The old man keeps a picture album. Nothing fancy. Dark blue, about the size of a baseball base. His niece made it. She copied newspaper clippings and arranged them beneath plastic covers.
The first page holds an article with the headline “Huerfano Deputy Sheriff Beaten to Death by Gang.” On the same page is a picture of a badge with a black ribbon across it and a photo of a man wearing a suit and a tie. Below are the words “Fidel Aguirre, 1894-1938.”
Turn the pages. More headlines: “Deputy Sheriff at Walsenburg Fatally Stabbed.” “Two Held for Fatal Beating of Officer.” “Huerfano County Brothers are Threatened with Mob Violence.” “G-Men Report on Aguirre Case.” “Jury Decrees Men Must Serve Life Imprisonment.”
The articles tell of the “moaning, unconscious officer,” “the slayers who had melted away into darkness,” a posse “bristling with high-powered rifles,” surrounding the suspects’ home.
The World Independent paper in Walsenburg started a collection “so that financial distress may not haunt the sorrowing home of Deputy Sheriff Fidel Aguirre, who was killed in the line of duty.” He left behind his wife and eight children, of whom the old man, Fidel Aguirre Jr., was one.
Aguirre Jr. is 82, a widower living in Littleton in a tidy house with larkspur in the front yard and his wife’s collection of tea cups and saucers decorating the kitchen. He brings out the album, and I think, not for the first time, about the ways stories are lost to time, how they exist in memory until memory fades or the men and women who hold it die. If you’re lucky, what you have left is a scrapbook a considerate niece put together before she, too, died.
Wait a minute, says Aguirre Jr., interrupting my reverie. I have forgotten memory lives in stories, and some stories are not only passed from generation to generation, they are immortalized in song.
“Listen to this,” Aguirre says, loading a CD. For the first time,
Understand, Aguirre Jr. did not set out on a quest to honor his father. He was 11 when Aguirre Sr. was killed. His father has been a memory to him for many more years than he was a man. What Aguirre Jr. remembers is his father in a suit and tie going to work; his father saving Pal, the family dog, from coyotes. He remembers he and his father trying to beat a snowstorm home and, later, his mom crying and his brother saying “dad wasn’t gonna come home anymore.”
Sixty years passed and his dad, he says, “was dead and gone,” and Aguirre Jr. had his own family to raise. In 1998, a reporter called him, wanted to talk to him about his father. The reporter told him about the state’s fallen-officer memorial and how his dad’s name wasn’t on it.
“I never knew anything about this memorial until he brought it up,” Aguirre Jr. says.
This is how his quest was sparked.
A man named Gary Lopez from Fort Collins was doing genealogy research and, as he tells it, ended up in a trailer in Gardner when someone popped a cassette in and out came El Corrido de Fidel Aguirre. The song has magic. It had long ago cast its spell on Joseph Sandoval, a professor of criminal justice at Metro State. Sandoval comes from the Huerfano Valley and grew up hearing the story of Deputy Aguirre. Two of his uncles took the wounded officer to the hospital. A third composed the corrido.
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the three men connected, Aguirre, Lopez, Sandoval. The quest has been taken up in earnest.
Two hundred and twenty three names are engraved on the state’s Law Enforcement Memorial, which is near the state Patrol Academy in Golden. To get Aguirre Sr.’s name added will take a letter from the Huerfano County sheriff and the approval of the 11-member memorial committee, made up of representatives of law enforcement groups.
Aguirre, Lopez and Sandoval are not leaving anything to chance. They’re meeting in Walsenburg this week to talk to the county commission and the sheriff. They’ll tell them Aguirre Sr.’s name is listed on the national Law Enforcement Officer Memorial. Aguirre Jr. will take out the album and tell them how back in 1938, his father arrested two brothers on a sheep-rustling charge. A few weeks later, while patrolling a dance hall, the deputy met up with the two brothers again. They were drunk and beat the officer with a fence post studded at one end with a nail.
“I’m gonna give this 100 percent and if it don’t work. It don’t work,” Aguirre says. “But, for my father, I have to try.”
Some stories do not die. One way or another, Fidel Aguirre Jr. is going to make sure of that.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
