Sometime in the late 1920’s, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd allegedly spent a winter living in Delta, Colorado at 2nd and Dodge Streets. Each Friday, Floyd took a train to Grand Junction and spent the weekend at the Grand Hotel. He frequented a saloon on Main Street and played pool with local aficionados, keeping a […]
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Thanks to the Mesa County Oral History Project, patrons can now hear episodes of the dramatic Western radio plays True Epics of Western Colorado through the Mesa County Libraries catalog. After vaudeville’s decline and before television’s rise, radio plays were popular entertainment. Serialized shows like The Shadow and Little Orphan Annie inspired legions of devoted […]
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What didn’t Al Look do? In his life, the longtime Grand Junction resident homesteaded near Dove Creek, Colorado, worked as an advertising manager for Durango and Grand Junction newspapers, wrote a popular column for The Daily Sentinel, became a knowledgeable amateur archaeologist, geologist and paleontologist who was involved with important dinosaur and Paleo-Indian digs in […]
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Mesa County residents can now find an oral history interview of U.S. Representative Wayne Aspinall online in the Mesa County Libraries catalog, via the Mesa County Oral History Project. In his time, Wayne Aspinall was one of the most powerful men in the United States. As one of the longest serving members of the U.S. […]
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Jean Urruty came to the United States in 1925, at a time when Basque immigrants were expected to work as sheepherders for at least four years before they could quit and go onto other professions. Sheepherding, aside from being a very lonely life, could also be dangerous. Ranchers and cowboys in the West, angry at […]
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Every town has its firsts: the first baby born, the first death, the first editorial shaming of a woman for riding her horse through town in inappropriate dress (see news clipping). The firsts of many towns and cities are mired in the haze of pre-history, when no one thought to make a note about the […]
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Join us for our next Kiva Bookclub, at 6:30 pm on Thursday, July 21st, in the Central Library Community Room, as we discuss Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger. In Ordinary Grace, thirteen-year-old Frank Drum, a Methodist preacher’s son, explores the darker side of what the book jacket describes as a “time of innocence and […]
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Clifton was an interesting place when I was a kid. In the late 1970’s and throughout the 1980’s, my neighborhood around 32 1/8th Road and others in the area had many abandoned houses with overgrown weeds, broken fences, and other features that might capture a child’s imagination. Who left that gate open? What’s inside the […]
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It seems not many women lived in Grand Junction in its earliest years. In 1882 and 1883, women were scarce enough that the Grand Junction News often remarked when the wife of a man joined him here in town. The News also occasionally noted when a single woman passed through, as it did with Miss […]
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Settlers in Grand Junction faced obstacles in building their town. Among these impediments was a lack of building materials. While the nearby Uncompahgre Plateau and the Grand Mesa might provide timber supplies, these sources were relatively distant in the days before automobiles, and before roads were built that enabled people to get from there […]
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