Goodbye

Final Post in Len's Memory Blog--2/26/2025


There’s a saying—all good things must come to an end. I’m going to revise it slightly. I think all things must come to an end, good or not. I hope this blog has been good, but whether it has or not, it’s ending. Now. With this post.

I’ve been debating with myself for a while how I would end it. One last happy or sad remembrance? Some memorable event from the distant past? One more character description of a friend or relative?

I’ve decided against all those possibilities, and have decided instead to provide a simple timeline—something you can use to fit all previous 39 posts into, to create a chronological order for everything.

It’s not that I think chronology is the most important ingredient in a memoir. I think theme-relation and topic-follow-through are more important, and I have jotted all these remembrances down in the order they came into my brain, with no attempt to arrange them into any kind of sequence. But now I think the time has come.

So here’s what I remember about how time flowed across the 16-20 years I’ve covered here. I could have a fact or two mixed up or slightly out of sequence, but this is pretty close:

We lived in Denver, Colorado and nearby locations from my birth in 1940 up to the late summer of 1947. I was born at (the then named) Porter Sanitarium and Hospital, now known as Porter Adventist Hospital. I went home on my tenth day. (Mothers and their babies were kept in for a lot longer then than they are now!) We lived on South Washington Street, just a few blocks from the middle of the business district. It was a rental, and my folks didn’t like it much. A few months after my birth we moved, next door. We didn’t like that house any better than the first!

I had my first Christmas, and, later my first birthday in that second house.

Meanwhile, my dad, who was averaging a tale-home pay of $800 a month from his sales job with Auto Equipment Company (which no longer exists) had been saving money. In the early summer of 1941 we bought (all cash) the tiny little house at 201 South Decatur, an edifice which is still there. He paid $3500 for it, and we kept it for almost two years, before selling out and moving to Derby, a Denver suburb north of town.

The Derby ‘house’ was actually a chicken coop, recently converted for human living. It was extremely small, about the size of a modest-length single-wide mobile home today. There was only one bedroom, which I slept in with my folks, in my own bed. I have several memories from that location, the most vivid of which is the only rainbow I have ever seen at night. (The one shown at the head of this post is very similar, but not the one I saw.)

I had my third birthday there (the second having been on S. Decatur) and shortly after that event, we drove up to North Dakota to rescue my dad’s mom and three youngest siblings from an abusive situation they had gotten into there.

When we got back, Grandma lived in the Derby house with the kids, and we moved to a house on West Virginia Ave, back in Denver again. When the school year started, Uncles Bill and Brian, and Aunt Alta (only eight years older than me) came to live with us, so they could walk to Denver Junior Adventist Academy, on top of a nearby hill, and Grandma lived by herself in Derby.

I had my fourth birthday in the West Virginia house, and my sister Maurita (whom we called Rita) was born while we lived there, two and a half months after my birthday. 

All of our housing to this point, except for the house on S. Decatur, had been rentals. But we now made another purchase: 4801 W. 5th, about five blocks shy of the western Denver City Limit. (Sadly, the house is now gone, replaced by a very large solar panel.) Our house was the only one on an entire city block, and my dad often joked that what we should plant on the rest of the block was houses. My mom scowled and scoffed at this, but the fact is, if we had done so, our fortune would have been made, and we could have avoided the poverty we later lived in (from 1949 to 1953).

West 5th is where I had my 5th birthday, and where we lived when I began music lessons at the Lamont School of Music. When I had my first recital, at age six, we still lived in the same house.

But as always, my dad grew restless, and we soon moved again, this time back to a rental: 2724 S. Decatur, in the area of Denver known as Loretta Heights. (The house is still there.)

This is where I had my seventh birthday and where my mom began my schooling, starting me in first grade books, which I soon learned to read with alacrity. (Within a few months I was reading encyclopedias!)

This is also where we lived when disaster struck. My dad lost his job, as recounted elsewhere. We soon moved into a series of really cheap Denver housing, about two months or so per location, and then to the city of Greeley, an hour north, were my dad was able to get another auto-parts sales job, though at a much reduced income level.

Our brand-new house in Greeley (address forgotten, though I could probably drive there!) is where I had both my eighth and ninth birthdays, where I broke my arm falling down the basement stairs, and where I was bumped from second grade to fourth because my mom had taught me ‘too much’ in first.

Disaster struck again. My dad, who had had his tonsils take out at age 20 and had been alarmed as they grew back in again, came down with a severe case of strep throat, part of the treatment for which was a second removal of the tonsils, and he almost died. He was in the hospital for two weeks, and as a result lost his Greeley job.

The summer of forty-nine, unable to afford either a purchase or a rental, we lived in my Grandma Schultz’s cabin at Conifer, above Denver. It was the best three months of my life so far, even though I was worried about my dad, who was still sick.

At the end of the summer, my dad obtained a jobs as a bookkeeper for an Adventist medical clinic in Montrose, four hours away. He moved there immediately and lived in a motel, while the rest of us figured out how we were going to join him. We finally did, two weeks into the new school year, after I attended school in Denver for those two weeks. After two more weeks in the motel, we found a house to rent, and did, and I obtained my dog Ginger, about which there was a whole blog post entry early on.

I had birthdays 10-13 while living in Montrose.

After living in five different houses in four years in Montrose, my dad resigned from his low-paying job at the clinic, and we moved to Grand Junction, an hour north. We lived in seven different houses there, in the intervening years till my 16th birthday. Which brings us up to the end of my blog, except for the one story about college, which relates a series of events culminating in my 20th year.

The End. 

Except in some ways it’s a beginning. I recently joined the Medium.com Social Media site for writers, and have already posted twenty-one blog-sized entries there, though only three about my childhood. I’ve also posted three fictional short stories in one of their publications, and plan to do more of that genre. (Three poems as well.)

Hopefully, this summary will provide the curious reader of this blog series with a timeline into which they can insert the various posts in a reasonable chronological order, so as to understand what happened when.

Thanks for coming with me on this journey. If we meet again elsewhere, I’ll be glad.


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copyright ©2025, LegendKeeper LLC


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For an index of all Len's Memory Blog posts, click HERE.

For Len's Music Blog posts, click HERE.




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