Fowler
His name is Ray Wards, but nobody calls him Ray. They’ve always called him Bushy.
Now, he’s Mayor Bushy.
And Thursday, as a steady drizzle mercifully moistened the dust in this small southeastern Colorado prairie outpost, the mayor was one busy Bushy.
The first item on his schedule involved cranking up a power saw and slicing some office furniture into pieces he could carry. The pieces would be moved from the old courtroom in the turn-of-the-century town hall to the new courtroom in the new town hall, which is a glass-front corner shop on Main Street that used to be an insurance agency in this town of 1,154 folks.
The pieces of furniture would then be put back together, although Mayor Bushy wasn’t sure how that was going to happen.
Frankly, Mayor Bushy isn’t sure how a lot of things in town are going to work now that he’s the boss.
“I have a lot to learn before I really feel like I know what I’m doing,” he said.
But the people like him, and that’s a good start.
“On the ballot we had to list him as Bushy because no one in town knew who the heck Ray Wards was,” said Eileen Straach, the former mayor.
Of the town’s 262 voters, 205 checked the box next to the name Bushy on April 4. His opponent, Pat Christensen, collected the other 57 votes.
“Pat would have done just as good a job as I hope I will do for the town,” Mayor Bushy said. “He’s a good man.”
So what’s with the name?
“When I was younger I had a great big beard and a lot of hair, and both of them were bushy,” said the mayor, who is 59 and now sports a less-bushy beard that has turned white. “Back there everyone just called me Bushy, and it stuck.”
Back there was Kansas, where he owned a bar in the town of Ottawa near the Missouri border. The bar was named Bushy’s Blue Sky.
Today he owns a motel on the eastern edge of Fowler, a motel he bought about three years ago. Bushy’s Blue Sky Motel has 16 rooms and, except for a few days during the town’s annual Missouri Days celebration in July, usually a vacancy or two.
During the years between the bar and the motel, Bushy was a cop – first as an officer and then as chief in Pomona, Kan., (“Gateway to Ottawa”), then as assistant chief in the slightly larger town of Wellsville, then as a sheriff’s deputy in Gray County and, for 10 years ending in 1992, as a Kansas Highway Patrol officer.
Bushy’s wife, Jan, retired six weeks ago as an independent contractor for the Department of Defense. For the past few years she worked at the nearby Pueblo Chemical Depot. The couple found Fowler in 2003 and decided to stay put.
“It’s a good town,” Bushy said. “Crime isn’t something we deal with much. And no graffiti. It’s a safe place. The high school prom, for example, is closed.”
During the winter, he decided he’d like to get more involved. Being mayor seemed like a good place to start. His campaign consisted of walking the streets and talking to people. He made an occasional visit to the town’s senior center to answer questions.
And just like that, Bushy became Mayor Bushy.
“I’m the boss,” he said, a smile on his face. “Or at least you can say I’m the boss.”
As he sat at his desk in the storefront town hall with the light rain running down the windows, you wouldn’t guess he was the boss. The easygoing way of the town and its people rules out much in the way of formality.
“Pam, did you steal my wastebasket?” he asked municipal court clerk Pam Spitzer, with whom he shares the main room in town hall. “I can’t find my wastebasket. We’ll have to call the cops.”
“It’s on the other side of your desk,” Spitzer said with a sigh. “The cleaning people moved it.”
“That’s her job,” the mayor said. “To humiliate me and make me look dumb.”
Fowler is a place where you can still find a pretty nice little house for $50,000. It has two banks and five restaurants and Jack’s grocery store, which sits next to town hall. And you will not be carrying your groceries to your car.
“They carry your groceries out for you,” the mayor said. “I mean, they don’t ask if you want them to, they just do it. And mostly they know which car is yours, so they don’t even have to ask where you’re parked.”
In March, thanks to a committee of town residents, Fowler got health care. Three days a week, the town’s medical building, vacant for the past three or four years, is staffed by Dr. Joe Flores or one of two licensed practitioners who come from Pueblo, some 35 miles to the west.
“It helped,” said longtime resident Della Bell, “that Dr. Flores is the brother-in-law of someone on the search committee.”
And that, more or less, is how a small town works.
“Good schools, a safe place to live, and good, friendly people,” Mayor Bushy said. “That’s a tough combination to find these days.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
