Ben Lacy, who founded a fiddling group that played all over southern Colorado for years, died July 12 at Parkview Medical Center in Pueblo. He was 90.
Lacy and his wife, Fern, founded the Prairie Ramblers in the 1940s near Sheridan Lake.
They played for dances, private parties, funerals and nursing homes.
When their son, Duane, now of Aurora, was a baby and his parents were playing a concert, they put him to sleep on a makeshift bed behind the piano.
But even that didn’t turn him into a musician. In fact, the first person to follow in Lacy’s footsteps is Sydney Lacy, 10, of Centennial, Duane Lacy’s granddaughter. She’s taking violin lessons, he said, but “no country-western” such as her great-grandparents played.
For a while, the Lacys had two programs on KLMR in Lamar. One was the “Saturday Night Shindig” and the other was a program of hymns and country music. They often invited other singers and players to join in.
Ben and Fern played on their 90th birthdays and their 71st wedding anniversary, both within the past year.
For their anniversary Ben Lacy sang a ballad he wrote about the infamous Fleagle Gang, which robbed banks in the 1920s. They were caught after robbing the Lamar bank in 1928.
For 19 years, Lacy was Bent County assessor in Las Animas.
Neither Ben nor Fern Lacy could read music, but they listened over and over to songs on the radio and memorized the lyrics and tunes, said their daughter, Pat Thomas of Pueblo. “They had hundreds of songs memorized,” she said.
Ben Lacy was born in Wiley on Sept. 25, 1919, and graduated from high school in Towner, both in southeastern Colorado.
Ben Lacy and Fern Hendrix married in May 1939. At the time of their marriage, he was earning $1.50 a day, working from “sunup to sundown” for a landowner, their daughter said.
The Lacys lived in several eastern Colorado towns and then moved to Cañon City, where they lived for many years.
In addition to his wife, son and daughter, Ben Lacy is survived by seven grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild. He was preceded in death by twin grandsons and nine brothers and sisters.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
