60
of 290
, query time: 0.03s
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 New Girl in Town,...
Format:
Voice Recording
Lester Starr talks about going to swim in the Colorado River without adult supervision at five years old, about frequent fist fights with a fellow student on the way to school, and about other aspects of his early childhood near Fruita, Colorado. He also discusses raising apples for cider, about the role the Interurban played as transportation for both produce and people in the Grand Valley, and about the warming of winters over the course of his...
Format:
Voice Recording
During an interview that was broadcast on KEXO radio, Al Look and Larry Leach discuss evidence of the Fremont and Basket-Maker Cultures at a dig in Paradox Valley. Bob Collins also interviews Look about finds at a dinosaur dig near Fruita, Colorado (28:53). Collins then interviews Look during a segment featuring Look as the Personality of the Week (42:17). This recording is made available via signed release by the Mesa County Oral History Project,...
Format:
Voice Recording
Grace and Ralph Inskeep talk about coming to Mack, Colorado with Grace’s family in 1920. They speak about Ralph’s job working for the Bureau of Reclamation at Camp 7 and his subsequent job as a trackman for the Uintah Railway. They discuss the people and businesses of Loma and Mack, and living in the old Sunset School building. Ralph talks about working at Mesa College as a maintenance man. They speak about attending the Church of the Brethren...
Format:
Voice Recording
Frances Idler remembers coming to Loma, Colorado in 1938 as part of a Federal resettlement program during the Dust Bowl. She talks about the school and religious life of her family and the town. She recalls moving into a house owned by the Holly Sugar Company with her second husband and their subsequent move to Fruita, where they began taking in foster children. She speaks about some of the many foster children that she and her husband cared for over...
Format:
Person
She was born in Montrose County, Colorado. By 1896, when she was six years old, she and her family were living on the Brink place in Fruita. They moved to what became known as Snooks Bottom around 1900, named for the homestead founded there by her parents William Tunis Snook and Clara Zillah (Park) Snook. The family lived there until 1910, when a reservoir constructed by resident families burst. They moved back to Fruita, where William purchased and...
Format:
Voice Recording
Tom Charles talks about moving to the Fruitvale area of Mesa County, Colorado in 1907, his family’s fruit orchards, and the history of fruit growing in the Grand Valley. Emma (Berg) Nagel describes her family’s homestead in the Highpoint area north of Fruita in 1894. She speaks about living in a dugout for three years, clearing the land for cultivation, and the family’s fruit orchard. Charles and Nagel both discuss the various crops grown around...
Format:
Compound
Bertha Schlegel discusses growing up in Loma, Colorado and helping her family raise beets for Holly Sugar, and making sauerkraut, pickled apples, pickled watermelon and other ethnic food with her mother, who was a German immigrant from Russia. She also remembers her education and school activities throughout her childhood, including field days at the Fruita Central School and Grand Junction High School. She talks about obtaining a teaching degree,...
Format:
Person
She was born in Princeton, Kansas. After high school, she received a scholarship for a business school in Topeka. During that time, her parents moved to Fruita, Colorado to escape the Dust Bowl. After finishing school, she followed and took her first job in the law office of Silmon Smith in Grand Junction. She then took a job as a secretary in the office of Western Slope Wholesale Grocers. After marrying James “Jim” Kyle in Los Angeles on November...
Format:
Compound
Marjorie Thomas describes her childhood on a homestead in the New Liberty area of Mesa County, Colorado. She talks about the difficulty of getting across the Big Salt Wash near Fruita when it flooded. She discusses Sunday school and religious services that existed in the community for twenty-one years, until the lack of leadership caused people to drive to Loma for church. She speaks about the history of the New Liberty School and about social clubs...
Format:
Voice Recording
James and Ida Jaenicke talk about moving to Loma, Colorado in 1937 as part of the US Farm Security Administration’s resettlement program for Dust Bowl refugees. They speak about aspects of farm life in Loma, such as relying on ditch water for drinking water. They remember running a dairy farm with 30 cows and 125 chickens. They recall people and stores in Fruita, where they shopped. James talks about his life in the congregation of the United Presbyterian...
Format:
Voice Recording
Lois Long describes the homestead she grew up on near Loma. She remembers living in a tent and then a pre-cut house, and drinking ditch water. She recalls her father and uncle moving the Valley View School to north of the Colorado River in the 1920’s, and the school bus that was sometimes a horse-drawn cart. Leland Buniger talks about his childhood in Grand Junction, Fruita and Loma. He describes farming potatoes, beans and hay. He speaks about...
Format:
Voice Recording
Lou Guccini describes growing up in Loma, Colorado, his father’s sheepranching business, speaking Italian in the home, and learning English in school. He remembers loving baseball and playing on town baseball teams with his brothers against the town teams of Hotchkiss, Rhone, Fruita, Appleton, and other locales. He describes how he became a sugar beet farmer with the help of his father-in-law, Thomas Wayne Beede. He recalls German prisoners of war...
Format:
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...
Format:
Voice Recording
Emmett Elizondo talks about his arrival in the United States from the Basque region of Spain and his first sheepherding job in Buffalo, Wyoming. He remembers building his own herds through a sheep leasing deal with a business partner in Salt Lake City. He recalls his move to Colorado’s Western Slope and eastern Utah, where he amassed a large sheep operation and owned 25,400 acres by 1980. He speaks about his community involvements, including his...
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,...
Format:
Voice Recording
Sisters Dorothy (Raber) Beard and Marjorie (Raber) Likes talk about the history of their family in Fruita, Colorado. They speak about Will Minor, the goat herder and self-educated photographer, author, and amateur lepidopterist who discovered the butterfly Papilio Indra Minori on the Colorado National Monument. They discuss homesteads that the Beard family owned in the canyons that comprise the current day McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area....
Format:
Person
He was born in Columbia, Missouri to Leonard Haseman, a professor at Columbia University, and Elosia Belle (Fish) Haseman, a homemaker. He attended David Henry Hickman High School, where he was in the Latin Club, the orchestra, and the all-state orchestra. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Missouri. There, he was in Lamda Chi Alpha, played football, and was in the Stripes and Diamonds and the Pistol Club. He received a science...
Format:
Person
She was born in Montale, Italy to Carlo and Carmelina Tonelli Duranti. Her Italian birth and baptismal record from the Pontremoli Diocese shows that she was born on May 6, 1900, while later records in the United States show a date of May 15th. The same baptismal record lists her birth name as Virginia Mistica Luigia. She attended school until part way through second grade, when she had to quit so that she could help her family when her mother got...
Format:
Compound
In this recording, Alta Nolan reads the memoirs of Cordelia Files. Files talks about the history of her parents and maternal grandparents who homesteaded in the Fruita, Colorado area in the 1890’s. She describes the fruit growing operation on the homestead. She recounts seeing the Ute people and Chipeta when they came in the fall to dry fruit from the orchard. She remembers early Fruita, with its dirt streets and plank sidewalks. She speaks about...
