Our final stop on the road westward was Gothenburg, Nebraska. We set up the old canvas tent in a park in the heart of town and slept to the screeching of cicadas (a sound new to me). (In those days we couldn't possibly have afforded the $10 or $15 for a motel.) By noon the next day we had reached Crook, Colorado (population 128 in 2000 but considerably more in 1969 -- the town was then large enough to support a restaurant and a gas station). We ate lunch but when we got back into the green Dodge station wagon, purchased ($2500) for our new life in the Rockies, we discovered that something had gone terribly wrong with the gears and that the car would only go backwards. I worried that we were going to be stuck in Crook with two boys under four years old while we waited for a transmission part to be trucked in from Detroit. Filled with financial trepidation, I backed the car around the block (there was only one block, fortunately) to the town's lone mechanic. He said he'd "take a look." He did, got himself a great big screwdriver and banged away under the hood for a few minutes. "Fixed it." When he charged me $1.00 for the service, I began to think well of Colorado. We piled back into the car and continued with the last 150 miles of the trip, gazing at the mountains in the distance and the arid steppes, populated only by the occasional cow -- with nary a human being in view.
We made it to Boulder sometime in that same afternoon. It took a while to find the house we had rented by mail. We missed it on the first pass and drove by the old Pioneer Cemetery, which became our first landmark. We had no idea that we had rented a cute small 1915 arts and crafts bungalow with the original fir woodwork still intact -- what a change from our Manhattan apartment overlooking Broadway. Our few sticks of furniture were delayed in transit (and would be for three weeks), so we all slept on air mattresses for the while.
The Daughter (at whose request I am writing this reminiscence), was conceived before the furniture arrived.
Our landlord and next-door neighbor was Jack David Angus Ogilvy, a rangy cowboy and professor of Anglo-Saxon who was, contrary to all expectations, a distant relative of the queen of England. (Was it 1969 or the next year that I met Jack's cousin, a pimply English boy named Angus, known across the sea as Lord Ogilvy)? That was a surprise. Another surprise: the alley behind our house was bordered with a huge crop of wild plums. The boys discovered the plums very soon after our arrival.
I was taken by surprise by the Colorado light. had always lived in the cloudy east, and that bright western sun was a complete surprise. High altitude, no humidity, and very big sky. I'm still not quite used to it.
Boulder was not the sophosticated, foodie, high-tech, trendy town it has become. It was all white bread, the downtown unMalled and still dominated by banks, car dealerships, Valentine's Hardware, Smith's Shoes, a big old Woolworth's and wide empty streets. There were only a few restaurants -- I remember the Harbin Inn, a mediocre Chinese joint, and the Gondolier ditto but Italian (still in business but much changed). And our favorite, the Aristocrat, a breakfast place with portions that could remedy in a single sitting those dangerous drops in cholesterol.
On our first day in town, we drove by Boulder High School. Mrs. Dr. M. said, "That's where I want to teach when I go back to teaching." Which she did, a few years later and then for many years.
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