"Last
Saturday we finally made our bike ride up Boulder Canyon....The high point of
the trip was visit with an old timer in Christman. When we passed his house the old gent was
combing cockleburrs out of his dogs tail.
Seeming to be so leisurely we went back and asked him a few questions in
regard to points of interest in the vicinity. This was enough to light the fuse
to an apparently endless collection of anecdotes and facts about Four Mill
Creek.
"First
he told us the complete history of the old Bolder Valley narrow gauge railway,
which ran up to the gold mining towns of Wall Street and Gold Hill, until
washed out in 1923.... There is nothing like talking to a native who knows
every foot of ground within a ten mile radius and every person or event within
the last fifty years for learning the history of a place….
"A
page or so ago I took time out to go to Denver with some of the boys. After
taking care of the shopping we dropped won to the Ichiyo Cafe for supper. And
this Cafe in the Japanese district put out a meal, the like of which I've never
seen before - for 90¢. We really got our
chance to read Japanese; for the menu was written in characters and many of the
juke box numbers were labelled only with kanji. However, the waitress, a nisei
(2nd generation) knew less Japanese than we - so our conversational knowledge
of the language didn't get a workout.
She confided in us that a number of boys from our school had appeared
there in recent weeks and tried to engage her in conversation. However, since it was incomprehensible to
her, she usually bluffed her through by laughing at the remarks -- but she had
decided not to pull her bluff on us."
-- Letter from my father, Boulder, Colo., to his
family, Bloomington, Kans., March 7, 1945.
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