I don’t believe I knew about Labor Day having passed.  All I knew was, it was a bright sunny Monday morning in early September.  I was standing on a point of land in front of the old ranch house, looking down at the Crystal River and the dirt road on which the school bus would soon appear.  My parents had recently bought the Whitbeck ranch which was located on Nettle Creek, 8 miles up the river from Carbondale.  The year was 1949 and I was about to do something I had never done before.  I was going to school.  I was 6 years old.

The spring of 1948 my parents had packed me, a dog, and a cat up and moved from Oklahoma back to a small cabin they owned in Reudi, Colorado where my mother had been the school teacher in that little community’s one-room school house during the Great Depression years.  She had an uncle that owned a ranch there and an aunt had a tea house where the stage stopped.

My mother had accepted a teaching position in Carbondale and by summer they had purchased the Whitbeck ranch and I spent the rest of that summer on the ranch with them.  My mother began her Carbondale third-grade teaching career the fall of 1948.  I spent that school year at home with my dad and the following summer with both mom and dad, until that September day finally arrived.  I was going to school.

I was going to school but I was not happy about it.  I am an only child of older parents and I was not used to being around others my age.  I would have been happy just staying home with dad and enjoying the few animals we had around.  So, now you have the background story. 

Spanning the years 1949 thru 1961, what follows are my thoughts, memories and impressions of growing up in the Crystal River Valley in the 1950’s.  A time when a sign at the entrance to town read, “Welcome to Carbondale, Population 1000, Home of 999 friendly people and one grouch”.

I stepped through the doors of Carbondale Union High School, home of the Bulldogs.  The higher grades were taught on the building’s second floor.  The lower grade class rooms were on the ground floor.  I quickly learned to stay out of the way of the staircase traffic when high school classes changed.

Time passed and I learned there were town kids and there were ranch kids.  It seemed the town kids had nothing to do and the ranch kids had much to do.  I learned parents were shop keepers, ranchers, and coal miners.  I learned that some folks were Italian but I didn’t understand why that was of interest.  Maybe it was because, as I learned in a later year, they made chokecherry wine.  I learned that you might get snowed on, on Easter and that you might get snowed on, on Halloween.  We all looked forward to the 4^th of July fireworks and for a couple of years they shot a display from Mount Sopris’ middle peak.

In the 1950’s Carbondale’s main street was not yet paved and the road up the Crystal River was a somewhat improved and often graded road.  The railroad had been abandoned and its rails salvaged for the war effort years before; however, there were many railroad spikes and rail plates to still be found along the abandoned right-of-way.  On the railroad side of the river there were many places where “scrap” marble, some blocks as large as refrigerators and others perfect for stepping stones, was used as rip-rap.  A 1950’s memory is of watching this marble slowly disappear as the public helped themselves to various pieces

Outside of town there was the turn off to Dinkel Lake where a small dairy farm was located. The fish hatchery was there where the road turned and went thru the Perry Ranch property beyond which were only the old ranches until Redstone.  A solitary building, the Rock Creek school house was no longer in use except as a Pitkin County polling place.  Janeway Flats was vacant except for a fallen building.  The Redstone coal mines’ hot springs bath house was in disrepair and inaccessible across the river, but the small public roadside bath houses, one with hotter water than the other, were in use.  There was no Redstone by-pass.  You crossed the river and entered Redstone traveling past the Redstone Campground and you exited Redstone by again crossing the river at the coke ovens’ location.  Upstream, Placita was abandoned.   

And Redstone, Redstone, whose dirt boulevard flooded some springs, was original miner’s cottages, some still occupied by miners, and executive homes.  Of course, there was Redstone’s Castle, Cleveholm, and the Redstone Inn but the Redstone General Store was the only business in town of interest to me; although, I seem to remember there being a store on the corner diagonal from the Redstone Inn.  I really don’t remember what all they sold but the General Store had a gas pump and a cold Coca-Cola and a Hershey’s candy bar in case you needed provisions and that was good enough for me.

There was tourism during the 1950’s and it was common for locals to take visitors as far as Marble.  My folks, as did many others, always stopped at the Redstone General Store; sometimes on the way to Marble, sometimes on the way back, and sometimes we stopped both ways.  However, it was Ruby Isler’s pop stand in Marble that owned my heart.  Actually, it was Ruby.  I enjoyed looking at her photos of the area’s past glory and listening to her stories of those days she loved and missed.

I remember that most of us Carbondale kids, even by the time we were ten or twelve, had no real idea of where we were even if we thought we did.  We had been to Glenwood Springs and maybe to Grand Junction.  We might have been to Aspen.  To some of us, Missouri Heights was a vast maze of bad roads.  I suppose to some, it still is.  Most of us had been to Marble and maybe one or two as far as Crystal City, but the old McClure’s Pass Road into the Muddy, although not as steep as the clearly visible Ute Indian trail which it followed in places, was steep with switch-backs and few went that way.

To we school kids, the ‘50’s were an innocent time.  Our lives, as did the town’s, revolved around the seasons and the school’s sports schedule.  Although perhaps relatives were serving, we kids were not concerned about the Korean Conflict and only really knew of its end by the arrival of shiny Korean jackets with dragons on them.  Most of us went to the town’s movie theatre once a week but usually westerns were shown, although a war movie was played every once in a while, so we were little exposed to the world.    

The Crystal Valley did have electricity and telephone service but television did not arrive in Carbondale until well into the ‘50’s and was not available in most rural locations and radio reception was sporadic depending on your location.  Both electricity and telephone service were relatively reliable.  The telephone was okay but our phone number was Redstone Six.  We were on a “party-line” and if the phone started ringing, you started counting rings. In our case, if the phone rang six times it was for us.  All six party members heard all rings, so we all knew who got a phone call.  Of course, you could listen in.  But who would do that?  You picked up the handset and listened to see if the line was open before you made a call.  A friend on the same line and I figured out that if we both picked up our phones at a set time well, then, there we were on the phone with each other.

We learned to deal with the local town character, the family that was different, the kid with bad hygiene, and the kid with Mongolism as it was called at the time; but there were no Native Americans, Black Americans, Asian Americans or Latin Americans until a Mexican family moved to town about the same time a family or two of refugees from the 1956 Hungarian revolt arrived.  As we aged, we became more worldly but we were an innocent and sheltered bunch.

Things that were important to us included the Potato Day Celebration and those days when, sometime following the first frost of Fall, school was dismissed so students could help with the hand-picking of the potato harvest.  We looked forward to snowball fights that were fought across the holding pens and bucking chutes of the rodeo grounds which were located just beyond the school yard.

We boys shot each other with pea shooters and no one swallowed a pea and choked – well, at least not to death.  We drank out of creeks, rivers, and irrigation ditches.  We had sling shots and BB guns and no body lost an eye.  We played “potsy”, trying to lag our shooter marble, no steelies allowed, into a small hole dug against the brick wall of the school house.   Most of us carried pocket knives and played mumblety-peg during lunch.  We grew older.   Many of us had 22 caliber rifles and some of us had hunting rifles.  I suppose most of us tried cigarettes and a few others snuff, but drugs meant that we might come up with a six-pack of 3.2 % beer.

I don’t know about the other guys, but during my early elementary grade years I had no idea of what the girls in school did and I didn’t really care.  I did learn they were intelligent and capable and were not to be underestimated.  Some were smarter, some were prettier, some I liked, some I didn’t…wait a second, maybe I did care.  Now I remember, most of us guys became interested in girls.  We talked about them and they talked about us.  Our lives were forever changed.

Those of us that drove the Crystal River Road, learned the road.  We learned where the permanent rocks were, which curves had washboards and which curves were shaded and more likely to be slick in winter.  We learned where there might be deer on the road and we learned where there was likely to be a tourist taking a picture.  We accepted that every spring and fall bands of sheep and herds of cattle would be driven to and from their high-country grazing grounds.  We knew that cloud-bursts, triggered by the hot afternoons of summer, could close the road with mud and rock slides.  The road seldom closed because of snow. 

We learned that the Black Panthers, the trucks hauling coal from the Coal Creek mines, were to be given as much room as possible but we also learned where it was safe to pass.  Those trucks were fast but they weren’t that fast.

We learned that the road, as it wound through the Perry Ranch yards was to be driven slowly and with respect.  The two hundred yards or so comprised of the grade at the fish hatchery, the bridge across the Crystal River, and the grade at the ranch entrance was one of the worst sections of the entire road.  It was not a favorite spot for the school bus or the coal trucks and at times everybody wondered if they themselves were going to make it. 

The students who brought sack lunches could eat them in the shelter of the grandstands of the schoolyard or join those in the school cafeteria.  The cafeteria was about a block and a half away.  Some of us ran the few blocks to Main Street to have a fifty-cent hamburger, fries, and coke at Miser’s Café.

Due to school crowding, sometime, maybe 1955 or ’56, my class attended that school year in a Main Street store front a couple of doors east of Keepers Drug Store (now the Pour House).  Around that same time the Redstone school was closed and the Crystal River school bus route became longer.  As the end of the 50’s approached, Carbondale’s Main Street was paved as was the Crystal River Road.

The kid nearest me lived not quite two miles away.  After the Redstone School shut down there were maybe 10 kids on the bus when it picked me up and, if we went up Prince Creek first, we might have picked up 10 more kids on the way to Carbondale.  Some of us had brothers and/or sisters; I didn’t.  I suppose it was a somewhat lonely life, but that was to change.  I turned sixteen and I got a car.  I drove to school in Carbondale. 

Many of us had cars.  We played “ditch’em” thru the town’s dirt streets.  I think maybe they paved the Crystal River Road in 1960.  I know it was paved when I graduated in 1961.  After the pavement was laid, we drag-raced from the bridge to the railroad tracks. Later, someone painted quarter-mile markers across the road near the Pitkin/Garfield County Line which, I was told, irritated the State Patrol.  I wonder who would do a thing like that.

We attended the school’s sporting events and attended school dances in the basement of the community church.  After the dance was over the “make-out” spot was on White Hill which was also a location with good radio reception and we usually could tune in KOMA out of Oklahoma City which played the latest, most popular songs.  8 track tape and players had not yet been introduced. The adults had their “family dances” at the IOOF Hall.  Music was provided by the “Sopris Six”.   A few Square Dances were called.  Those women wore funny looking dresses.  Thinking about it makes me remember that I think there was a “Squaw Dress” fashion at the time.

Carbondale lost its identity as the Home of the Bulldogs when it was dictated that after an addition to the original school building was built, Carbondale Union High School would change its name and accommodate students who were to be bussed from Basalt while their new school, Basalt High School, was being built.  In 1961 my class was the first to graduate from Roaring Fork High School.   There was no longer a Carbondale High School.

I am still upset about it.  The “powers” denied the student suggested name of Mount Sopris High School and we ended up being named Roaring Fork after a river that runs from the Continental Divide beyond Aspen to its confluence with the Colorado River in Glenwood Springs.  Goodbye “home town” identity

With the passing of the 1950’s, Carbondale’s post-war innocence and serenity faded as the ranch land of the Crystal Valley and elsewhere began to be subdivided and the area’s economy moved away from agriculture and coal mining.  The times were, indeed, changing as I, Carbondale, and the Crystal River Valley entered into the turmoil of the 1960’s.