East Colorado Blues

This is a blog, not a book so I’ll make no attempt to keep it chronological. It’s not a diary either. I guess it’s a retrospective — mostly from memory. I do want to start with some of the earliest things I remember, and this is one of them. Many of them are from living in Colorado. We’ll get to Kansas eventually. Maybe California, Washington and Arizona too.

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I once had a nice chat with Michael Bloomfield at a big outdoor blues workshop in San Francisco. I had no idea who he was in the blues scene at the time. He was setting up for his presentation. East Colorado Blues [~Written by Mississippi John Hurt and played by Michael Bloomfield – YouTube]

The roots of this story are in Two Buttes, Colorado. Two Buttes is located in Southeast Colorado. It is one of those places that is in the middle of nowhere. If you spent a year in that corner of Colorado you’d know what the title of this post reflects. I was too young at the time to be bothered by such things.

How we got to Colorado is a story in itself, so I’ll give you the short version. We landed in Two Buttes because my dad, who was a school teacher at the time, couldn’t find a job anywhere else. He had been teaching in Quinter, Kansas. But depression-era politics at the local school board left him without a job in the depths of the Great Depression.

Years later my dad told me, “I drove all over half the state of Kansas looking for a job.” But he couldn’t find one. Then Aunt Lula, my dad’s sister who had a farm out by Two Buttes, heard of his plight. His sister told him that he should come out there.

She told him the WPA had built a new high school in Two Buttes, but the town could not find a teacher who would move to such a desolate place. He took the job as principal though. We were in Two Buttes from 1935-1938 or so.

Link to an Aerial View of Two Buttes

Two Buttes is a little worse for the wear now. We lived in that little house on the NE corner of 5th and F Streets. Marcia and I found it there 50 years later. It was boarded up. (It’s gone now.) The tiny church on the other corner of 5th and F is still there today. About 50 people live in Two Buttes now.

Not only were we in Colorado in the depression. We were there during the worst part of it and the worst years of the Dust Bowl to boot. Those dust storms created drifts that looked like black snowdrifts. Of course, I didn’t know much about those things then. They also uncovered many Indian arrowheads. My dad had a nice collection of them.

I only remember one of those dust storms. My dad and I stepped out of the house to check out the storm. The wind doesn’t necessarily blow hard during those storms, but the dust had blotted out the sun. You couldn’t see your hand at the end of your arm. We didn’t stay out there long. Those dust storms continued for years.

The Dust Bowl eventually blew Aunt Lula and her family out of their farm. They simply couldn’t grow crops. Even if they could, prices were so depressed that they would have been practically giving what they grew away. So they went back to Kansas to live in a second house on what was then still my grandmother’s farm. We lived in Two Buttes during the school year, toughing it out in the dust and depression. We’ll have a story or three about farming later.

I was six years old when we left Two Buttes for good. I don’t have many memories of the place. Mostly just fragments. Here’s most of them:

There was a nice little reservoir out by the two buttes that the town was named after. They are the only thing sticking up from a vast flatness in all directions. There was an irrigation reservoir out there too. The water came from the mountains over a hundred miles away. My dad loved the good fishing there.

I have vague memories of going to that reservoir a couple times, and a hazy recollection of the buttes across the road. One time the five of us and a visiting couple had a picnic in the canyon below the Two Buttes Dam. That canyon was the most beautiful place around. There was a little creek, pools of water, lots of trees, and it was nice and cool down there. I have no idea what we had to eat for the picnic.

Stylish-casual was not the fashion in those times. Suits were the proper attire for most occasions. Mom (or maybe Grandma Miller) decided that Paul and I should have nice wool suits to wear for “dress”. They were made of coarse, not “fine” wool though. Boy, did they itch. I can still feel them. You can see in the picture that my hair is parted on the wrong side. I was 50 years old before I figured that out and switched.

We wore those suits for a trial visit to the little church across the street. I guess the suits were a bit slick. Paul persisted in sliding off our pew and under the one ahead of us. I think mom was as glad as we were to get out of there. I don’t think she took us back.

Many states, Kansas and Colorado included, had their own sales-tax tokens (aluminum coins) then. Many items cost a dime or less in those days, and people resented paying a whole penny for sales tax on them. The solution was tokens, which were worth 1/10 of a cent. For example, a Pepsi cost 5 cents plus a token or two.

We probably had been hounding our mother to let us go to the store. You could get a nice piece of candy there for a penny. One day she agreed we could go to the store and gave us each 10 tokens. She deputized me to lead the way. It was only two blocks away, but we had to pass by an open basement where a hotel had burned down. I guess she was afraid we’d try to explore it, so I was ordered not to go on that side of the street under any circumstances. Obviously, we all survived the excursion. I don’t know what kind of candy we picked out.

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We farmed in Kansas during the summer. That meant we migrated back and forth from Colorado to Kansas each year… Coming up in the next post.