The Colorado Whoopenhollars: Living a Good Life Despite the Great Depression, by Jean Rutherford Duaine, $30 hardback, $20 paper.
During the Great Depression, Bill Rutherford got a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps. That meant leaving his wife and five small children at home in Georgetown. He kept up with them not only on occasional visits, but also through letters containing stories that he made up about a bunch of rambunctious kids he called the Whoopenhollars. Not surprisingly, the children had the same names as his own brood.
Now daughter Jean Rutherford Duaine reprints those enchanting stories of the five little ruffians, weaving it through a family history of Georgetown.
Those were lean days in Colorado mountain towns. The boys made a hoop from a buggy wheel, and a worn-out tire became a vehicle of sorts when a Rutherford boy climbed inside and rolled down a hill.
But it was also a joyous time of simple pleasures. On New Year’s Day, the kids piled into the unheated 1929 Willis Whippet for the drive to Denver to see the Civic Center Christmas lights. “The magnificence of the scene before us was so amazing and seemed so real to us that none of us could speak,” writes Duaine. Then the five children snuggled in the back seat as the family made the drive home over dirt roads.
“The Colorado Whoopenhollars” is about a simpler time when nothing was more important than family and when pleasures were homemade.
Breckenridge: 150 Years of Golden History, by Mary Ellen Gilliland, $17.95.
Gilliland all but owns Summit County history, so it’s hard to believe she’s turned up any new information. But her latest, “Breckenridge: 150 Years of Golden History,” is filled with facts she’s recently uncovered about the town. She disputes the accepted story of who first settled the area and writes about early personalities.
One is Christ Kaiser, who ran the town’s grocery. One day, sitting on the floor of the store, he heard a heavy object fall and exclaimed, “Oh mine Godt, another side of beef fell off the ceiling.” Wrong. It was Kaiser’s pregnant wife, who’d slipped and fallen.
Then there was naturalist Edwin Carter, whose collection was the basis of Denver’s Museum of Science and Industry, and Helen Rich and Belle Turnbull, Breckenridge’s literary ladies, who served their Scotch neat.
Gilliland includes a great deal of information about 20th-century Breckenridge. The town did not die out when the first mines closed. That’s because gold dredging came along, and the gold boats dominated the economy.
So in the early part of the 20th century, Breckenridge was a lively place where residents bicycled (on balloon-tired bikes purchased for $6.50 from the hardware store), and they skied.
Gilliland also writes about the beginning of today’s ski area, when lift tickets sold for $4. The area was the brainchild of Wichita lumber executive and World War II pilot Bill Rounds. He poured money into rebuilding Breckenridge’s infrastructure and donated land for a school. But that wasn’t enough. The locals liked to bowl and insisted that Rounds also provide them with a bowling alley.
Heroes, Villains, Dames & Disasters, by Michael Madigan, $29.95.
During its 150 years in business, the Rocky Mountain News published thousands of front-page stories, from the April 23, 1859, piece on the opening of Japan (founder William Byers was in such a hurry to get out the paper that he used type already set that he brought with him to Denver) to the Feb. 27, 2009, story announcing the paper’s demise.
In between, the Rocky chronicled the news both local and national: the deaths of Billy the Kid and Winston Churchill, the Sand Creek Massacre and the opening of the Brown Palace. The Rocky was there when wars began and when they ended. It recorded the Ludlow Massacre, the end of Prohibition, the murders of Emily Griffith and JonBenet Ramsey. And of course, in its last year, the Rocky covered the 2008 Democratic National Convention and the election of President Barrack Obama.
Michael Madigan combed the Rocky’s archives for the newspapers that he reproduces in “Heroes, Villains, Dames & Disasters.” In companion text, he explains the times and the backgrounds of the news stories he selects and includes a few accompanying stories.
“Heroes, Villains, Dames & Disasters” reminds us that Denver once had two great newspapers. The book won’t bring back the Rocky, but it brings back the memories.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who write regularly about new regional nonfiction.
