AND SO WE ENTRAINED THEREFOR - by way of Denver, Colorado. And now it is necessary to understand a few things for sake of later narrative here. I will be relating events in this Chapter that did not all follow serially in Time, as do those in the other Chapters, but some of which would be dated much later in my life. Denver was (is) the ancestral home of both sides of my family. I was born there. (Serendipitously - I warned you! - just 79 years and One Day (Dang!) ago from the day I write this). The Mile High is my natal city. And that of my parents. But I never lived there: I just mostly spent my summers there. Passing through as it were. We often "retreated" or withdrew thence when various threats materialized in the Outer World. Interims (inter-regnum's?) between "moves" being one; the heat of Texas summers another (we always went "north" in summer to stay with my mother's family - my maternal grandparents and uncle - to escape the "ungodly" (as close as Pop ever got to risqué' words or language) heat of the Lonestar.
One place we often went for a couple of weeks each summer when we were up in Colorado, was "Stead's Ranch in Estes Park." My folks had been vacationing there many years and as we got older, my sister and I were taken along. It was a "dude ranch" sort of setup - you lived in little log cabins clustered around this big log lodge and messhall - where meals were served daily and there was always a big fire on the hearth in the main lodge room - with animal heads and skins on the walls... Activities were trail riding on horseback, hiking...I remember names and destinations only dimly: Bierstadt Lake, Emerald Lake, Long's Peak, others. Sometimes we would drive down into Estes Park and swim in a pool they had there: it was just a big concrete tank affair that a mountain stream ran into and then out of - water temps likely in low 50's and cold enough to freeze the you-know-what's on a brass monkey! I have been singularly unsucessful at locating any kind of Web link to "Stead's" - long gone these many years presumeably - save for this one Epilogue which seems a lament to its onetime passing somehow - for surely that one, blurry photo I recognize as the old Main Lodge I just mentioned, and the cabins going up the slope to the right. Down behind that Lodge were the horse barns and where the cowboys and ranch hands lived - and beyond them was a rushing trout stream and meadows where I taught myself some of the finer points of fly-fishing (using my own attempts at fly-tying...). Which reminds me of that old Chinese saying, "He Who Ties His Own Flies, Has Hamburger For Dinner"...
Comin' Roun' The Mountain We need to understand something else: Pop hated Texas the way the Devil hates Holy Water: unconditionally and without reserve. And Texans. You see, in his mind, my Pop was a "world class banker" you might say. His fantasy from youth on was a Wall St. Banker complete with Homburg - which fantasy, I must add, he was happily able to fully realize in life many decades later as a V.P. with one of the largest: Chase Manhattan (the office of its legendary founder, J.P. Morgan, was maintained, as he told me later, as a virtual shrine in perpetuity on the floor above Pop's office...). But first he had to do his Purgatory in Texas. As we shall see - but we were headed for Denver, right? My Maternal Grandfather, Richard "Dick" Williams was born in a log cabin in the southern "Ohio Country." He and his brothers "made meat" with a genuine muzzleloader, which is now my proud family inheritance - and always hangs over my fireplace (when I have one...). Along about the late '80's, I refurbished this piece myself back to working order after all its long years of abuse and neglect. You may judge my efforts from the picture below: As a young man, "Dick" had "...gone West" from the Ohio Country to the mines in and around Cripple Creek, CO, where he fell in with one Flint, up in Central City, a mercantile purveyor to the miners. Flint convinced him selling to the miners was more profitable than working as a miner, and he became Flint's Head Clerk and general factotum. Flint had no heirs and when he died my Grandfather inherited his entire store. He thereafter removed down to Denver, and "Flint Mercantile Co." at 16th and Market Streets, became one of Denver's early and prominent establishments. Here comes the fish part again: in his reorganization and move, my Grandfather changed the firm around completely - and it became a ...Fish Market! Not just your run-of-the-mill market, now, but a showpiece and emporium known far and wide. He, himself, became an industry "leader" in the American commercial fish market, and knew prominent fishermen from the Grand Banks to the Aleutian Islands - and in between! So, Flint Mercantile Co. became "... the largest commercial fish house West of the Mississippi..." as it was known far and wide. "If It Swims We Have It" emblazoned on its showy red-and-gild fleet of Mac delivery trucks and company stationery, boxes and cartons. And most notably, its famous gallon-size fresh oyster cans: everyone ate large quantities of oysters in those days - even in the American Heartland. In the vast building at 1611 Market, you could buy every kind of fish product known in the world: fresh, salted, dried, whatever you desired. And all this in the heart of the Continent! And I grew up learning and knowing "all about fish" thousands of miles from their sources! They came into Denver daily by rail in a constant parade of coffin-like wooden boxes, bearing tags attesting to their being "iced down" all along the way at every tank town East of us out on the Great Plains, or West "over the Divide" clear to 'Frisco Bay.... The picture above was probably taken late 20's or early 30's of last century. In color, this would knock your eye out! That huge "mural" on the building wall was commissioned by my Grandfather Williams and was a Denver "must see" for many years. Presumably when Market Street and environs underwent a "rebirth" and boutique-ization some years back (I have never been back) - the mural was destroyed... A curious thing happened while I was searching for such a picture: I turned up a site for the "Seattle Fish Company" (still extant - in Denver). This rang a bell - and I read the blurb: it repeated phrases that are duplicates of those I just used above in describing Flint Mercantile! This jolted me! - and then it began to come back: Seattle, I am quite sure, was a bitter rival of my grandfather's (?) business, and in the family and discussions around the dinnertable and all, I now recall anger and disgust with Seattle's operators who often stole my grandfather's copy and marketing 'storylines' about fish and fish consumption and merchandising, etc. etc.. LOL! This was all a big issue with the family way back then - but of course, I was only a small boy overhearing it all - and we lived in distant Texas and all, so it was not really a daily thing for me - but seeing that Seattle Fish Co. website and its copy, tended to bring it all back... There were giant halibuts and fresh cod and whitings and hake and flounders from the far off "Banks" and docksides at Boston. There were truckloads of catfish from the sloughs and ponds of Mississippi and Louisiana. At that time, there was still a big fish industry in the Great Lakes (now destroyed by pollution and lampreys) - but back then, there were giant Lake Trout, and Walleyes and Yellow and White Perch by the boxload. Salmon, fresh and with staring, sightless, bulging eyes arrived from the Pacific Northwest. Crabs came from everywhere - most notable (this was long before the War with Japan) - were the "Geisha" brand giant Aleutian King Crabs. There were oysters from the Chesapeake and tiny, midget varieties from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Colorado's own hatcheries and lakes furnished never-ending cascades of fresh mountain trout, rainbows, Dolly Vardens, brookies, brownies... As "accessories" he stocked great barrels of salted olives direct from Spain, and giant cartwheels - the size of truck tires! - of cheeses from France and Italy. Barrels of anchovies from Sicily! Thousands and thousands of pounds processed here daily. He had his own ice-making plant, of course. Plus a giant walk-in refrigerated room - the latter not all that common yet at the time. A huge staff iced and shoveled and gutted and scaled continuously, and customers came from near and far. People ate more fresh fish in those days than now, and families were larger. Roman Catholics still had to eat fish on Friday, and Irish and Italian and Oriental cooks and domestics for the big Denver families jostled one another here daily....joined by the Head Chefs of every hotel and restaurant in Denver. Halibut - great fish beasts six or more feet long and tipping the scales at several hundred pounds each, were lifted out of their icy coffins and sliced up on open band saws! I used to love this part - for often the saw would fetch up on an ancient fishook (some even eyeless, hand-forged shanks from an earlier era!), and old ships' lanterns and sea boots and whatnot still in their abdominal cavities. My granddad "saved" all such items just for me and I had a wondrous collection at one time of these curios from the far-off North Atlantic Fishing Banks... His day began at four in the morning, and my fondest memories, as I grew older, are of being roused out by him - smelling faintly always of fish no matter how much he scrubbed - in the dark shaking me awake and saying, "Get Up, Stick-in-the-Mud - you can come to work with me today!" And since spending the day with granddad was full of activities that mothers and grandmothers did not approve, he would add unnecessarily, "And don't make any noise - we don't want to wake the womenfolk!" With Granddad, one was immediately initiated into the secret world of men and their united front against a shadowy world known only as the "womenfolk." Then conspiratorially we two would sneak out the back door and into his big old Franklin touring car and away in the early dawn! Big breakfasts in any one of a dozen diners and all-nite-eateries (my granddad knew and was known to) every Italian, Greek and Irishman, every cook and fireman and policeman and roustabout in town. There were always shouts and hails from all sides when "Dick" Williams walked on the scene. We'd tuck into the Blue Plate Specials - and for me would be a rite of passage: Granddad would order a forbidden cup of coffee for me! (Had my mother or grandmother ever known of these derelictions, there would have been no peace under the rafters for a long time). But we menfolk - we "bonded" automatically as it were, and as I guess is the current "modspeak" for such things... "After all, Stick-in-the-Mud," he would say to me, "you got to be awake on the job - can't have you falling into the ice machine." You see, back in those times, OSHA was not yet even a gleam in a Bureaucrat's eye - and ice came in huge 50 and 75 pound blocks down a chute onto the cement floor of the ice room. Here an open, unguarded rotating drum covered with long, jagged, very sharp spikes whirled continuously at high speed in a steel frame. The older roustabouts heaved the blocks into the maw of this monster and I and others grabbed shovels and shoveled the mountains of ground, shining, dripping ice and ice flakes which shot out the other end into an open hole in the floor where they cascaded down to the floor below upon icing crews who shoveled the flakes up yet again into show cases, bins, and boxes where the finny tribe lay row on row on view to would-be purchasers. One of the roustabouts being Paddy O'Brien, a little, old, wizened ex-boxer with the map of Ireland stamped indelibly on his visage. Paddy had secretly been assigned as my guardian in these dangerous pursuits - answerable direct only to my Grandfather, you see. I have little doubt that many and many a time, I was saved from being spread upon the halibuts below in minute iced red flecks all over, by Paddy's still sharp boxer reflexes - snatching my shirttail at the last moment as I slipped and slid among the ice and guts on the floor. I can hear his brogue now over all the years since: "An' shur'n-n-n-n, Bernard, it's a lovely lad you are, May the Saints Be Praised! - but whu-t-t-t wud your Dear Gran'mither be thinkin' naow of Old Paddy ifn' you wuz to go home wrapped up in ta' pap-ier wid ta' fishes fer dinner?" Thus, I learned to heave and lift and grind and shovel ice. And gut and skin and scale. Little I knew but I was actually being schooled in "the family business," for Little Bernard was maybe second in line to "inherit the business" some day. First in line, being of course, my Uncle Roger - Granddad's son and more like an older brother to me. And my constant companion in these affairs, as well...Alas - like many another "career preparation" I have undergone in this Vale of Tears, it was not to be. But the take home pay has stuck with me all these years... These were days of intrigue, adventure and excitement for me you can be sure! The roustabouts who worked at the store were a colorful lot. High jinks abounded: those found sleeping on the job in the back room were given hot-foots (Anyone here remember hot-foots? The kind you gave with real wooden kitchen matches. Anyone remember wood kitchen matches?). Sometimes the deeply slumberous (alcoholics made up much of the shifting work force) were stapled right through their clothing to the benches they were stretched out upon: a shout of alarm in the wings would bring them all-standing to their feet - ripping them half-way out of their clothes! Ha! Ha! Ha! In the streets, fist fights abounded: this was near the rail yards and lower end of town...Across the street was an ancient flophouse, the Metropolitan (which I must say, quite by accident and serendipity the other day, I discovered mentioned on Google Earth's fantastic site, the Metropolitan being described as "one of nation's worst" flophouses in its day, and which figures somehow in the writings of Jack Kerouac and the "Beat Poets" generation). Any day one could see the shirtless bums sitting in the windows there - pounding along the seams of their shirts with small stones to kill the lice... It was all most informative to a small boy's outlook upon the world and a most welcome offset to a too-strict mother's insistence on regular washing (ugh!) and ... regular naps! Nearby was the famous old Buckhorn Saloon run by one "Shorty Scout" Henry Zietz - said to be Buffalo Bill's last living scout - and an intimate of my Grandfather's. When things got slow in mid-afternoon, he would take Stick-in-the-Mud in tow and we'd go over to the Buckhorn. It was cool and gloomy inside, redolent of cigars, damp sawdust, and stale beer. One whole wall was covered with mounted heads: antelope, bear, buffalo. You name it! "Shorty Scout" (so named by the Indians it is said, for his diminutive stature), would lean over the bar and ....shake my hand! I shook hands with the last living scout of Buffalo Bill's troupe! And - since I had survived the (forbidden) coffee with my biscuits and gravy of the morning, what more natural than now that I be indulged in just a "wee" glass of beer! Ah-h-h-h - the rake's progress, indeed! (At home later, it took both grandmother and mother to wrestle me to the sink for wash-up before dinner: I had determined to live forever with my unwashed hand that "Shorty Scout" Zietz had shaken, man-to-man ...Sigh). And so far as 'pressing the flesh' with Injuns and Injun-fighters, my own Mom, when a girl had, in turn, shaken hands with Buffalo Bill himself on some occasion - I forget just which. And her mother, my Gran, when a girl back in Council Bluffs, had once made so bold as to lay her hands on the smooth, white, buckskin jacket of a "Brave" returning to the Reservation once, when her father had taken her there - at which the "Brave" jumped straight up in the air, spun around and "war-whooped" in her face - which experience taught her "to keep her hands to herself" thereafter, as she often told the tale... I remember those dinners well, too. We almost always had fish - brought home fresh from the store, of course. Usually 'mountain trout" - in abundance - all you could eat. Often we had shrimp, too. I grew up with the impression that trout and shrimp practically grew on trees, so plentiful were they in our diet. Only slowly and later did it dawn on me how usually "pricey" these are held to be elsewhere - even now in regions where they occur naturally.... These splendid meals were accompanied by interesting talk - and much banter (my grandmother was Irish). Children were not excluded and one was encouraged to use new words, and describe new events and scenes witnessed. Jokes were common and there was much laughter. And family tales and legends. There was a strong sense of place and "belonging," in some ways, perhaps the strongest I ever knew. And every once in a while, my grandad piled us all into his big old touring car - a Franklin it was! - and take us all out for a day at an amusement park, of which it was said, "Not To See Elitch's Is Not To See Denver". Kiss Me, O'ime Irish! And now we need a bit of mood music to set the pace for what follows... Here is a jig (and providentially named, too!) right from the Auld Sod, as I introduce the Irish-side of my family... Master McDermott Several times, while we were there, my Great-Uncle Will McDermott (Gran's brother) and his wife, Gertie (wait till you learn who she was!), came from Arizona to visit, too. At such times, and for a small boy, the world dropped away and I lived and breathed as a member of the cast in a real-life Western... for Uncle Will was a bona fide sheriff from a small town in Arizona (Ray, by the way, and near as I can find out no longer in existence). He was the walking, talking embodiment of everything you ever read or heard about in the way of Western Sheriffs - about 6-6 in his stocking feet, broad-shouldered and hard as nails, moustachioed and deep, gruff voice. He habitually shook all the kitchen towels vigorously (with which he was wont to wipe his manly features from time to time, to Gran's despair) - popping and snapping them so as to fray their very ends. When asked whence this peculiar habit, one was informed in his gruff, no-nonsense-now-young-man, it was to assure that no vinegaroons were hiding in their folds! (Once I peeped into his boudoir as he was dressing one morning, and can report he also popped his socks vigorously the same way). And shook and banged his empty boots on the floor, too, before he dumped out the invisible vinegaroons. He was my idol. Mesicans and scorpions alike had to get up early in the morning to steal a march on Will! Best of all, he told tales one after another of his tumultous life "in the West," - a West that was all but faded even as I was growing up. As a Guard, among other assignments for the mines in Ray, he had once been jumped in fact by a band of Mesican desparados, who were busy pummeling him in the street, when a dance hall gal (so the story goes) leaned out of an upstairs window across the street and shot into the pack with her six-shooter - at which they all took to their heels. As Will was dusting himself off, and adjusting his hat, she called down, "Will! Will! Are you alright?" To which he replied, "Yes, M'aam I am and I'll be thanking you for your attention, I will! (Then a short pause, and...) "Shucks, M'aam, and shur'n I'm Irish - and iveryone knows you cain't hurt an Irishman 'lessen you kick him in the shins!" In fact, Will in his later years, was a confidant and pal of the famous "Death Valley Scotty" - on whose radio show he was several times a guest, and they would reminsce about the days in the Old West. (Check it all out at Death Valley Scotty's Borax Radio Show). But - best of all! - Will's wife - my Great-Aunt Gertie - was Wyatt Earp's niece! I kid you not! Virgil's daughter, as near as I can trace back a most convoluted family tree: the Earps were alternately hated and adored wherever they went, and the brothers married indiscriminately and several times (and even each other's wives, once or twice I believe) and generally disported themselves in the manner which such major Icons must attain to in their dual roles as saints and sinners... Indeed, though everyone around the dinner table back then just took all this in stride - I am sure that it was this "Earp connection" that lured Will West from his native Omaha (Council Bluffs) in the first place. There is a documented record of Virgil Earp's most convoluted "marriage arrangements" which establishes at least one sojourn and marriage in the same city and into the same Irish community as my Grandmother's and Great-Uncle Will's (McDermott) Irish family. Virgil married one Allie Sullivan (she died in 1947, at the age of 100, and her obit was in the New York Times...). Many records say they had no children, but again many sources say, too, that there is no real record of this marriage (supposedly his third), and for that matter - no real record of his first one, either. (And the wife of his second marriage 'vanished" wtih no further record!). Kinda sounds like "...there goes the neighborhood" to me, but my Aunt Gertie I think, may have been born out of wedlock (a "woods colt," as sometimes known in those days) and thus not on any "official" birth rosters anywhere. I don't know - I have broken my pick trying to run back through obscure and missing records and tales (both in the family and in the public record). The major components all fit anyhow - and so (here comes more name-dropping, Martha!) along with "thousands" (the Editor of the Tombstone Epitaph once wrote me) I can and do, claim tenuous "relation (by marriage)" to our Nation's most illustrious gunslinger and Lawman: Wyatt Earp! I am at least less tenuous than most perhaps! (Grin!) One other tale about Will before we push on. As a young man, he had come out one summer to Denver to stay with his sister (my Gran) and her husband. While there, he went on a bicycle fishing trip up into the mountains once with some chums. Coming back, they had been caught by inclement weather, and had sought shelter at "an old farmstead by the road." Resident at said farmstead was a "kindly old gentlemen" who took them in, letting most of the boys sleep in his barn and his cabin, but giving my Great Uncle, half of his brass bedstead to share in the house. The next morning the boys continued on, and when he got back, my uncle reported what had transpired. My grandfather listened intently, and then quietly said to Will: "Will, you have slept with a cannibal!" LOL! And Will had! For the "kindly old gent" he had shared a bed with was no less than the infamous Cannibal Packer one of Colorado's most noted criminals. One Alfred Packer, who ate several companions when lost in the Rockies one long ago winter, and for his gustatory habits was sentenced to the penitentiary at Canon City, but was later "pardoned" and lived out the rest of his life in obscurity at "the old farmstead by the road." Often of evenings, we had to make the obligatory trip across town to visit also with my paternal grandparents. This was a much more proper household - given to nothing much else but playing Chinese checkers with one's elders, and staring out the lace-curtained windows at passersby. Occasioned, I came by degrees to understand by the fact my paternal grandparents were Methodists (thus, also my Pop...) and disapproval and denial lurked around every corner. (Though both of them had grown up in Late Frontier environments: my grandfather in a hard-scrabble backwoods Missouri farm - at nine the "man-of-the-house" for a family of women after his father's demise from Civil War misfortunes. And Grandmother herself came from a family near as I can tell, of indolent, coon-hunting, knife-wielding, duel fighters (something like five brothers and "over a ton" (determined once by the entire assembly getting on the local coal yard truck scales...) of assorted dogs, guns, and demi-johns on the front porch down Kentucky way)... Her elder brother, she said, one "Speed" Mitchell "...did his man in" with a bowie knife once, when as a "Second" in a duel for a friend, he was so-called upon. The victim, as I recall the tale, was prominent politically thereabouts, and since this fracas had taken place "where a bridge crosses a major river," the State of Kentucky years later obligingly erected a monument to it all. In later years here, I sought the services of an author and authority on Kentucky duels (no less!) but strangely, perhaps, he was unable to verify any of this. Not everything gets into the history books, I guess... But my Pop wanted no knowledge of his "roots" - his eye fixed steadfastly on Wall St. as we have learned previous - and so I had to learn of my grandparents' early days in private and out of earshot of my dad... So evenings, like I said, I would be rubbed and tubbed like an Irish potato ready for the baking, and shook into short pants (maybe knickers? remember knickers?) and shirt-and-tie, and we would go see "The Powell's." All would be going well, until one of my Powell Grandparents would ask, "And what did you do today, Bernard?" "Oh, Grandmother, I got up very early and went to work with Nana (my name for my maternal grandfather)." "Oh, that's nice. And what did you see?" "Oh, it was just great, Grandmother! One man knocked another man down right outside the store and gave him a bloody nose! Then that man got up and tore the shirt off the back of the other man... Then I shoveled ice up in the 'ice room' today and because I was littlest, they let me crawl into the chute when the machine was off to unplug it, and then and and and...." From the corner of my eye I knew the blur streaking my way was my Mother from across the room. All the other adults present had cleared or were clearing their throats and looking out the lace-curtains - or even through them... Sigh... It remains to add, since this is a fish story as you may have concluded to yourself, or at least a paen to things "fishy" in this world... that my Grandfather and my Uncle were my introduction to the world of trout fishing and camping generally, in the Rockies. No summer was complete without several forays up to remote Blue Lake way over on the Western Slope, and Willow Creek, and Eight-Mile Brook and a dozen or more splashing, dashing, ice-cold gorgeous mountain streams that in those days still coursed down the sides of pristine mountains. We would camp in lush wet meadows and at night the coyotes tremulous howls echoed in distant canyons, and elk herds bugled in answer. Now and then a bear materialized out of the pine or the scrub willows along the creek bottoms... We would be up at dawn, and my grandfather would have the potatoes and eggs frying, and I would slide into cold waders, slip on my landing net and proudly take up my Abbey & Imbrie 9.5 ft split bamboo rod - come all the way from Scotland it did - at 3.5 ounces the whole - a super-gift for a small boy, believe me! - from Nana (I have its age-wasted and dried-out remains still) - and go forth to catch the wily trout. I became passably adept at fly-fishing ("...for a Texan," as they would both tease me: not many places to practice in the "seasonal wet draws" down that way...). Thus, Rio Grande King, and Grey Gnat, and - Royal Coachman! a favorite - and who can forget the gaudy Parmachene Belle - the tiny hand-tied flies of the fisherman's trade - entered into my repertoire. I always leaned toward craftwork and working with my hands (a trait my largely cerebral father saw as an atavistic throwback I now think) and so, soon I was pulling chicken feathers out of my grandmother's pillows on the sly, and tying my own flies laboriously out in "the shop" - a place where womenfolk dared not go, and my grandfather introduced me to the vise, the saw and the drill. (Hammering seems to be innate in our species: few need instruction beforehand...). Denver (a place), and fish (things or beings), were always my solace in Life's storms. Back To Contents Page For Next Chapter (Click Here) Contact Bernie
We need to understand something else: Pop hated Texas the way the Devil hates Holy Water: unconditionally and without reserve. And Texans. You see, in his mind, my Pop was a "world class banker" you might say. His fantasy from youth on was a Wall St. Banker complete with Homburg - which fantasy, I must add, he was happily able to fully realize in life many decades later as a V.P. with one of the largest: Chase Manhattan (the office of its legendary founder, J.P. Morgan, was maintained, as he told me later, as a virtual shrine in perpetuity on the floor above Pop's office...).
But first he had to do his Purgatory in Texas. As we shall see - but we were headed for Denver, right?
My Maternal Grandfather, Richard "Dick" Williams was born in a log cabin in the southern "Ohio Country." He and his brothers "made meat" with a genuine muzzleloader, which is now my proud family inheritance - and always hangs over my fireplace (when I have one...). Along about the late '80's, I refurbished this piece myself back to working order after all its long years of abuse and neglect. You may judge my efforts from the picture below:
As a young man, "Dick" had "...gone West" from the Ohio Country to the mines in and around Cripple Creek, CO, where he fell in with one Flint, up in Central City, a mercantile purveyor to the miners. Flint convinced him selling to the miners was more profitable than working as a miner, and he became Flint's Head Clerk and general factotum. Flint had no heirs and when he died my Grandfather inherited his entire store. He thereafter removed down to Denver, and "Flint Mercantile Co." at 16th and Market Streets, became one of Denver's early and prominent establishments.
Here comes the fish part again: in his reorganization and move, my Grandfather changed the firm around completely - and it became a ...Fish Market! Not just your run-of-the-mill market, now, but a showpiece and emporium known far and wide. He, himself, became an industry "leader" in the American commercial fish market, and knew prominent fishermen from the Grand Banks to the Aleutian Islands - and in between! So, Flint Mercantile Co. became "... the largest commercial fish house West of the Mississippi..." as it was known far and wide. "If It Swims We Have It" emblazoned on its showy red-and-gild fleet of Mac delivery trucks and company stationery, boxes and cartons. And most notably, its famous gallon-size fresh oyster cans: everyone ate large quantities of oysters in those days - even in the American Heartland. In the vast building at 1611 Market, you could buy every kind of fish product known in the world: fresh, salted, dried, whatever you desired. And all this in the heart of the Continent! And I grew up learning and knowing "all about fish" thousands of miles from their sources! They came into Denver daily by rail in a constant parade of coffin-like wooden boxes, bearing tags attesting to their being "iced down" all along the way at every tank town East of us out on the Great Plains, or West "over the Divide" clear to 'Frisco Bay....
The picture above was probably taken late 20's or early 30's of last century. In color, this would knock your eye out! That huge "mural" on the building wall was commissioned by my Grandfather Williams and was a Denver "must see" for many years. Presumably when Market Street and environs underwent a "rebirth" and boutique-ization some years back (I have never been back) - the mural was destroyed... A curious thing happened while I was searching for such a picture: I turned up a site for the "Seattle Fish Company" (still extant - in Denver). This rang a bell - and I read the blurb: it repeated phrases that are duplicates of those I just used above in describing Flint Mercantile! This jolted me! - and then it began to come back: Seattle, I am quite sure, was a bitter rival of my grandfather's (?) business, and in the family and discussions around the dinnertable and all, I now recall anger and disgust with Seattle's operators who often stole my grandfather's copy and marketing 'storylines' about fish and fish consumption and merchandising, etc. etc.. LOL! This was all a big issue with the family way back then - but of course, I was only a small boy overhearing it all - and we lived in distant Texas and all, so it was not really a daily thing for me - but seeing that Seattle Fish Co. website and its copy, tended to bring it all back...
There were giant halibuts and fresh cod and whitings and hake and flounders from the far off "Banks" and docksides at Boston. There were truckloads of catfish from the sloughs and ponds of Mississippi and Louisiana. At that time, there was still a big fish industry in the Great Lakes (now destroyed by pollution and lampreys) - but back then, there were giant Lake Trout, and Walleyes and Yellow and White Perch by the boxload. Salmon, fresh and with staring, sightless, bulging eyes arrived from the Pacific Northwest. Crabs came from everywhere - most notable (this was long before the War with Japan) - were the "Geisha" brand giant Aleutian King Crabs. There were oysters from the Chesapeake and tiny, midget varieties from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Colorado's own hatcheries and lakes furnished never-ending cascades of fresh mountain trout, rainbows, Dolly Vardens, brookies, brownies...
As "accessories" he stocked great barrels of salted olives direct from Spain, and giant cartwheels - the size of truck tires! - of cheeses from France and Italy. Barrels of anchovies from Sicily! Thousands and thousands of pounds processed here daily. He had his own ice-making plant, of course. Plus a giant walk-in refrigerated room - the latter not all that common yet at the time. A huge staff iced and shoveled and gutted and scaled continuously, and customers came from near and far. People ate more fresh fish in those days than now, and families were larger. Roman Catholics still had to eat fish on Friday, and Irish and Italian and Oriental cooks and domestics for the big Denver families jostled one another here daily....joined by the Head Chefs of every hotel and restaurant in Denver.
Halibut - great fish beasts six or more feet long and tipping the scales at several hundred pounds each, were lifted out of their icy coffins and sliced up on open band saws! I used to love this part - for often the saw would fetch up on an ancient fishook (some even eyeless, hand-forged shanks from an earlier era!), and old ships' lanterns and sea boots and whatnot still in their abdominal cavities. My granddad "saved" all such items just for me and I had a wondrous collection at one time of these curios from the far-off North Atlantic Fishing Banks...
His day began at four in the morning, and my fondest memories, as I grew older, are of being roused out by him - smelling faintly always of fish no matter how much he scrubbed - in the dark shaking me awake and saying, "Get Up, Stick-in-the-Mud - you can come to work with me today!" And since spending the day with granddad was full of activities that mothers and grandmothers did not approve, he would add unnecessarily, "And don't make any noise - we don't want to wake the womenfolk!"
With Granddad, one was immediately initiated into the secret world of men and their united front against a shadowy world known only as the "womenfolk."
Then conspiratorially we two would sneak out the back door and into his big old Franklin touring car and away in the early dawn! Big breakfasts in any one of a dozen diners and all-nite-eateries (my granddad knew and was known to) every Italian, Greek and Irishman, every cook and fireman and policeman and roustabout in town. There were always shouts and hails from all sides when "Dick" Williams walked on the scene. We'd tuck into the Blue Plate Specials - and for me would be a rite of passage: Granddad would order a forbidden cup of coffee for me! (Had my mother or grandmother ever known of these derelictions, there would have been no peace under the rafters for a long time). But we menfolk - we "bonded" automatically as it were, and as I guess is the current "modspeak" for such things...
"After all, Stick-in-the-Mud," he would say to me, "you got to be awake on the job - can't have you falling into the ice machine."
You see, back in those times, OSHA was not yet even a gleam in a Bureaucrat's eye - and ice came in huge 50 and 75 pound blocks down a chute onto the cement floor of the ice room. Here an open, unguarded rotating drum covered with long, jagged, very sharp spikes whirled continuously at high speed in a steel frame. The older roustabouts heaved the blocks into the maw of this monster and I and others grabbed shovels and shoveled the mountains of ground, shining, dripping ice and ice flakes which shot out the other end into an open hole in the floor where they cascaded down to the floor below upon icing crews who shoveled the flakes up yet again into show cases, bins, and boxes where the finny tribe lay row on row on view to would-be purchasers.
One of the roustabouts being Paddy O'Brien, a little, old, wizened ex-boxer with the map of Ireland stamped indelibly on his visage. Paddy had secretly been assigned as my guardian in these dangerous pursuits - answerable direct only to my Grandfather, you see. I have little doubt that many and many a time, I was saved from being spread upon the halibuts below in minute iced red flecks all over, by Paddy's still sharp boxer reflexes - snatching my shirttail at the last moment as I slipped and slid among the ice and guts on the floor. I can hear his brogue now over all the years since: "An' shur'n-n-n-n, Bernard, it's a lovely lad you are, May the Saints Be Praised! - but whu-t-t-t wud your Dear Gran'mither be thinkin' naow of Old Paddy ifn' you wuz to go home wrapped up in ta' pap-ier wid ta' fishes fer dinner?"
Thus, I learned to heave and lift and grind and shovel ice. And gut and skin and scale. Little I knew but I was actually being schooled in "the family business," for Little Bernard was maybe second in line to "inherit the business" some day. First in line, being of course, my Uncle Roger - Granddad's son and more like an older brother to me. And my constant companion in these affairs, as well...Alas - like many another "career preparation" I have undergone in this Vale of Tears, it was not to be. But the take home pay has stuck with me all these years...
These were days of intrigue, adventure and excitement for me you can be sure! The roustabouts who worked at the store were a colorful lot. High jinks abounded: those found sleeping on the job in the back room were given hot-foots (Anyone here remember hot-foots? The kind you gave with real wooden kitchen matches. Anyone remember wood kitchen matches?). Sometimes the deeply slumberous (alcoholics made up much of the shifting work force) were stapled right through their clothing to the benches they were stretched out upon: a shout of alarm in the wings would bring them all-standing to their feet - ripping them half-way out of their clothes! Ha! Ha! Ha!
In the streets, fist fights abounded: this was near the rail yards and lower end of town...Across the street was an ancient flophouse, the Metropolitan (which I must say, quite by accident and serendipity the other day, I discovered mentioned on Google Earth's fantastic site, the Metropolitan being described as "one of nation's worst" flophouses in its day, and which figures somehow in the writings of Jack Kerouac and the "Beat Poets" generation). Any day one could see the shirtless bums sitting in the windows there - pounding along the seams of their shirts with small stones to kill the lice... It was all most informative to a small boy's outlook upon the world and a most welcome offset to a too-strict mother's insistence on regular washing (ugh!) and ... regular naps!
Nearby was the famous old Buckhorn Saloon run by one "Shorty Scout" Henry Zietz - said to be Buffalo Bill's last living scout - and an intimate of my Grandfather's. When things got slow in mid-afternoon, he would take Stick-in-the-Mud in tow and we'd go over to the Buckhorn. It was cool and gloomy inside, redolent of cigars, damp sawdust, and stale beer. One whole wall was covered with mounted heads: antelope, bear, buffalo. You name it! "Shorty Scout" (so named by the Indians it is said, for his diminutive stature), would lean over the bar and ....shake my hand!
I shook hands with the last living scout of Buffalo Bill's troupe!
And - since I had survived the (forbidden) coffee with my biscuits and gravy of the morning, what more natural than now that I be indulged in just a "wee" glass of beer! Ah-h-h-h - the rake's progress, indeed!
(At home later, it took both grandmother and mother to wrestle me to the sink for wash-up before dinner: I had determined to live forever with my unwashed hand that "Shorty Scout" Zietz had shaken, man-to-man ...Sigh).
And so far as 'pressing the flesh' with Injuns and Injun-fighters, my own Mom, when a girl had, in turn, shaken hands with Buffalo Bill himself on some occasion - I forget just which. And her mother, my Gran, when a girl back in Council Bluffs, had once made so bold as to lay her hands on the smooth, white, buckskin jacket of a "Brave" returning to the Reservation once, when her father had taken her there - at which the "Brave" jumped straight up in the air, spun around and "war-whooped" in her face - which experience taught her "to keep her hands to herself" thereafter, as she often told the tale...
I remember those dinners well, too. We almost always had fish - brought home fresh from the store, of course. Usually 'mountain trout" - in abundance - all you could eat. Often we had shrimp, too. I grew up with the impression that trout and shrimp practically grew on trees, so plentiful were they in our diet. Only slowly and later did it dawn on me how usually "pricey" these are held to be elsewhere - even now in regions where they occur naturally.... These splendid meals were accompanied by interesting talk - and much banter (my grandmother was Irish). Children were not excluded and one was encouraged to use new words, and describe new events and scenes witnessed. Jokes were common and there was much laughter. And family tales and legends. There was a strong sense of place and "belonging," in some ways, perhaps the strongest I ever knew. And every once in a while, my grandad piled us all into his big old touring car - a Franklin it was! - and take us all out for a day at an amusement park, of which it was said, "Not To See Elitch's Is Not To See Denver".
And now we need a bit of mood music to set the pace for what follows... Here is a jig (and providentially named, too!) right from the Auld Sod, as I introduce the Irish-side of my family...
Master McDermott Several times, while we were there, my Great-Uncle Will McDermott (Gran's brother) and his wife, Gertie (wait till you learn who she was!), came from Arizona to visit, too. At such times, and for a small boy, the world dropped away and I lived and breathed as a member of the cast in a real-life Western... for Uncle Will was a bona fide sheriff from a small town in Arizona (Ray, by the way, and near as I can find out no longer in existence). He was the walking, talking embodiment of everything you ever read or heard about in the way of Western Sheriffs - about 6-6 in his stocking feet, broad-shouldered and hard as nails, moustachioed and deep, gruff voice. He habitually shook all the kitchen towels vigorously (with which he was wont to wipe his manly features from time to time, to Gran's despair) - popping and snapping them so as to fray their very ends. When asked whence this peculiar habit, one was informed in his gruff, no-nonsense-now-young-man, it was to assure that no vinegaroons were hiding in their folds! (Once I peeped into his boudoir as he was dressing one morning, and can report he also popped his socks vigorously the same way). And shook and banged his empty boots on the floor, too, before he dumped out the invisible vinegaroons. He was my idol. Mesicans and scorpions alike had to get up early in the morning to steal a march on Will! Best of all, he told tales one after another of his tumultous life "in the West," - a West that was all but faded even as I was growing up. As a Guard, among other assignments for the mines in Ray, he had once been jumped in fact by a band of Mesican desparados, who were busy pummeling him in the street, when a dance hall gal (so the story goes) leaned out of an upstairs window across the street and shot into the pack with her six-shooter - at which they all took to their heels. As Will was dusting himself off, and adjusting his hat, she called down, "Will! Will! Are you alright?" To which he replied, "Yes, M'aam I am and I'll be thanking you for your attention, I will! (Then a short pause, and...) "Shucks, M'aam, and shur'n I'm Irish - and iveryone knows you cain't hurt an Irishman 'lessen you kick him in the shins!" In fact, Will in his later years, was a confidant and pal of the famous "Death Valley Scotty" - on whose radio show he was several times a guest, and they would reminsce about the days in the Old West. (Check it all out at Death Valley Scotty's Borax Radio Show). But - best of all! - Will's wife - my Great-Aunt Gertie - was Wyatt Earp's niece! I kid you not! Virgil's daughter, as near as I can trace back a most convoluted family tree: the Earps were alternately hated and adored wherever they went, and the brothers married indiscriminately and several times (and even each other's wives, once or twice I believe) and generally disported themselves in the manner which such major Icons must attain to in their dual roles as saints and sinners... Indeed, though everyone around the dinner table back then just took all this in stride - I am sure that it was this "Earp connection" that lured Will West from his native Omaha (Council Bluffs) in the first place. There is a documented record of Virgil Earp's most convoluted "marriage arrangements" which establishes at least one sojourn and marriage in the same city and into the same Irish community as my Grandmother's and Great-Uncle Will's (McDermott) Irish family. Virgil married one Allie Sullivan (she died in 1947, at the age of 100, and her obit was in the New York Times...). Many records say they had no children, but again many sources say, too, that there is no real record of this marriage (supposedly his third), and for that matter - no real record of his first one, either. (And the wife of his second marriage 'vanished" wtih no further record!). Kinda sounds like "...there goes the neighborhood" to me, but my Aunt Gertie I think, may have been born out of wedlock (a "woods colt," as sometimes known in those days) and thus not on any "official" birth rosters anywhere. I don't know - I have broken my pick trying to run back through obscure and missing records and tales (both in the family and in the public record). The major components all fit anyhow - and so (here comes more name-dropping, Martha!) along with "thousands" (the Editor of the Tombstone Epitaph once wrote me) I can and do, claim tenuous "relation (by marriage)" to our Nation's most illustrious gunslinger and Lawman: Wyatt Earp! I am at least less tenuous than most perhaps! (Grin!) One other tale about Will before we push on. As a young man, he had come out one summer to Denver to stay with his sister (my Gran) and her husband. While there, he went on a bicycle fishing trip up into the mountains once with some chums. Coming back, they had been caught by inclement weather, and had sought shelter at "an old farmstead by the road." Resident at said farmstead was a "kindly old gentlemen" who took them in, letting most of the boys sleep in his barn and his cabin, but giving my Great Uncle, half of his brass bedstead to share in the house. The next morning the boys continued on, and when he got back, my uncle reported what had transpired. My grandfather listened intently, and then quietly said to Will: "Will, you have slept with a cannibal!" LOL! And Will had! For the "kindly old gent" he had shared a bed with was no less than the infamous Cannibal Packer one of Colorado's most noted criminals. One Alfred Packer, who ate several companions when lost in the Rockies one long ago winter, and for his gustatory habits was sentenced to the penitentiary at Canon City, but was later "pardoned" and lived out the rest of his life in obscurity at "the old farmstead by the road." Often of evenings, we had to make the obligatory trip across town to visit also with my paternal grandparents. This was a much more proper household - given to nothing much else but playing Chinese checkers with one's elders, and staring out the lace-curtained windows at passersby. Occasioned, I came by degrees to understand by the fact my paternal grandparents were Methodists (thus, also my Pop...) and disapproval and denial lurked around every corner. (Though both of them had grown up in Late Frontier environments: my grandfather in a hard-scrabble backwoods Missouri farm - at nine the "man-of-the-house" for a family of women after his father's demise from Civil War misfortunes. And Grandmother herself came from a family near as I can tell, of indolent, coon-hunting, knife-wielding, duel fighters (something like five brothers and "over a ton" (determined once by the entire assembly getting on the local coal yard truck scales...) of assorted dogs, guns, and demi-johns on the front porch down Kentucky way)... Her elder brother, she said, one "Speed" Mitchell "...did his man in" with a bowie knife once, when as a "Second" in a duel for a friend, he was so-called upon. The victim, as I recall the tale, was prominent politically thereabouts, and since this fracas had taken place "where a bridge crosses a major river," the State of Kentucky years later obligingly erected a monument to it all. In later years here, I sought the services of an author and authority on Kentucky duels (no less!) but strangely, perhaps, he was unable to verify any of this. Not everything gets into the history books, I guess... But my Pop wanted no knowledge of his "roots" - his eye fixed steadfastly on Wall St. as we have learned previous - and so I had to learn of my grandparents' early days in private and out of earshot of my dad... So evenings, like I said, I would be rubbed and tubbed like an Irish potato ready for the baking, and shook into short pants (maybe knickers? remember knickers?) and shirt-and-tie, and we would go see "The Powell's." All would be going well, until one of my Powell Grandparents would ask, "And what did you do today, Bernard?" "Oh, Grandmother, I got up very early and went to work with Nana (my name for my maternal grandfather)." "Oh, that's nice. And what did you see?" "Oh, it was just great, Grandmother! One man knocked another man down right outside the store and gave him a bloody nose! Then that man got up and tore the shirt off the back of the other man... Then I shoveled ice up in the 'ice room' today and because I was littlest, they let me crawl into the chute when the machine was off to unplug it, and then and and and...." From the corner of my eye I knew the blur streaking my way was my Mother from across the room. All the other adults present had cleared or were clearing their throats and looking out the lace-curtains - or even through them... Sigh... It remains to add, since this is a fish story as you may have concluded to yourself, or at least a paen to things "fishy" in this world... that my Grandfather and my Uncle were my introduction to the world of trout fishing and camping generally, in the Rockies. No summer was complete without several forays up to remote Blue Lake way over on the Western Slope, and Willow Creek, and Eight-Mile Brook and a dozen or more splashing, dashing, ice-cold gorgeous mountain streams that in those days still coursed down the sides of pristine mountains. We would camp in lush wet meadows and at night the coyotes tremulous howls echoed in distant canyons, and elk herds bugled in answer. Now and then a bear materialized out of the pine or the scrub willows along the creek bottoms... We would be up at dawn, and my grandfather would have the potatoes and eggs frying, and I would slide into cold waders, slip on my landing net and proudly take up my Abbey & Imbrie 9.5 ft split bamboo rod - come all the way from Scotland it did - at 3.5 ounces the whole - a super-gift for a small boy, believe me! - from Nana (I have its age-wasted and dried-out remains still) - and go forth to catch the wily trout. I became passably adept at fly-fishing ("...for a Texan," as they would both tease me: not many places to practice in the "seasonal wet draws" down that way...). Thus, Rio Grande King, and Grey Gnat, and - Royal Coachman! a favorite - and who can forget the gaudy Parmachene Belle - the tiny hand-tied flies of the fisherman's trade - entered into my repertoire. I always leaned toward craftwork and working with my hands (a trait my largely cerebral father saw as an atavistic throwback I now think) and so, soon I was pulling chicken feathers out of my grandmother's pillows on the sly, and tying my own flies laboriously out in "the shop" - a place where womenfolk dared not go, and my grandfather introduced me to the vise, the saw and the drill. (Hammering seems to be innate in our species: few need instruction beforehand...). Denver (a place), and fish (things or beings), were always my solace in Life's storms. Back To Contents Page For Next Chapter (Click Here) Contact Bernie
Several times, while we were there, my Great-Uncle Will McDermott (Gran's brother) and his wife, Gertie (wait till you learn who she was!), came from Arizona to visit, too. At such times, and for a small boy, the world dropped away and I lived and breathed as a member of the cast in a real-life Western... for Uncle Will was a bona fide sheriff from a small town in Arizona (Ray, by the way, and near as I can find out no longer in existence). He was the walking, talking embodiment of everything you ever read or heard about in the way of Western Sheriffs - about 6-6 in his stocking feet, broad-shouldered and hard as nails, moustachioed and deep, gruff voice. He habitually shook all the kitchen towels vigorously (with which he was wont to wipe his manly features from time to time, to Gran's despair) - popping and snapping them so as to fray their very ends. When asked whence this peculiar habit, one was informed in his gruff, no-nonsense-now-young-man, it was to assure that no vinegaroons were hiding in their folds! (Once I peeped into his boudoir as he was dressing one morning, and can report he also popped his socks vigorously the same way). And shook and banged his empty boots on the floor, too, before he dumped out the invisible vinegaroons. He was my idol.
Mesicans and scorpions alike had to get up early in the morning to steal a march on Will! Best of all, he told tales one after another of his tumultous life "in the West," - a West that was all but faded even as I was growing up. As a Guard, among other assignments for the mines in Ray, he had once been jumped in fact by a band of Mesican desparados, who were busy pummeling him in the street, when a dance hall gal (so the story goes) leaned out of an upstairs window across the street and shot into the pack with her six-shooter - at which they all took to their heels. As Will was dusting himself off, and adjusting his hat, she called down, "Will! Will! Are you alright?" To which he replied, "Yes, M'aam I am and I'll be thanking you for your attention, I will! (Then a short pause, and...) "Shucks, M'aam, and shur'n I'm Irish - and iveryone knows you cain't hurt an Irishman 'lessen you kick him in the shins!" In fact, Will in his later years, was a confidant and pal of the famous "Death Valley Scotty" - on whose radio show he was several times a guest, and they would reminsce about the days in the Old West. (Check it all out at Death Valley Scotty's Borax Radio Show).
But - best of all! - Will's wife - my Great-Aunt Gertie - was Wyatt Earp's niece! I kid you not! Virgil's daughter, as near as I can trace back a most convoluted family tree: the Earps were alternately hated and adored wherever they went, and the brothers married indiscriminately and several times (and even each other's wives, once or twice I believe) and generally disported themselves in the manner which such major Icons must attain to in their dual roles as saints and sinners... Indeed, though everyone around the dinner table back then just took all this in stride - I am sure that it was this "Earp connection" that lured Will West from his native Omaha (Council Bluffs) in the first place. There is a documented record of Virgil Earp's most convoluted "marriage arrangements" which establishes at least one sojourn and marriage in the same city and into the same Irish community as my Grandmother's and Great-Uncle Will's (McDermott) Irish family. Virgil married one Allie Sullivan (she died in 1947, at the age of 100, and her obit was in the New York Times...). Many records say they had no children, but again many sources say, too, that there is no real record of this marriage (supposedly his third), and for that matter - no real record of his first one, either. (And the wife of his second marriage 'vanished" wtih no further record!). Kinda sounds like "...there goes the neighborhood" to me, but my Aunt Gertie I think, may have been born out of wedlock (a "woods colt," as sometimes known in those days) and thus not on any "official" birth rosters anywhere. I don't know - I have broken my pick trying to run back through obscure and missing records and tales (both in the family and in the public record). The major components all fit anyhow - and so (here comes more name-dropping, Martha!) along with "thousands" (the Editor of the Tombstone Epitaph once wrote me) I can and do, claim tenuous "relation (by marriage)" to our Nation's most illustrious gunslinger and Lawman: Wyatt Earp! I am at least less tenuous than most perhaps!
(Grin!)
One other tale about Will before we push on. As a young man, he had come out one summer to Denver to stay with his sister (my Gran) and her husband. While there, he went on a bicycle fishing trip up into the mountains once with some chums. Coming back, they had been caught by inclement weather, and had sought shelter at "an old farmstead by the road." Resident at said farmstead was a "kindly old gentlemen" who took them in, letting most of the boys sleep in his barn and his cabin, but giving my Great Uncle, half of his brass bedstead to share in the house. The next morning the boys continued on, and when he got back, my uncle reported what had transpired. My grandfather listened intently, and then quietly said to Will: "Will, you have slept with a cannibal!"
LOL! And Will had! For the "kindly old gent" he had shared a bed with was no less than the infamous Cannibal Packer one of Colorado's most noted criminals. One Alfred Packer, who ate several companions when lost in the Rockies one long ago winter, and for his gustatory habits was sentenced to the penitentiary at Canon City, but was later "pardoned" and lived out the rest of his life in obscurity at "the old farmstead by the road."
Often of evenings, we had to make the obligatory trip across town to visit also with my paternal grandparents. This was a much more proper household - given to nothing much else but playing Chinese checkers with one's elders, and staring out the lace-curtained windows at passersby. Occasioned, I came by degrees to understand by the fact my paternal grandparents were Methodists (thus, also my Pop...) and disapproval and denial lurked around every corner. (Though both of them had grown up in Late Frontier environments: my grandfather in a hard-scrabble backwoods Missouri farm - at nine the "man-of-the-house" for a family of women after his father's demise from Civil War misfortunes. And Grandmother herself came from a family near as I can tell, of indolent, coon-hunting, knife-wielding, duel fighters (something like five brothers and "over a ton" (determined once by the entire assembly getting on the local coal yard truck scales...) of assorted dogs, guns, and demi-johns on the front porch down Kentucky way)... Her elder brother, she said, one "Speed" Mitchell "...did his man in" with a bowie knife once, when as a "Second" in a duel for a friend, he was so-called upon. The victim, as I recall the tale, was prominent politically thereabouts, and since this fracas had taken place "where a bridge crosses a major river," the State of Kentucky years later obligingly erected a monument to it all. In later years here, I sought the services of an author and authority on Kentucky duels (no less!) but strangely, perhaps, he was unable to verify any of this. Not everything gets into the history books, I guess...
But my Pop wanted no knowledge of his "roots" - his eye fixed steadfastly on Wall St. as we have learned previous - and so I had to learn of my grandparents' early days in private and out of earshot of my dad...
So evenings, like I said, I would be rubbed and tubbed like an Irish potato ready for the baking, and shook into short pants (maybe knickers? remember knickers?) and shirt-and-tie, and we would go see "The Powell's." All would be going well, until one of my Powell Grandparents would ask,
"And what did you do today, Bernard?"
"Oh, Grandmother, I got up very early and went to work with Nana (my name for my maternal grandfather)."
"Oh, that's nice. And what did you see?"
"Oh, it was just great, Grandmother! One man knocked another man down right outside the store and gave him a bloody nose! Then that man got up and tore the shirt off the back of the other man... Then I shoveled ice up in the 'ice room' today and because I was littlest, they let me crawl into the chute when the machine was off to unplug it, and then and and and...."
From the corner of my eye I knew the blur streaking my way was my Mother from across the room. All the other adults present had cleared or were clearing their throats and looking out the lace-curtains - or even through them...
Sigh...
It remains to add, since this is a fish story as you may have concluded to yourself, or at least a paen to things "fishy" in this world... that my Grandfather and my Uncle were my introduction to the world of trout fishing and camping generally, in the Rockies. No summer was complete without several forays up to remote Blue Lake way over on the Western Slope, and Willow Creek, and Eight-Mile Brook and a dozen or more splashing, dashing, ice-cold gorgeous mountain streams that in those days still coursed down the sides of pristine mountains. We would camp in lush wet meadows and at night the coyotes tremulous howls echoed in distant canyons, and elk herds bugled in answer. Now and then a bear materialized out of the pine or the scrub willows along the creek bottoms...
We would be up at dawn, and my grandfather would have the potatoes and eggs frying, and I would slide into cold waders, slip on my landing net and proudly take up my Abbey & Imbrie 9.5 ft split bamboo rod - come all the way from Scotland it did - at 3.5 ounces the whole - a super-gift for a small boy, believe me! - from Nana (I have its age-wasted and dried-out remains still) - and go forth to catch the wily trout. I became passably adept at fly-fishing ("...for a Texan," as they would both tease me: not many places to practice in the "seasonal wet draws" down that way...). Thus, Rio Grande King, and Grey Gnat, and - Royal Coachman! a favorite - and who can forget the gaudy Parmachene Belle - the tiny hand-tied flies of the fisherman's trade - entered into my repertoire.
I always leaned toward craftwork and working with my hands (a trait my largely cerebral father saw as an atavistic throwback I now think) and so, soon I was pulling chicken feathers out of my grandmother's pillows on the sly, and tying my own flies laboriously out in "the shop" - a place where womenfolk dared not go, and my grandfather introduced me to the vise, the saw and the drill. (Hammering seems to be innate in our species: few need instruction beforehand...).
Denver (a place), and fish (things or beings), were always my solace in Life's storms.
