I grew up on an 80-acre farm in Montrose County, Colorado about four miles west of the City of Montrose in an area known as Oak Grove. The Oak Grove school was a couple of hundred yards from our house. Mother picked the location for our farm, based on the fact that it was so close to an elementary school. This is how it looked in the spring of 1957. The garden has been planted and is being irrigated.
Being in the country, there were not very many children nearby, and I spent
many hours by myself. My grandfather, H. O. Hardy, built a large circular playpen where I could play without getting into too much trouble. It must have been about ten feet in diameter and three feet high. My grandfather had rolled it down the road from his house to ours, which was about a half mile away. It was always outside, and could be easily moved to allow the grass to be mowed.
My two sisters were probably more like baby sitters than playmates. Carol was born five years and Lynn eight years before I was, and I don’t remember any big fights or rivalries that seem to be common among siblings.
I seemed to follow in Carol’s footsteps with my interest in music and mathematics. She got a degree in music at the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in mathematics at New Mexico State University. Lynn followed her own path, with a
degree at Whittier followed by a masters degree in religion at Bob Jones University.
The big day in my childhood arrived when I got a Doberman puppy. From that day until I left home for college, we were never far apart. Queenie walked me to Oak Grove school and met me there after school to walk me home. With a Doberman by my side, it seemed like I never got into any serious fights. Here’s a story that is so unbelievable that I’m not sure that I believe it myself. But here it is, still in my memory bank after all these years. The movie theater in Montrose had matinees during the summer. I didn’t want to miss an episode, so I rode my bicycle to town, with Queenie running at my side. When we got to the theater, the bicycle and dog remained on the sidewalk and I went inside. An hour or two later, the show was over and I got back on my bicycle and dog and boy made our way back home. No big deal.
We raised corn, grain, hay, and a variety of other crops. We even had a
contract for a while to grow beer barley for Coors. We had a few head of
cattle, and the highlight for me each year was a two-day cattle drive to a ranch owned by my uncle Wendell. I remember getting bucked off my cousin’s horse first thing in the morning, then a long day in the saddle.
Early on, I suspected that I would never make it as a farmer. My father and I pitched silage when the temperature was below zero and we bucked hay bales when it was more like 100 degrees. One of my early memories is the quote from my dad, “Sine squared plus cosine squared equals one.” As you have probably guessed, I didn’t have a clue, but my father’s love of mathematics must have been infectious since two of his three offspring went on to get PhDs in mathematics. He had a lot of great advice. For example, “When you are driving a tractor pulling some large machinery, the object is to try to miss the gate posts by the widest margin possible, rather than to see how close you can come.” And, ” Make sure that your thumbs never wrap around the steering wheel of your tractor. Otherwise, you will end up with broken thumbs on both hands when the front tires hit a rock and the steering wheel whirls in response.” Needless to say, our Massy Harris had no power steering.
Growing up on a farm was not all work. I had a bolt-action single-shot
Remington 22. I learned to shoot a long bow and later a new recurved bow. One day when my dad and I took a load of trash to the dump, I took a bow and some broadhead arrows along. After we finished dumping our load, I hiked over to a small canyon and looked over the ledge at a deer grazing not too far below. I took careful aim and let an arrow fly. The arrow found its mark. I went back to get my dad and the two of us carried the deer back to the pickup, a quarter at a time.
My earliest construction project was a boat that I used to paddle on Spring Creek, which ran through the middle of our farm. The boat was 18 inches wide and 5 feet long, all made from flat lumber. It was ugly, it leaked, it was very unstable, but it worked and I had built it myself!
There were some other playmates outside of school. Most notable were my twin cousins Carla and David who lived in Montrose and were born just two months before me. They had a lot of close friends who lived nearby their house in town, but for me who lived in the country they were special. We were together a lot, especially on weekends.
I’m not sure that you would call him a playmate, but another person that I spent a lot of time with was my grandfather George P. DeVinny. He taught me to play cribbage and chess. He could walk my legs off hunting for arrowheads when he was well into his seventies. His collection of artifacts included dozens of arrowheads and several stone axes. He gave his entire collection to the Indian Museum in Montrose, and they promptly sold the collection to other museums. Following is a picture of Alice and George DeVinny on the occasion of their 65th anniversary.
The summer before I was in the fifth grade, I started playing a baritone in a beginning summer band in Montrose, Oak Grove was a country school with four classrooms and eight grades, with two grades per classroom. Since Oak Grove had no band, Mother helped schedule transportation so that I could play in school bands in the town of Montrose. I realize now that although money was very tight, my parents made sure that I had every opportunity to develop the talent that I might have had in music.
My sports career peaked in the eighth grade. At Oak Grove School, we had nine boys and three girls in my eighth-grade class. I played left field on our softball team. We dominated the other rural schools and won the Uncompahgre Valley Championship. The big city schools were not allowed to play against the small rural. We did make the mistake of playing against Montrose Junior High in basketball. Our coach was also our janitor, who had probably never actually played the game himself. Long story short, we were out of our league.
Just a note about Oak Grove Elementary: The school was built in 1906, which means that it would have been about two years old when my dad started school there. It must have been 1981 when I went with him to the 75-year anniversary. The school still exists, with about 400 students. There were probably about 100 when I started school there in 1946.
In 1954, the year I graduated from the eighth grade, my sister Lynn graduated from Whittier College. We drove to Whittier, California to attend Lynn’s commencement. Richard Nixon gave the commencement address.
Once while we were in high school, I was driving our Oldsmobile Rocket 88 with David and Carla. This car’s hood ornament was in the shape of a rocket with a very sharp tip. I can’t imagine such a hood ornament being allowed by current safety standards. The tip of the rocket managed to severely injure a pheasant that flew up in front of us. I stopped the car, I jumped out and finished off the pheasant with my pocket knife, then we took it home and Mother fixed it for dinner that night.
In high school, I played in the band, sang in the mixed choir, and acted in several plays. I played baseball my freshman year, but that was my only sport. I had rheumatic fever when I was three or four years old, and I still had a heart murmur through grade school. I probably could have played more sports, but my mother made it known in a subtle way that music might be a better direction to follow in light of my heart condition. Playing with golfers my age who played football in high school and college, I realize that my mother was wise. Now I walk 18 holes of golf and feel great while the rest of my foursome struggle to walk from golf cart to tee.
My academic interests were mainly science and mathematics. Biology required the memorization of lots of technical terms, which I found impossible. The book One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow sparked my interest in physics. But mathematics came in first. In mathematics it is not necessary to memorize anything. You just figure it out.
During my senior year in high school I visited my sister Carol who was finishing her degree in music at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Carol had a lot of friends and classmates at CU who later became well-known in their field. One such friend was George Gamow’s son Igor, who asked Carol to help him with his mathematics courses. Carol introduced me to George Gamow in his faculty apartment. I remember his many pictures of faraway galaxies. He was one of the early proponents of the Big Bang Theory.
English was my hardest subject. I didn’t learn to write well until I started working on my PhD dissertation. When I got the first draft back from my major professor Robert J. Wisner, there was but one page that didn’t have more red marks than black ink. Bob was at that time an editor for Brooks/Cole. I learned more about writing when Carol and I wrote Doing Mathematics with Scientific WorkPlace, thanks to Editor Susan Bagby.
Although not a member of the most popular crowd that consisted mostly of jocks, I was elected as the junior class president and president of Honor Society. I was the drum major in the marching band and had lead roles in some school plays.
During my senior year I was the campaign manager for the losing contender for the next year’s student council president. The campaign manager for the winner Neil Petrie was my on and off again girl friend Audrey Hill, and our friendship was never the same after that.
My parents sent me to summer music camp at Western State College in Gunnison a couple of times and once to the University of Colorado. I was also selected a couple of times to play in the all state band at Colorado State College in Greeley, now the University of Northern Colorado.
The most memorable part of my life on the farm was the nearly unlimited trust given to me by my parents. I cannot claim that I always earned that trust, but they pretended not to notice.
This is how I remember them sitting in their living room.
