Biography of Don Young
CCC Man, Camp NM-3, Fruita, Colorado
I graduated from Gilchrest High School in 1934 and went to Colorado Teachers College in Greeley the next year. Not having enough money to continue, I tried to find a job. The State Employment Agency got me a job on a farm about an hour east of Greeley. The diet consisted of pinto beans two or three times a day. The well water had a film of oil on it and made me quite sick after a few days. I made them take me home at the end of the week - he paid me $1.00, quite magnanimously.
A neighbor lady who worked for the Welfare Office suggested I sign up for the CCC. I had to put my mother on welfare to be eligible, and I'm sure she used the sack of groceries (mostly potatoes and onions) they gave us. Enrollment was at the Red Rock amphitheater and Reception Center near Denver. I am a slow eater, so of course I was one of three or four picked to peel potatoes the next day. The cook demonstrated how to use the (then) new peelers with a rapid, going-away motion. As soon as his back was turned I would switch to a beckoning, paring-knife motion. He would see me and come back and peel several potatoes with his fast, going-away motion. He peeled more potatoes than I did. The next morning I had fried potatoes for breakfast for the first time in my life.
A year later he was transferred over to Fruita, where i was on the headquarters staff of NM-3, as Infirmary Orderly. While having 10:00 O'Clock coffee with the kitchen crew, I asked him about Red Rocks. He looked at me smiling, and said, "Yes, I figured out the next day what you were doing."
The trip from Denver to Grand Junction (through the Rocky Mountains and across the continental divide) was made on a train with ancient cars (even for that time) with no air conditioning, but windows that went up without too much of a struggle. There were fifteen or twenty tunnels through the mountains at that time. The windows were just as hard to close as to open. We would get them open just in time to go into another tunnel. The coal locomotives of those days put out a lot of smoke. By the time we got to Grand Junction we were all quite dark complected.
Camp NM-3, at Fruita, was the third camp that had been built to build the road to and through the Colorado National Monument. My first job was to "slope" (roll rocks on a fill and slope) to stable positions. It was an appropriate job for the two smallest boys in camp. They were getting ready to blast in a tunnel just above us. I heard the call, "Fire in the Hole". I called to my companion to come up and we would go to a protected location. What I didn't realize was that we hadn't heard the first two calls. Just as I got level with the road-bed I could see the rocks from the blast coming at us. I dropped flat on the slope and called to my companion to drop also. The rocks flew over us, mostly. When the foreman came over to the top of the slope to see how we were, he remarked that when my head came up above the level of the road-bed my eyes were as big as "road apples". Anyway, after that he was more careful to be sure that everyone could hear his warning calls.
The purpose of the Colorado National Monument (a part of the National Park system) was to protect and display the area of land with sheer-walled canyons, magnificent monoliths and uniquely shaped spires and columns of rock. One of the attractions was a herd of bison. One of the jobs of our camp was to build a fence to keep them from wandering off the park on to private land. Experience soon proved that an ordinary three-strand, barbed wire fence won't stop a herd of buffalo that are used to going where they want to graze. It took an eight-foot, chain link fence with lots of posts. The herd still roams the lower part of the park.
I had time to stop and visit Colorado National Monument about 1990. The road we built is no hard surfaced. The Monument headquarters is up where Camp NM-2 used to be. A very nice Visitors Center has been built to educate the public. When two of the lady Rangers found out that I had been there in the CCC days, they interviewed me for about an hour.
----- Don Young
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