My father, Henry Nicholas Patterson, Sr., and my mother Lula May Shive Patterson were both born and raised in the same area of Kentucky. They were both raised in rather large families. My father's family had nine children, one lived only a very short time, and there were eight children in my mother's (Shive) family.

My grandmother Patterson died while the family was living in Kentucky (1873) and the family then moved to Nebraska in the Humboldt area. My grandfather died in Nebraska (1904) and was buried in Kentucky in the Patterson cemetery. The children were all grown by then and they broke up the home in Nebraska. One son stayed in Nebraska and my father and a brother, who wanted to be farmers, settled in Western Colorado. The rest of the family members went to California.

All of my mother's family were raised in Kentucky. After the older children were grown and some were married they moved to various parts of the United States. My grandmother Shive died in Kentucky in 1917. After her death my grandfather and the three youngest children, who were girls, moved to Pleasant Hill, Illinois. The three boys had already settled in Illinois. My grandfather died in Pleasant Hill in 1934. Both of my Shive grandparents are buried at Summer Shade, Kentucky.

My father built a house in Grand Junction, Colorado at 1520 North Seventh Street to have a home to bring his bride, my mother, to live. He went back to Kentucky and married her on March 10, 1909. The house is still standing and appears to have been kept in very good condition. I was born in that house on August 4, 1910. I am their only child.

GROWING UP IN GRAND JUNCTION

Some of the neighbors I remember on Seventh Street were the Browns, Kennedys, Campbells, Ashchrafts, Webers, Gearys and Drurys. Mr. Drury was a special guy for me. For a long time he would give me a dollar on my birthday and Christmas. I didn't get to spend it, as it had to go into the bank. When I was five or six years old the Kennedys had a lawn party. Their yard was at least a half an acre with lots of trees. The whole area was lighted with Japanese lanterns. Us kids had a great time playing hide and seek. We had no electricity at that time but it did come later. Because of no electricity the Christmas trees were lighted with candles--what a fire hazard. The candles were not allowed to burn for very long. About this time all I wanted for Christmas was a sled. When I went downstairs on Christmas morning it wasn't there--what a disappointment. The tree was so big that I had not seen it hidden behind. I wanted a sled because I would spend a lot of time at our front window watching the big kids hitching rides behind the wagons or horse and buggies that were going by. The big deal was to get to Harvey Hill which was quite long and a challenge. No, I wasn't big enough to do any of that. It was fun to visit the Campbells because they had a big family and they had two drawers of toys that I could play with. They always had plenty of cookies and cake because the girls were taught to cook. Also, the Geary family had three boys. About the first of July they would have a backyard circus or carnival. There were lots of things to see and do and it would cost so many matches to see each event. They were getting matches for their Forth of July fireworks. Another neighbor was the Joy brothers. One of them was the manager of Western Union and the other one was a carpenter. The folks later had him build our house on North 12th Street. One of those years my dad farmed a piece of land called Palmer Park which was later the site of the Uranium Mill. It was across the river (Colorado river) and he had to pump water from the river to irrigate the land. He grew pinto beans there and was quite successful. One year we got to go down to McCrary's and bought a new surrey with a fringe on top.

Another highlight of those years was the annual Thanksgiving ride in the surry way out on East Orchard Mesa to have dinner with the Andreys. It was an all day trip without much time to eat before it was time to start home. At that time they were about the only ranch on what is now the big peach growing area. The Andreys had one boy, Leonard, and he was allowed to have a rifle. He would demonstrate it for me but would not let me shoot it.

Electricity finally came out as far as we lived on Seventh Street and we had an Arc-Lite just south of our home. This was the first type of a street light. It was a treat to go out in the evenings and play with the neighbor kids. Automobiles were beginning to be seen about this time. There was an old race track where Saint Mary's Hospital is now located. The car dealers would drive their prospective customers there for them to practice driving. I can't remember just when it was that we had our first car ride but a contractor friend of the family came out one Sunday and took us for a ride to Fruita. We stopped at the Fruita Drug Store and had ice-cream and the owner of the store gave me a penny for the gum machine. That was a big treat. On the way home our driver thought it was time to turn on the lights. He stopped the car and got out to light the kerosene or carbide lights. They didn't help very much.

When the first World War was over we went downtown to the big parade on Main Street. They had the Kaiser strung up and one Dodge truck had him fenced in the back. Uncle 0. G., my mother's brother, came to visit us very soon after he got out of the army and I can remember seeing him in his olive drab uniform walking up Seventh Street to our home. We took him to the Fair that was going on at Lincoln Park.

At that time the entire park was fenced with an eight foot fence. It went from Gunnison Avenue to North Avenue and east to Fifteenth Street. In the area where the baseball field is now located and east to the big row of trees was a race track. On the south side was the grandstand. There were Indians pulling their portable tepees. There were all kinds of cowboys, horse races, Roman riding, chuck wagons, etc. Lincoln Park was an all important place in that area of time. It is hard to believe about this time Lincoln Beechie landed his airplane on the infield of the track. He was a nationally known pioneer trick flier. He even flew in the early evenings and waved a lantern from the cockpit.

Probably about this time was when we first started going to Chatauquas. My mother always came up with enough money for a season ticket for the two of us. I think they usually lasted for a week. They had an afternoon show and another show at night. We would walk to each of the programs and again walk back home. As I remember, the place they pitched the big tent was between the old Carnegie Library and the city jail on Seventh Street just south of Grand Avenue. The seating was great--wooden benches made each year and then taken apart and used to build into homes. The ground was covered with wood shavings from the planing mill owned by the Coopers. The show had a great variety of programs--singers, lectures, chalk talks, magicians and hypnotists. I remember one hypnotist who had about six people hypnotized at the same time and he told them they were eating juicy red apples when they were eating onions. He broke the spell and then had a hard time keeping himself out of a fight with one of the victims. These shows were in the middle of the summer and it was hot under that tent. If you were lucky you could get a cardboard fan from one of the funeral homes or perhaps some merchant gave them away for advertisement. There may have been some electric fans but I don't remember them. There may have been some overhead fans in the drug stores and other kind of stores.

One evening while looking out the front window the Klu Klux Klan went marching by with their white sheets covering them. They were on their way to the old race track for a ceremony. It has been said that at that time they were very strong in Grand Junction and they forced business people to belong. There was quite a group of them going by.

School time for me came along and my mother took me to Hawthorne School so I would know the way home. It was walk to school--walk home for lunch--then back to school again for the afternoon and then walk home again after school was out. My first four grades were at Hawthorne School and then we had to go to Lowell School at fifth and Rood. The YMCA was on the west side of fifth street and in the middle of the intersection there was a big four-sided drinking fountain for horses. Remember at this time there were very few cars. Bailey's Grocery Store was on the southeast corner and on the southwest corner was a tennis court that belonged to the YMCA. When we got to the sixth grade we were old enough to take manual training and once a week the boys would walk to the manual training building at ninth and Gunnison. Mr. Hindman held forth there and with his little goatee he was one to remember. All this time it was walk to and from everywhere we went. I did learn to ride a bicycle about this time. My mother would churn butter which she would mold into one pound blocks and I would take them to the Farmer's Store at seventh and North to sell. There was always buttermilk left over and about once a week a fellow would ride up to our house from town to get a quart of buttermilk. He and my dad would always visit for quite awhile and since he left his bike in the front yard I would practice on it. It was a 24 inch frame job so I had no trouble riding it by putting my leg below the upper frame bar. I don't remember if I ever broke anything on it but I did learn how to ride it.

Lowell School was so far from home that I had to take my lunch with me. Over the years I sure got tired of an egg sandwich and another of jelly or jam. Noon hour gave us too much time so we would prowl Main Street and hunt for steeles (ball bearings which we would put in our marble collection). We found these in the trash behind the garages. For awhile I would go to the Novelty Store in the 200 block of Main Street and check out five Denver Post newspapers. I think I got two cents for each one I sold. Any profit I made stayed there and I exchanged my earnings for candy.

About this time my parents sold the house at 1520 North Seventh Street and we moved to North 12th Street. My father had already spent a lot of time up there leveling the ground for farming and marking a site to build our new home. At this time 12th Street went only to the north side of our place. Since we were going to move, my dad grew a big patch of popcorn and we spent night after night shelling this corn by hand and we finally had a gunny sack full and that sold for about $15.00 which turned out to be just enough to buy my first bicycle. When we moved it was going to be too far for me to walk to school. Our first house on 12th Street was to be the garage later so they built a two room small building that was the kitchen on one side and a bedroom on the other side. They built on a full length screened porch on the front of the building and we slept on the porch in the summer. We lived in this arrangement for two or three years while they were getting the house built. My dad dug the basement with the horses. He fixed up the wagon to haul gravel and sand for the cement. He went across the river close to where the Connected Lakes area is now. He had to shovel all the sand and gravel by hand as there were no backhoes at that time. During this time we started raising strawberries and raspberries. They also planted watermelons and cantaloupes. In the spring when the berries were in season we would get up early in the morning and pick them. It was then my job to sell them door to door. One long day I sold 16 crates (24 boxes to a crate). I was really tired. Then when the melons came along I would hitch Old Jap (one of our horses) to the old surrey and sell them door to door. I knew everyone on the north side of town and usually knew where I could get rid of some of our products. The cantaloupes would sell from five cents each or three for ten cents. Not many for more than that. Watermelons would sell for about twenty cents or up according to the size. My favorite cantaloupes was a Hoo Do, which was very sweet and the first melon with an orange center. Most cantaloupes at that time had green centers. We also sold milk and I had customers that I would deliver their milk before school and others I would deliver in the evenings. Of course, the cows had to be milked and I got my share of that duty. The biggest problem was the animals had to eat. Most of our ground was planted in alfalfa and it had to be cut and put in the barn or in stacks to feed the animals. I got the feeling that all I was doing was working to feed the animals.

Come fall it was time to get ready for winter. Our new house had a coal bin that would have to be filled before it got too cold. My dad would put the high sides on the wagon and leave at daybreak to go up north to the Bookcliffs where there were several coal mines. He would have to wait his turn to get loaded because there were always other wagons which had arrived before him. He would usually get home after dark. It was my job to shovel those loads of coal into the basement coal bins. He usually made four to six trips each fall to get enough coal for the winter. If we ran out we would have to have someone bring some from town, as the dirt roads to the mines would be impossible to travel on in the spring.

One of the interesting events in the spring when school was finally out was watching when the Miller family, our closest neighbors, would pack up and leave their home for the summer months. They had a string of donkeys and would pack their backs with their tents and necessary baggage. They had horses for the family to ride. They had a trail up the west side of Grand Mesa that took them to Cottonwood Lakes and they would camp there all summer. We put them in the category of a strange family. Mr. Miller would rent a shed for the donkeys during the school term and the children would ride the donkeys to school.

Probably the first money I made came during this era. My uncle lived just west of Clifton. He had an orchard of pears, apples, plums, cherries, etc. During cherry season I would ride my bike up and live with him for a week. I would take my beany-shooter along and try to shoot the birds out of the cherry trees. It wasn't much fun living with him as there were no kids around, he was a bachelor, and he was a fitness food buff. He would grind up non-roasted Spanish peanuts (ugh) and eat these with canned milk and there would be no desert. Every other Sunday, as long as I can remember, he would come to our home for dinner to get a real meal. This was quite a sore spot for my mother to have to fix something special for his frequent visits. During the time I spent with him that I learned to make boxes for the fruit that was to be shipped. The fruit that was shipped was mostly pears. I was paid a penny for each box I made.

Going to the seventh and eight grades made us feel more grown up because our classes were held in the basement of the high school. We could mingle with the big boys and there were more school activities. Sports were out for me as I was the smallest boy in school. At that time I had no athletic ability and in the gym class I was a wash-out. The teacher would line us up and pair us up according to height and I was always paired up with a boy much more mature than I was. There were lots of good times meeting with the neighborhood boys and riding to school together. There were eight to ten of us from Orchard Avenue and north. I almost forgot to say that Fridays was Miss Moulton day in the music room and we would go there for our music culture. In the winter when it was cold enough the city had an ice skating rink in Lincoln Park where the golf course club house is now located. Those of us who took our lunch to school would rush out there and put on our skates and eat lunch while skating. It was a no no for me to go there after school, as I had to get home. I think it was in the eight grade when we were eligible to get a student body ticket so we could go to all the ball games. I can remember having to wait in the entryway for all the high school basketball games until the game was half over then I could go in free. I could not raise the $1.50 it cost for a season ticket.

Times for us at home were pretty hard but we always had enough to eat because of our garden and milk. The cows with their milk and cream, sold every Saturday, would get us some needed groceries. Before our house was built my dad decided to buy us our first car. This was a 1921 Nash 4. It wasn't much of a car--tires were not good and there were plenty of nails on the roads, as the wagons and buggies of that time lost a lot of them. I remember patching a lot of flats and hand pumping them back up. My bicycle, of course, had the same problem. Lots of flats and wheels to be fixed. Steel rims that would not warp were the new thing so I ordered spokes and rims from Montgomery Ward catalogue and built up my wheels -- my first experience in building wheels. I didn't do them right but they lasted pretty good. My bicycle was very important to me, as it was my way of getting around--to school, to school activities, to Pioneer Club meetings and to the YMCA.

The Pioneer Clubs we had then were very much like the Boy Scouts of today. The programs were sponsored by the YMCA and the churches. The members of each club came from a church but we had all our meetings at the YMCA. The programs were similar to Scouting as we had progress programs similar to merit badges. We had organized hikes to a lot of the mountain trails around the area, camp-outs and inter-club contests. We always looked forward to the YMCA camp, which was ten days at the big cabin on Sunset Lake on Grand Mesa. The cost for the ten days was $8.00 and at that time that amount was hard to come by. The camps were very well organized and were a great learning experience. There were hikes, contests, fishing, and every night a campfire. When we would go to camp we would try to get to ride in Mr. Benge's car. Somehow he could always find a nut Hershey bar for each of us. On other trips we would try to get in Doc Carey's car as it was a Reo with a better transmission gear ratio and could go up the hills faster. He would let Mr. Benge leave first and then we would pass him and that was great fun for us.

It was in the early 1900's that the Interurban was built between Grand Junction and Fruita. Passengers could ride but the main purpose was for transportation of fruit. At that time there were many orchards in that area. At the highway intersections there were platforms where the farmers could put their produce on and it would be picked up and taken to town. The platforms were also used by people who were passengers. The platform on our corner was called Patterson as the Interurban turned west there and went through the Patterson property. That is where the name Patterson Road came from. The Bookcliff Railroad was built first so the Interurban would always have to stop before it crossed the Brookcliff track. This went on until the tracks for the Bookcliff Railroad were removed. I can only remember that the Bookcliff Railroad went by our house just a few times before it was abandoned. Their terminal was just west of where Biggs and Kurtz Hardware had their building.

For the fruit growers it was the beginning of a lot of hard work. They would first have to put on what was called dormant spray. Then as the fruit grew they would have to spray about every ten days. They used a lot of arsenic of lead to kill the fruit flies. Now they make a big stink out of a little lead here and there. The fruit flies eventually won and most of the orchards were pulled up and the fields planted to something else. Thinking back it is hard to believe that from Palisade to Fruita there were hardly any fields--just orchards. Back then a ten acre orchard was about average. If a farmer had twenty or more acres he was well off. The Interurban lasted for several years. However the coming of automobiles and trucks caused it to go under.

At this time people were beginning to travel across the country in their cars. The Peak Peak-Ocean to Ocean Highway went by my uncle's place. The only markings were red, white and blue bands painted on the telephone posts. It also was funny to see the farmers grading the roads for the cars with their horses. The farmer would contract to grade the road for about ten miles. The ground up gravel they put on the roads made good ammunition for my beany.

Gunnison Avenue was where the streetcars used to go and when they were discontinued the city made a parkway in the middle of the street from Seventh Street to Twelfth Street. It had a small curbing around it and just for the heck of it us boys would try to see how far we could ride it without falling off of it. This ability came in handy when the Cycle Trade of America came to our town trying to revive the use of bicycles. People were buying cars and using them to go to work and not using their bikes as much. The representatives of this Cycle Trade of America group went around to all the schools and organized a Bike Day. They asked Bicycles Shops to donate prizes. They planned a big parade with decorated bicycles and etc. The big event was the plank ride with the winner to receive a $25.00 gold watch. They borrowed 150 feet of 1x6 inch boards from the lumber yard and put them out on the street. The person who made the most trips across it without falling off was the winner. I was the winner and also set a new record of laps but I was later told that my record was broken at the next town where they had the same events. I won the gold watch and I still have it. I was pretty happy because I at last had won something.

Springtime was not only the beginning of the planting season but was also a pleasure season for the boys. There were many willows growing on the ditch banks and they were good for a lot of entertainment. While the sap was running you could make them into whistles. We also made blow-guns and would use cotton balls from the cottonwood trees for ammunition. We didn't go to the store to buy our toys--we made them ourselves. Things we used were wood shingles, spools, rubber bands, old inner tubes, old alarm clocks and cat tails and willows from the ditch banks. Where ever a house was being built us boys would search a two-winged Jenny, which was a copy of the World War I fighter plane.

I think it was in the eighth grade that a friend took me to his home and showed me his crystal radio set. That was the beginning of my radio days. I made several crystal sets and spent a lot of time listening when I should have been doing my home work. The tuner of the crystal set was made out of an oatmeal box and an ice-cream container. We lived out in the country where there was no electrical interference. I was able in the winter time to get real clear signals. I could get KDKA in Pittsburgh, PA., KOA Denver, KFKX Henry Field's station in Iowa and KFI, KNX, and KHJ in Los Angeles. I would especially tune in to KDKA to listen to Little Jack Little. He was a very good piano player and his tunes were light and jumpy. Later on I built a 1 tube, 2 tubes and 4 tubes sets before we bought a real Atwater Kent or it may have been a Zenith radio. One day I told a neighbor boy, who had won a boxing match in Montana, that I had heard the results of his fight on my crystal set. It was hard for him to believe I had heard it.

One family who I delivered milk to were very good to me. They would take me with them to Grand Mesa to go fishing. Those trips to Grand Mesa in the early days were a real adventure. Cars would heat-up and you would have to refill the radiator more than once before you made it to the top. The road up through Mesa at that time was very crooked and narrow. It is hard to believe that the new road could be as straight as it is now. Road engineering has come a long way as well as the cars. Cars can now go up that same mountain without hesitating.

High school came along and it was a grueling experience for me, as I was not a very good student. I did not get very good grades unless it was something to do with using my hands. I took manual training and this I really enjoyed. My mother bought me a flute and later a piccolo so I could join the band. They had no piccolo players and this gave me a lot of good memories. I think it was about the second year of high school that our band made a trip to Denver. I don't remember where or why we played but we stayed in a hotel. I was afraid to go more than a block away for fear I could not find my way back to the hotel. It was there that I saw the first talking picture show--Al Jolson in the Jazz Singer. I also went to an Operetta because a local girl had a singing part in it. At the end of my senior year Audrey Strong, the band master, organized a one hundred piece band from the Western Slope of Colorado to go to Los Angles by train to represent all the Elk Clubs of the area. I and another piccolo player from Paonia got to go on this trip. Not that I could play that good but because a band of that size had to have two piccolo players in it. It turned out to be a big adventure for us but Audrey Strong had put it together to advertise himself to California. Through our trip he was able to get the director job of the Tournament of Roses host band at Pasadena which he held for several years. He was a real showman and while he was the director of our school band he put on very good stage shows at the Avalon Theater.

In California he had us going to play wherever he could get us in. We went to a radio station and we played at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles. It was at this theater that I rubbed elbows with Jack Dempsy. He was on a personal tour and was booked in the Pantages Theater the same time as we were. I walked past him and thought I had never seen a bigger man. We marched down Figurora Street and played in a mass band concert in the Coliseum Sport Center where the Elks were having part of their show.

Each kid in the band was given a coupon book with tickets to all the rides at Venice Park and at another amusement pier on the ocean. We got to spend a lot of our tickets there. I took my first and last Roller Coaster Ride and did a lot more there that I do not remember. This was a one week trip but if we had relatives in California we could stay another week.

I stayed a few days at Aunt Mary's, my mother's sister, in West Hollywood. While there I got to go to the Graumans Chinese Theater and saw Edgar Bergan and Charlie McCarthy. I also spent some time in San Bernardino with Patterson relatives. It was easy at that time to go from Los Angeles to San Bernardino as they had electric trains and you could make very good connections.

The Bicycle Shop--getting to work away from home was a great event for me and it became a great learning experience. The varied things I learned to do and the people I met has meant so much in my life. Bicycles then were very popular and many of them were used to go to and from their work, as well as young people using them for transportation. At that time the weakest problem of the bicycle were tires and wheels. Tires then were what were called single tube. That means that an inner tube was there but it was completely encased by fabric and then a coat of rubber with a tread on the running surface. These tires were very weak as the fabric was cotton and by hitting a rock in the road you could easily break the cord. Also, there were many--many tacks to be run over and picked up by a tire. The upholstery in wagons and buggies were put on with tacks and they would work loose and fall wherever. We had what they called brass plugs of different sizes to repair the breaks in the tires. To install them you had to have a sharp knife to cut the tread to a smooth surface. The plug had a tapered part that you would push through the break. Then you would put on some rubber cement and wind the top part of the plug down on the flat surface that you had prepared. They were very successful and sometimes you would have more than one in a tire. Tack holes were a different repair. We had a tool that you would put on several rubber bands and push it through the hole with rubber cement and release them in the hole. You would cut off the surplus rubber on the outside. I would like to have a nickel for every band I used.

When I first went to work wheels had wood rims installed with either 32 or 36 holes. Eventually the 32 hole pattern was dropped. There were so many rims that had to be replaced because of warping that spokes would be purchased in a box that would hold five thousand. Steel rims came in about this times but were slow to catch on until they came out with new type clincher tires and separate tubes and they eventually took over. Another problem of the single tube tire was that it had to be glued to the rim to keep it from slipping and pulling out the valve stem. There was also a repair for the leaky stem. You would cut out the old stem and insert a shoe into the tire that had threads in it. Then screw in a stem and put on an outer shoe and tighten it down with a nut. This was a never ending repair until they came out with a better rim glue than the shellac we first used.

Not only did we repair bicycles but we did a lot of general repairs which included welding. I practiced a lot on welding and went to every clinic that I could. Welding salesmen would come through and one of them was a very good welder and he would give me a lot of tips on how to weld. I learned to weld aluminum from him. Later we had another salesman that told us how to weld what was called pot-metal. It also took a special rod and a technique that was different. There was a lot of pot-metal used on early cars because it was easy to cast and chrome plate. There was a lot of variation of metal content and I learned the hard way which metal could be welded or not welded. I think I was the only one in town that successfully welded pot-metal. We welded a lot of different things--farm tools, car fenders, stove legs and grates which were made of cast iron. We welded a lot of these because people were careless about trying to move heating stoves by sliding them and because cast iron was very brittle they would break. Remember this was back when very few people had central heating.

When I first went to work we were the only shop in town that had access to Harley-Davidson parts. This, of course, made me interested in them. Not to have to pedal a two-wheeler was very intriguing and, of course, the sound of them was something only a boy would like. As time went on and I became older I was doing all the motor work on the later models. The boss would work on all the older ones as that was what he knew. He gave me a good deal with the motorcycle end of the business and that is probably why I am where I am now. I would buy the demonstrator model that was necessary at that time to be a dealer and then I got a good commission on any machine that I sold.

In 1936 I decided I wanted to go to the Harley-Davidson Factory School in Milwaukee. I asked my boss to apply for me and I was accepted, so in February 1937 I took three weeks off from work without pay. I paid my own railroad fare to Milwaukee and went to school. That was the way it was then--a vacation with pay was rarely known and going to school on the boss's time was not done.

All in all working there was a great experience. Not much pay. When I first started I would go in during my school lunch period while the boss went home for his lunch. After school I went back to sweep out and learned to fix things. Saturdays was always sweep out, wash the windows and dust the bikes. This was for $3.00 a week. I was rich and could buy my own cloths. I could afford a student body ticket in high school so I could attend football and basketball games--this cost $1.50 a year. At this time he was very good to me as he would let me off work if there was a game I wanted to attend.

Porter, my boss, became a City Council member and through that I became well versed on what went on in our city. At times he was president of the council and had many visits at the shop by people wanting this or that done. I can remember salesmen coming in and offering him bribes to get their companies the bid on something for the city. One man came in and offered quite a sum of money if he could be considered for a liquor license. None of these visits helped, as Porter was very honest and did his best for the city. He told me later that at times he regretted not taking some of the money. I especially remember one day when the city manager came in walking faster than usual. He took the boss aside and they talked for quite awhile. Porter told me after he left that the government wanted the city to help put in something on the old Palmer park, the land my father had once farmed. They wanted to make what he thought was some kind of an explosive but they would not tell what kind. They had sold him on the project and told Porter that day that he thought the city should do it. It became the Uranium Mill where they made the concentrate that eventually was used in the atomic bomb. There I was sitting on history that was to come later. Although the people of Grand Junction did not know what was being made at the mill, one day they caught a Japanese photographer near the mill before he could take any pictures. This was the start of the uranium boom that made Grand Junction a very successful community for awhile. A number of people became rich mining uranium in the area.

The shop was not all work. During the latter days of vaudeville a couple of unicycle riders came into the shop. They were going to put on their act at the Majestic Theater but as young guys they needed something to do before show time so they wandered into our bicycle shop. They told us to come out on the sidewalk and they would show us how to ride. One of them could ride backwards as good as forward and his favorite trick was to just ride around until a lady would come out of Jones Grocery Store loaded with a sack of groceries. He would ride as fast as he could right directly toward her and act as if he was falling into her. Before she could recover he had reversed himself and was back up the sidewalk 30 or 40 feet riding backwards. They did a lot of their act there in front of us. This was how I got the unicycle bug. Probably within a week I had built one and started to learn to ride. I ruined the wall paper on one side of the shop with my greasy hands while I used the wall to keep my balance. I never was able to ride backwards very far but had a lot of fun riding in parades. The shop had a high-wheel old time bike that I learned to ride and rode it in several parades.

I don't remember what really got me started in being interested in golf. I do remember riding my bicycle over to the Redlands and hunting golf balls on the cliffs along the Glade Park road. The Country Club had a hole along that road up on top and occasionally I would find a ball. This was before the city made a course at Lincoln Park. Sometime during this period Alex McCafferty, who was married to the sister of Porter's wife, was an import Scottish golf professional and he had come to town to teach golf. He would work in the shop cleaning golf clubs, putting in new wooden shafts, regripping them and other repairs. I knew from watching him how to whip (put on the strings that supported the wooden part of the club where the shaft went in and where you would protect the end of the leather grip) before I learned to swing a club. I know with the opening of the Lincoln Park course I started hunting golf balls there. Why? Because I could sell them for ten cents apiece. There was a small canal that went through the course and one hole was paralleled to this canal. It would collect a lot of balls on Saturdays and Sundays. I made up a long handled rake with a wire pocket on it and would always walk that canal bank on Monday evenings. I got a lot of balls that were lost there. I would not have to take the rake home as I could hide it under the old grandstand. No one ever bothered it even though they knew it was there. There are some blank areas in my memory as how I was able to do this at the same time I was at the shop. I know I was able to get a lot of spending money from the sale of those balls. I can remember the first time I caddied. One of my milk customers was in a tournament and asked me to caddy for him. I knew absolutely nothing about what I was supposed to do and he did not tell me. I do remember that he was "my guy". I apparently got very vocal rooting for him and rooting for the other guy to miss, who said after the match was over that he knew he could beat my guy but not both he and his caddy. Probably about this time I started collecting clubs and learning how to play. On one of my ball hunting days I went into a willow patch that was near number five hole at that time and I found a putter. It was a long time before I realized it was not a lost club but one that had been thrown away. I gradually became pretty proficient at the game and was winning quite a few matches and tournaments. At different times I was Club Champion, City Champion and County Champion. However, I never won the Western Slope Championship that I wanted. I was finalist once but lost 1-up. Part of the reason I was successful was because it was something I could do and I worked at it. All the time I was in high school I was too small to play in any sports except be a part of a team in gym class. Golf has been a very relaxing sport for me for many years.