Warren Conner

WARREN CONNER

Interviewer Kathy Daily

C208 – 1996.049.0002

 

So I’ll just ask you, we’ll start from the beginning.  When were you born?

I was born July 25, 1920.

 

And were you born in your house?

I was born in the house next to, what used to be the house that was next to the court house.  My mom and dad lived there when they were married and I was born in that house.  And later we moved over here in about three more, two more years, and then came ’23 I believe we moved into this house at 534 East Hopkins.

 

Tell us more about your parents.  I know we have this from your mom, but let’s start with you.  We’re going to talk about your parents.  Tell us what you know about who came when and just do the whole family history for us.

My dad’s side, my grandfather, John Melton Conner, came to Aspen in 1886, and his brother, Emery Conner had preceded him about six months previous.  My grandfather immediately went into the mines.  He worked and leased at that time, the first couple of years you worked for the company, if it was Smuggler Durant Mining Company, or one of the other mining companies like Argentum-Juniata or some of those ones like that.  And later on they found that it was probably more profitable for them after silver crisis in 1893, to lease blocks of certain portions of the mines and they let the miners then produce from there and they would charge them for the air to run the jackhammers or liners or stokers or whatever they were running.  They would charge them for sharpening the steel for the machines and they would charge them for hauling the ore off that they had broken out to the tram house to be put in the railroad cars and everything.  And then they would get a percent of whatever it was they shipped to the smelter in Leadville.  So that was the way they started.  So my grandfather worked in, as a miner or right up the front where it would break in the ore, I think for probably 7, 8, or 9 years and then you became a lessor and he leased blocks of land like, he leased with Mona Frost’s dad and her uncle, the Jenkinson’s brothers.  They had a lease…

 

What was Mona’s father’s name?

I believe it was Frank, I wished I knew.  Well anyway, he leased with the Jenkinson brothers in the Bonnie Bell, which is up in Tourtelotte Park.  And then he stayed in the mines until about 1905 and at that time they got him involved in politics because he had been a republican all of those years.  I don’t know at that time whether they called them populists.  Well anyway, he was a republican so he went into the court house, into the county clerk’s office as, first of all he was a deputy county clerk and later on he was elected as county clerk and recorder and stayed in that office for, I’m not sure how many terms, but then was defeated and then he went back into the mines again.  But about 1918, right at the time of the World War I, he went into the court house again as deputy sheriff and custodian of the jail and things like that and that is why my connection with the court house is because my grandfather and grandmother were in the court house when I was born and they lived downstairs and at that time the whole downstairs was the sheriff’s quarters.  And my grandmother cooked for the people in jail and Granddad was court bailiff among other things, and that stayed, I think they lived down there almost 20 years so that is why they associate the lower part of the court house with our family quite extensively and then after that he became, he still stayed on as bailiff, but he retired around 1938 or 1939, or thereabouts.  I used to help him when I was a youngster, maybe 15 or 16 years old, I used to help him.  In those days, the custodian of the court house did everything from top to bottom.  It didn’t make a damn bit of different if it was shoveling snow, all the walks, or whatever needed to be done, all the cleaning and various things like that.  Since my grandmother was a good cook, they always got along good with the jail fare and all that.  And on my mom’s side, my grandfather, Patrick Harrington, he came to Aspen in  1888.  He came from Ireland, but, by the way, my grandfather Conner came, it was a jump sort of a thing, he came from Hagerstown, Maryland, to Henry County, Ohio, and to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and then of course they got the news of the silver strike in Colorado in Aspen and Leadville and since things weren’t too good in Iowa, that’s why they came west.  And the same thing with my grandfather, his two brothers had come to Leadville back in 1884 and 1885 and so, when he was old enough to start to work, they decided it would be a good thing for him to come to Aspen and I think he got to Aspen when he was about 18 or 19 years old.  And he immediately went to work in the mines and worked in virtually all of them from the Smuggler to the Free Silver.  He worked at the Newman where the Aspen County Day School is, that was a good mine.  He worked in that mine.  He stayed in the mines for about 22 years and then he went into the grocery business and was with a man by the name of Ed Groscurth.  And Groscurths used to live right across the street from us so that was good.  And then since my granddad stayed in the mines longer than my other granddad and he had run, what they call dry machines, like the jackhammers and the liners and he had contracted silicosis and so he was ill for probably six or seven years and he died in 1942.  I had rheumatic fever when he died and I remember that date real well.  I think it was in 1942.  That is kind of the history.  He met my grandmother here in Aspen.  She and her aunt ran the Clarendon Hotel which is up where Wagner Park is.  So she worked in there with her…

 

That burned down didn’t it?

I don’t know the date, but I imagine it was right around the turn of the century.  And so that is kind of the way, my grandmother and granddad were married here.  They were married in St. Mary’s, or my grandmother and grandfather on Mother’s side were married in St. Mary’s and then later Mom and Dad were married there too.  That is kind of the history of the early part of our family.

 

Where did your father come from?

My granddad’s family originally came over from Ireland, but they came a long time ago because my granddad’s great uncle fought in the Revolutionary War when General Washington, when Irish Brigade, so there was a Conner in that thing.  Then later after they got into Maryland, that part of the country became so populated so they went to Ohio and my great grandfather was county assessor in Henry County, Ohio, I think it was in 1836 or ’38 and he was assessor there for I think 12 years and apparently that was a pretty popular place.  That was about the time they started getting this assessor government where you valued property and levied tax against it.  And then my granddad Conner before he came here, he was county assessor in Henry County, Iowa for I think four years.

 

Do you think it is in your genes?

Must have been for me.  But anyway, they said it was hard work because you know, you rode horse back you know, and you might go 80 miles and you might have to stay some place and make out a whole hell of bunch of papers and stuff like that.  So it was never easy.  But my great granddad, I guess he did a pretty good job to keep that thing all the time because it was political and they called them townships, you know.  They weren’t counties like we have in there.  So that started the Conner and Harrington family and as I said I was born in a little house next to the court house that was torn down many, many years ago.  Next to where Hannibal Brown lived and next to where Elizabeth Callahan is now.

 

Warren, do you know how to spell Hannibal Brown?

Hanibal.

Just one N?

Well I better not say that swiftly because you know, I never have written, I don’t know.  It possibly has two N’s.  Isn’t that terrible.  I may have written to Hannibal once or twice in my life or written his name but most of the time it was hollering at one another or joshing at one another or going some place with one another.

 

Can you recall approximately when your grandfather was defeated the first time?

It was around 1910, I would say, something like that.  Maybe ’12.  But it was, the politics wasn’t very honorable in those days.

 

It was all fixed?

It was very much partisan, and some of the partisans you weren’t too sure whether they were party or not.

 

Do you remember any stories your grandfather told you about the jail?  Did he ever have any scoundrels?

Yea.  Well, sure, he had some of the people that were incarcerated were murderers, I know that.  There were a couple that I remember that they used to say and I don’t remember their names, I know the one from out on Capital Creek had shot someone and was in the jail and, or killed him, I guess.  And then I remember another one he told me about, but he would always say that they were the nicest people when they were in jail because I guess that old jail was a heller, there was no place to go.  My God, you couldn’t have got out of there if you would have had a tractor.  You couldn’t have plowed through that old thing.

 

Was the jail in the…?

It was right down…

 

Because originally it was up…

That’s right and then when the court house got built in 1891, that’s where they moved, they moved the darn thing down, it was right down in the southeast corner of the basement where the ready room is down for all of the guys down there.

 

Did he have any rustlers?

He had everything.  Bootleggers was the main thing, and mean ones too.

 

How long did a bootlegger have to be in jail?

Usually they only kept them, they kept them in sometimes, I remember they had one, I think it was Tony the Weasel and Tony I think, I believe the Judge gave him four months.

 

The bootlegging was a federal, they weren’t…

Yea, they had a revenue officer that testified against them, yea.  Anyway, somewhere in my possession I have a good picture of my grandfather and the county sheriff and the revenue officer and the county clerk and recorder and the county treasurer out in front of the court house, front steps of the court house, out on the sidewalk and they had, hell I don’t know, must have been 30 or 40 gallons of bootleg in glass jugs.  They were all in these boxes and everything like that.  And Frank Bruin, the sheriff, he had a hammer, like he was getting ready break them.  They had to destroy it.  Because the revenue officer had to watch them.  And there were various tales of things, they said that Frank, the sheriff, had things rigged up so that the revenue officer would watch them pour the stuff down the sink and it would go down into the lower floor and there would be somebody catching it.

 

Was that true?

I think they kept a little bit.  My granddad never told me that exactly happened that way, although he said that perhaps it did.  But I do know that some of the times when they were going to destroy maybe 16 or 18 gallons they would keep a couple of gallons in back to keep and the revenue officer in that picture looked like hell.  He was young and I think he had a cigar and he must have brought his little boy with him when they took this thing.  And he wasn’t from here, see they would bring different revenue officers in from Glenwood or Leadville so that, they wouldn’t get known around so they would go to the dance and say “can you tell me where I can get a pint” and they would say “well I’ll get one from you, I’ll go to Mrs. so and so”, and then he would be watching and watching where they would go, you know, and making these notes and then after a time or two, he would get the drift and say well they have a still up there or over there and then they would pull the thing.  And then they would have a different revenue officer the next time and nobody would know quite what they looked like.  He had on bib overalls, if I’m not mistaken.

 

That photo we might want to look at, that would be delightful.

I’ve still got it.  And Frank the sheriff, he was a great big, good looking, tall, strong man.

 

How do you spell Bruin?

Bruin, just like the bear.

 

Let me get one, the jail was down where the ready room is now, and where did your grandparents have their living area?

All in the very west portion of the basement.  That whole thing was their, there were two or three bedroom down there and a great big living room and a dining room and the kitchen and bathroom.

 

Was it warm there in the winter?

Well it was all steam heat, you know, and a hand fire furnace, and Granddad fired that damn thing too, and I used to help pitch coal in that and punch the flues, the flues and the big coal boiler had to be punched every, oh maybe three or four days to get the carbon out of them from the coal so that when the heat came through, it would heat the steam up and the more carbon there was in the flues, the more coal it took to get the steam up.  Because you had to get 15 or 20 pounds of steam to send it clear up the court room and if the court room wasn’t warm, the judge was raising hell because it was cold or something like that.

 

Do you recall any other people with nicknames?

Let’s see.  Tony the Weasel was one of the good ones.  I’ll have to think about that a little bit.  Right off the bat…

 

If any of them come to you, try to remember, what’s his name lives over here that we talked to, Frank started to give me a bunch of names.

He could remember a bunch, I’ll bet.

 

There was a bunch that hung out in the Jerome bar.  Because Fred worked in the Jerome.

One of the ones I remember from the tunnel up there that was an absolute heller was Sully.  He was a Sullivan, one of the, but he wasn’t one of the Sullivans, part of our family was related to, but he was a character.  He was in jail a lot just over night from coming down from the tunnel.  Because most every Saturday night in the summer time there was a dance down in the Armory Hall and all the tunnel stiffs would come down, stiffs we called them.  We would call them all stiffs because they were hard working, hard strong men.  I guess from running those machines all the time probably drove them batty and its a good thing maybe they had Saturday night to come down and get swacked.

 

They would have a little too much fun and get thrown in jail?

Yea, usually, that is if they were real obnoxious and stuff like that.  Like jumping up and pulling light cords out of the ceiling and stuff like that.

 

What year were you born?

I was born in 1920.  I contracted rheumatic fever when I was 21 years old and that put me down for about three and one-half to four years.

 

Did you almost die?

I don’t know, but I wasn’t very good at the beginning of that siege and it took a long time to get, because the methods they used to treat it were so much different.

 

What did they do back then?

I don’t know, among other things, if your heart wasn’t working the way it should because the rheumatic fever was something to the valves in your heart.  Well anyway, so after I got over that so I could get around, I went in the court house as a deputy county treasurer and I worked in that office for Robert Kelly, who had been county treasurer for almost 20 years before and later for Marjorie Jenkinson, who is still alive and is a good old family friend.  I was her deputy for a couple of years and then, I think in about 1948, they needed someone down because Mr. Paepcke had started buying property about that time and they needed somebody down in the assessor’s office because the assessor at that time was all by himself and he was over burdened with work and so they asked me if I would go down and help him and I was only down there for about six months and then Burt Kling was the assessor and he died.  So the commissioners put me in the office immediately and so that was my connection from that point up until February of this year that all those intervening years I was doing something one way or the other either as county assessor or deputy assessor.

 

What were the funniest stories you remember from the court house, I imagine there must have been some things going on around there.

Yes there were.  I kept away from most of the shenanigans most of the time because later on in that time, my father was probation father and also veterans service officer.  He served as veterans service officer for about 45 years and so I had to keep a pretty straight face because, well not that there were, but anyway, and then I was, some of those years back in that time, usually in those days, someone from the county assessor’s office was a deputy sheriff, because when they had to go out, in those days, you had to assess sheep and cattle and you would have to go in and count them and I was a deputy sheriff for about 26 years or 27 years.  But later after Dick Kienast got into office, that sort of, we decided that wasn’t too good of an idea any more, because things were a little bit more complicated.  So, we had, I’m sure, you know, I haven’t thought about crazy things that happened in the court house for a long time, but I don’t know, almost every day I’m sure there was something because back a long time ago, people would be able, up until 20 years ago, if you had a good dog, you could bring your dog to work with you.  I wouldn’t say you could, but you did, so I used to bring my dog.  I had a big beautiful Collie and I used to bring my dog to work so whenever Jakes would want to go out, he wouldn’t bother going through the door, he would go over and stand by the window and Jakes would jump down that about eight or nine or ten feet into the garden down there.  People used to come by when the office was over on the other side and wait for Jakes to come so they could take a picture of him going out the window.  Well not too many people know that, that was an interesting thing.

 

What about when Bundy jumped out of the window?

He came right down by the side of my window over there.  I never saw him, right away somebody from the sheriff’s office said Bundy had jumped off the window and I said “what in the hell?”  I looked out and I could see pieces of the pine tree that he had hit coming down.  He kind of scraped some of the branches down and they started looking for him.  Usually I was always turned around looking in, I wasn’t looking outside.

 

So you were in your office?

I was sitting right there.  I was probably six, seven feet away from him when he came down from the upper level there because he jumped right out.

 

We could do a chapter on things coming out of court house windows.

I remember we had people who will remain nameless that even threw furniture through closed windows in the back of the court house.  I couldn’t tell you who they were because they are still alive.

 

Why did they do that?

Mad, because they were mad.  Mad at everything.  At the county and they threw the damn things out in the alley.  But anyway, we better not go into that.  Most everybody meant well because when I was growing up nobody had a darn thing, everybody was just kind of… when I started to work at the court house, I only, my pay was only .25 an hour.  And I had to work too, I had to be able to type and I had to be able to make good numbers because we done the tax rolls in those days.  All long hand, there was nothing type written and you had to prepare tax schedules in a big wide carriage typewriter and then finally they raised the salary to .50 an hour and that was…

 

When was that, do you remember?

I don’t remember.  I think I started getting .50 an hour maybe towards about the time I went down into the assessor’s office, which would have been in ’48 or ’49, I don’t remember.

 

Do you remember the precise year, you said it was three or four years after you contracted rheumatic fever?

Yea, I went in about, must have been in the fall of 1946.  I remember Mr. Paepcke, the first time I ever saw Walter Paepcke was with Friedl Pfeifer.  They came in and Friedl, he had been in the Army and had just been discharged I believe and I think I have the dates right, and I remember they came into the office and were talking to the then treasurer and they were going over the things.  They started to build the Number 1 Lift, I think, and I think that is the right year, I hope it is 1946.  Well and then when I was a youngster, a lot of the good things I got into is because my both uncles were musicians and they played in dance orchestras and they had dance orchestra.  So I learned to play the clarinet when I was pretty young and so I started playing the Elks band and the Elks band was the one thing that was really going good back when things, well everybody thought things were tough.  And the Elks band gave periodic concerts.  They gave a concert during July and August every Thursday night in the band stand and of course that entailed a lot of rehearsal and things like that.  But I played, when they holed through the tunnel up at Grizzly, or up at Lincoln Gulch, I was not very big, I must have only been around 16 years old, but I played in the band when we went up there.  It was in the dead of winter, it must have been January or February.  It was awful.  We went up there and I remember we played the Star Spangled Banner and I don’t know whatever things.  We went up in, I think, everything was frozen so hard and they traveled the road a lot everyday and they had tracks and they could brush the snow off and everything.  We went probably in an old, I don’t know, some of the older people in the band had cars, like an old Buick and I think a Grand Page, I don’t know, but I got a ride.  Whatever car my two uncles went in I got to go.  So we went up there and we done that.  And then I played when they dedicated the Highland-Bavarian Lodge up Castle Creek where Coffee’s place is up there, or used to be, I don’t know who in the hell owns it now, that place right, it’s on Castle, right there on the bank of, overlooking Conundrum Creek, where that beautiful place is with a couple of little ponds is, right above the Highlands Mine is.  Well, anyway, that was the Highland-Bavarian thing.  That was Billy Fiske and Tom Flynn, and they were going to build the tramway to the top of Mt. Hayden back in those days.  And then Billy Fiske was killed in the war.  He was the first American pilot killed in Germany.  Well anyway, when they dedicated that and I went up there and played on that, and then when they dedicated the Sun Deck and finished Number 2 Lift, and the Sun Deck was done, I was still playing in the band then and we went up and played that.  We got to blow around on a lot of those.  I was thinking I couldn’t blow very much now.  I have a hell of a fever blister and I know that used to be the curse of the clarinet players.

 

Did your uncles teach you to play?

Oh God yes.  Well my uncles had, they played everything though.  They were good musicians and they had the orchestra and the Roamers Rhythm Kings and they played everywhere.  I have a picture of that orchestra some place too.

 

When was that?

Oh I would say the Roamers were going good about 1935, ’36, ’37, ’38, ’39, ’40, ’41, ’42, those years about like that.  The depression years when they would only get like maybe $25.00 for a dance on Saturday night for five of them, sometimes six of them.  Boy that was hard going to spend all the time practicing.  They would have to go some place where there was a piano, you know, because there was always a good piano player and probably two saxophones, a trumpets, trombone and they would interchange instruments, and maybe even a violin player once in awhile.

 

Did Freddy Pearce play in this too?

Fred never played in the Roamers Rhythm Kings.

 

In the Elks one?

No, I’m the only one, Louis Zupansis and I are the only ones left in Aspen that played in the Elks band.

 

When did they disband the Elks band?

Well it had to be the time that I got, well I don’t know, I tried to play after I got sick and I just couldn’t, so it must have been about ’42 or ’43, something like that.

 

The dances were really well attended, weren’t they?

The dances were well attended and it was damn good music too.  It wasn’t any of this play one or two things and then get down and go around and smoke and stuff like that.  They would play maybe 15 or 16 different things, the fox trot and waltz and whatever and then they would have intermission.  And then you would go and you would know you were going to be for 15 minutes and the guys could go outside and get a drink.  Or they had some bootleg or have some of the home brew from somebody that was brewing good stuff.

 

I want to ask you something about the court house.  Why does the woman on top of the court house have no blind fold?

The most honest thing I can get because my great uncle Emery worked on the court house.  He and Mr. Whale, I believe it was, he plastered most of the inside of that court house.  Any place there is any plaster going, why it was an Emery Conner thing. I won’t say he plastered the whole thing, but he was a plasterer by trade.  And on one of the, I have heard, I don’t know if Dad or somebody else asked him, but he said he thought that it was the particular foundry where that thing was cast or something like that, that just happened to be maybe the way the architect designed it.  I don’t know that there is any special story I have heard.  The most honest thing I could say is that particular casting was done by someone that said that is the way we visualize justice.

 

Has anybody crawled up there and put a blind fold on her?

Oh sure, lots of times.

 

When did that happen?  I’ve always wanted to do that.

Many times.

 

Did anybody get caught?

No, because it usually was somebody in the court house probably helping them out.  You never can tell, we have had a few that wouldn’t mind doing it.  Some of the Justices of the Peace too, we used to have that system here, you know, until 25 years ago, or so.  But I have seen a lot of, red ones and blue ones.

 

When was the last time?  It wasn’t too terribly long ago that somebody did that?

Yea, within the last two or three years.  And they had a bronco t-shirt on her.  There have been a lot of things put up there and everything but, usually someone in the inside has to, you know, because there was no way anybody could get up there and do that without somebody fronting for them or distracting.

 

What were some of the funny stories that you heard why she didn’t have a bandanna on?  Do you remember any of those?

No.  Just for Halloween or some of those, when there would be some big celebration here when there was going to be a lot of people in town and they wanted it to look a little bit different.

 

What about when they found marijuana growing up in the court house, do you remember that one?

Yea, but that wasn’t, I don’t think that was as serious as a lot of people made it out to be.

 

I remember seeing those plants there.

Yea, I don’t know, I remember once when some of the drug enforcement agencies would find, hell I think they found a marijuana plant growing, well I’m not sure, maybe even down next to city hall, but it had to be something they know somebody had dropped or a seed fell or something like that.

 

Or they did it to embarrass.

And hell that don’t grow very good up here anyway unless you got special conditions.

 

Did anyone ever come into the court house with a gun and threaten to kill anyone?

No, but there was always a lot of I’ll knock your god damn head off and a few things like that you know.  But I never did see any, I never saw any guns in my time.  I guess I would have run across them if there had been anybody having anything around.  But there was always, when I began to work in the court house, the sheriff’s office was upstairs.  They had a special office upstairs, so there was always somebody going up and down the steps or something like that.  They had to be pretty evident because in order to come from the outside, you had to go and pass through the hall and go up the stairs and then finally when they moved the office downstairs then you didn’t maybe see as much of them.  But they were always pretty darn close if you needed them.

 

Well traditionally, assessors are pretty disliked when it comes to assessing.  Were you ever threatened by anyone because of a change in the assessment or the taxes?

No, I have had several people, I think I could be very honest and say that I guess all the years I was lucky enough to be diplomatic enough to avoid those kinds of things.  I have heard some threats about don’t send someone that would be working for me because I will run him off.  Yes, there have been for some of the people that worked in the office, there were threats that they would put their dog on him or things like that.  I guess no one has ever told me that, few people invited me outside and when I got ready to go out with them and we got out and started down the steps they changed their mind, so at least I didn’t get my teeth knocked out by anybody, but I went out with them anyway a couple of times.  But a lot of this and a lot of the animosity that may be shown toward county assessors is entirely misunderstandings between the tax payer for the person that owns the property and the person that is doing the work because if you know what the hell you are doing and you have a reason for doing it, there shouldn’t be, sure you are going to have wide disagreements, but you don’t have to get in this business where, oh I don’t know.  I have had people tell me, one woman told me that she was going to pull all my hair out and I said “God don’t get going too bad on me because I don’t have a helluva lot to spare”.  That was quite a while ago, but she was so mad.  And then in about two months she apologized.  I have had a couple of people tell me, one woman told me once she was going to smack me and I said well you know there is not any need for that.  And then in a couple of months she told me she was taking some kind of medicine that made her crazy.  She said she was having a nervous break down and they were trying some kind of new stuff so she apologized.  There is always something, but now, I don’t know.  I wouldn’t want to say that what has been going on lately, I’m sure there has been some bad exhibits of bad manners on both sides in the office now this year.

 

Can you kind of, I’m trying to think of the vast difference between the property and the value of it when you started and the value of property here today.  Is there any way we can put it into a perspective?

Well, I don’t know, Gaylord, but if you wanted to, I believe, of course, using figures to make those comparisons, you don’t know exactly what you are doing because the percentages in order to arrive at assessed valuation has changed in my, there has been so many definitions of what value is.  There is cash value, loan value, market value, and now the damn statutes say actual value, and then the percentages to arrive at the assessed value.  But when I went in the office the first time, the assessed valuation, I believe, of the county was $800,000.00.  Well, back then that involved an awful lot of things because there were probably in those days, you had to evaluate the sheep.  So let’s say there were 20,000 sheep in that thing, there might have been 4,000 cows and you had to get all those straightened out.  Maybe Vagneurs would have 180 cows and you go up to Natals and maybe he would have 46, and you would go jumping around and everything like so, it was a terrible process of accumulating all that stuff and then valuing the lots around town.  Some of the lots around town back in those days, $25, $50, $80 per lot, depending on where they were.  So I watched the progression of those things go through that stage and like the $500 level and the $1,000 level and then to the $10,000, the $20,000, etc. and so, but then the thing that threw it off perhaps, ten years ago, they quit assessing cattle and sheep.  Farmers don’t have to pay on livestock.  You don’t have to pay on farm equipment any more and that used to be one helluva job because you had to go in and inventory the whole damn thing, all the mowers and tractors, and hay rakes, and whether you had a side delivery rake or a front delivery rake, it was awful.  That’s what, you know, a lot of people think that things are complicated now, but they were awful complicated before because did them all manually.  And you had to go out and then you would go to some place and the guy couldn’t speak good English, you know, or they were giving you that bit that they couldn’t speak and you would say, you know, tell them what you do and then he wouldn’t tell you.  You would say I’m looking out there and it looks like there are damn near 60 cows out in that field, are those yours?  And then maybe get a nod out of him, and then you would have to go and count them.  We had counters and you would look and have to separate them.  You know it was serious business because you had to put the things down right and then you had to report them to the state and the state would then, well they wouldn’t check them, but they would know and in the case of sheep, there was a tax on sheep called a predatory animal tax because the state imposed that tax to pay for the trappers to pay for the coyote trappers.  And when they dropped that, the agricultural assessment, that helped an awful lot.  And it helped the farmers too.  But the progression, as I mentioned, I think I started out when the assessed valuation was around $1,600,000.00 or there abouts and it is over, the assessed valuation is $500,000,000.00 now.  And that means that $500,000,000.00 means that that only represents a percentage of the actual value of the property which is probably, residential is a little over 14% of the actual value and commercial property is 29%, so you just, to be safe, there is a lot more residential than there is commercial so say you multiply that $500,000.00 and you get $2½ billion.

 

Did you ever have anyone, did you ever catch anyone hiding any cows or sheep?

Oh yes.

 

How did you find them?

Well because I would always ask because, there is no use you being honest if so and so is coming in from Kansas…

 

END OF SIDE