Rex Hurd wanted to make his mark as a band director, but “he became disillusioned” with the low salaries teachers were paid, said his daughter Corliss Stroud of Chicago.
So he switched to engineering and, for years, owned lumberyards.
But he made his mark as a volunteer, whether it was helping to found a Las Animas town parade, now 74 years old, or persuading residents to buy $1 bags of sand to build the town swimming pool. Built in 1954, it still exists.
Hurd “was the first one in,” said his daughter Miriam Schaper of Englewood.
Hurd was 91 when he died Feb. 7 in Grand Junction, where he had lived for the past 38 years.
The Hurds were such a part of the community that when Rex Hurd’s parents, Wesley and Julia Hurd, were stumped on a middle name for their son, they asked the local Ladies Aid Society of the Methodist Church to put names in a hat. Benjamin was the name drawn, said Stroud.
Hurd and other high school seniors founded the Santa Fe Trail Day parade in 1934, and it is still a feature of Las Animas’ annual April celebration.
Every year, even after Hurd had his own family, everyone dressed up as early “pioneers or gunslingers,” said Hurd’s daughter Candace Cotton of Chicago. One year, the family rode on a float built to look like a steam engine.
A Republican, Hurd got the whole family involved in campaigning for Dwight Eisenhower, sending the girls through Las Animas neighborhoods to hand out “Mamie Eisenhower’s favorite cake recipe,” said Cotton.
Hurd kept up with his trumpet — playing taps with his son, Alan, at the funeral of his first wife, Maxine, and playing love songs at his second wedding, to Jean Langford, when he was 86, said Alan Hurd of Los Alamos, N.M., who is a professional trumpeter.
Rex Benjamin Hurd was born in Lamar on Sept. 16, 1916, graduated from Bent County High School and attended Oberlin College in Ohio and the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.
To put himself through college, he played trumpet in bands. As a teenager, he climbed out a window at night to join a band at the Alpine Night Club in Las Animas. “His mother wouldn’t have approved,” said Cotton.
He married Maxine Moore on March 21, 1943. She died in 2001.
In addition to his wife, son and daughters, Hurd is survived by 10 grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; two stepdaughters, Kate Hill and Libby Hutton, both of Santa Rosa, Calif.; and two stepsons, Charles Sisk of Louisville and William Sisk of Broomfield.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
