Thieves steal about 300 cars a month in Denver. Last month, they also took a couple of bulldozers. At least one of them was special.
Steve Thornton’s 1971 Case 350, technically a crawler loader, is fitted with an extra-large backhoe bucket, a loader bucket and a lot of memories.
It was Thornton’s inheritance from his father, Vern, who ran a heating company in Chicago for years before deciding to try his hand at property development west of the city, on a plot of farmland between Sycamore and Genoa.
“He dug every basement of every house with that machine. Built every house from the ground up himself,” Thornton said, pride still evident about 40 years later.
There were 52 acres in what Steve likes to call Thornton Heights. Vern subdivided them into acre-sized lots. Today, the Google street view shows that Thornton Drive features large homes, mostly ranches, with big, lush yards and gardens. There are still a couple of lots available.
Steve remembers the old farmhouse that was on the land when his dad bought it. They wrapped a chain around the house, hitched it to the Case 350 and pulled the house down. Steve watched.
“I will never forget that day,” he said. “I always wanted to get my chance to drive it, but Dad wouldn’t let us.”
Vern Thornton died in Illinois four years ago at age 73 when a tractor (not the Case) rolled over on him. He left the Case to Steve, now 55, in his will.
It took a couple of years before Thornton put together the money and the time to fetch the loader from Thornton Heights. He and a son took a truck there, hitched up the 10,000-pound machine and trailer and started the drive back.
It was not as easy as it sounds.
“We had quite a white-knuckle trip back,” Thornton said. “Peeled the tread off the trailer tires at one point. Had to stop a couple of times.”
But they made it, and Thornton finally got his turn at the controls.
“I drove it off the trailer at the house and drove it around there just a very, very little before the city said, ‘Uh-uh, you can’t do that in your neighborhood,’ ” Thornton said. “So I drove it back on the trailer, and that was it.”
The Case needed work — and he needed a nonresidential spot to park it — so Thornton took the machine to a hose-repair company where a friend works in the 5100 block of East 48th Avenue. It never really occurred to him that someone might steal it, so he left it on the trailer. For a year, there it sat.
Until New Year’s Day. That day, the crawler, and the trailer, disappeared.
Denver Police Lt. Matt Murray said the investigation has turned up no leads. A second dozer was taken at about the same time from the same part of the city, but it was abandoned in Adams County a short time later and is not thought related.
“The investigation is now considered inactive,” Murray said. “We don’t have any information on it.”
Thornton works in the upholstery shop at the Regional Transportation District’s facility off 31st Street in Denver. He wears a work shirt with his father’s name above the pocket and sews new covers for the seats on buses and light-rail cars — a skill he learned from his grandmother back in Illinois.
Thornton has passed out fliers throughout RTD with photos of the loader.
“I’m just hoping that maybe one of the drivers will see it while they are out,” Thornton said. So far, nothing.
He had hoped to clean the Case up and eventually use it to develop a little property on his own after he retires from RTD in a few years. But after he was first offered $6,000 and then $12,000 for it and turned the money down, he realized he really just wanted to keep the loader around, even if he never used it.
Thornton mostly blames himself for the loss.
“If I had just taken it off the trailer, it would never have gone anywhere,” he said.
And if he got a chance to say one thing to the thief, it would be: “I’d sure love to have it back. I don’t think I can replace it in any way.”
If you have information on the missing crawler loader, please call Denver police at 720-913-7867.
cq Chuck Murphy: 303-954-1829, cmurphy@denverpost.com, or
