Fowler
If you dig into the history of this tiny Colorado prairie town nestled in cottonwood trees along the banks of the Arkansas River, you stumble across the name of NFL quarterback Earl “Dutch” Clark.
He was born here, and his play for the Detroit Lions in the 1930s was so spectacular that the Pro Football Hall of Fame had this to say: “Although a great athlete, Dutch was not particularly fast and had such poor eyesight, he had trouble seeing his receivers.”
High praise indeed.
Clark would be 100 if he were alive. He isn’t. He died in 1978. And so today, if you had to pick someone, the most interesting person in Fowler might just be “Big” Bob Oakes, 67, manager of the Fowler RV Park and a guy who also has an NFL connection: He spent 10 years driving a Coors truck in Denver. (If you think delivering truckloads of beer isn’t much of an NFL connection, you haven’t been in the stands during the fourth quarter of a Broncos game.)
Oakes, born in Mississippi, settled with his wife, Ada, in this town of about 1,200 people about five years ago. They wanted to get away from the hectic pace of Denver and into a place where, on a good day and if you’re in the right place at the right time, you can watch a goose land in a cornfield.
“We wanted to travel and see the country,” said Oakes, a big guy who owns an RV and almost always wears a Coors cap pulled very tightly onto his head, a smart move in a flat land where the wind could knock down a small cow. “So we got to Fowler, and the next thing I know, I’m the manager of an RV park.”
These days, it’s the off-season for RV travel. And frankly, there isn’t much to do in a town like this.
“On Friday night, my wife and I go to the restaurant on that end of town,” Oakes said, pointing toward Kansas.
“And the next Friday night, we go the restaurant at that end of town,” he said, pivoting on his old work boots and sweeping a meaty hand to the west. “We try to spread it around a little bit.”
But come Memorial Day, well, the town starts hopping.
“We get 100 people or so at the park every summer,” Oakes said.
They come, he said, from all over. From Kansas and Nebraska and Georgia and even Alaska, roaring down U.S. 50 in their homes on wheels. Last summer, Oakes said, he got a couple from – and here we present, as best we can, Oakes’ own pronunciation – “How-ah-ya,” which is, of course, our 50th state.
And each summer, Fowler really lets down its hair with Missouri Days, celebrating the town’s first settlers, who came from Missouri along the Santa Fe Trail.
“It’s big,” Oakes said. “The town gets a band, and there’s dancing.”
For each of the past few summers, Oakes and the RV park – the park’s owner lives in a nearby town – also have entertained long-haul bicyclists, as many as a dozen of them, who arrive from Seattle and stay a night or two on their way, Oakes said, to South Carolina.
“Have no idea why they’re doing it,” Oakes said. “Guess they just like riding bikes. They stop here and take showers.”
They also use the washing machines and dryers in Oakes’ latest creation, which he built a few years back, the “Ole Santa Fe Trail Laundromat” that sits out front, its big sign beckoning to travelers who have run out of clean underwear.
Not that life in Fowler is perfect. There is, for example, political unrest. Oakes said one town official doesn’t like the RV park and said so last summer at a town meeting.
“He said we can’t have trailers here, and he defined trailers as anything that has wheels and a skirt,” Oakes said, referring to the partition placed around the bottom of a mobile home to give it a more homey look and to keep out raccoons.
“So,” he said, “my boss stands up and says ‘Well, we got that Sonic hamburger stand down the road in La Junta. The waitresses have roller skates, and they wear skirts. Does that make them trailers?”‘
And then Big Bob Oakes laughs hard and the sound rolls across the flat Colorado landscape and for a moment, you’re afraid he’ll frighten away the geese.
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
