|
Home
| |
Click the tab
Up on
left to back up a page. To return to Store Page click
RETURN
You will find a short
portion of this book below
Gold Hill Women II
CD $25 + $5 Check
or Money Order |
Gold Hill Women II
©
This is a great collection of stories about women
who have come to the gold mining town of Gold Hill, Colorado since it was
founded in March 1859. In this collection are stories about some of the women
that have come to Gold Hill from 1950 to 2000. Gertrude Jones,
Dorothy
Knapp, Barbara Finn, Mary Ryan, Norma Jean Steinman, Marie Brookhart, Edie
Eilander, Kay Simms, Gretchen Diefenderfer, Holly Hirsch, Linda Laughlin, Kim
Rosenthal and Sharon Conlin to mention a few. Of course there are many more
but I don’t have their stories, yet.
History
$25 + $5 S&H
170 Pages
|
- The Younguns -
The following is one of a two part series about Gold Hill Women which was
printed in the November 1, 1981 (Part 1), and November 8, 1981 (Part 2). ‘The
Sunday Camera Focus’ is part of the Boulder Sunday Camera newspaper.
By Vicki Groninger; photos- Vern Walker
“There’s a women’s energy in this town that just won’t quit,” he said, clutching
at his chest in self-mockery. (He had just suffered a heart attack.) “Look what
it’s doing to me.” I had noticed the strength and the cohesiveness of the women
in Gold Hill too, and decided to investigate: maybe if I hung around I could
pick some of it up.
As I wandered among the jalopies settling into the dust of Gold Hill’s roadways,
looking for the sound and sights and smells of this women’s energy, I saw
scattered clues: potted geraniums resting on porch stoops, lace curtains peeping
from window frames, smoke in the chimney stacks at midday.
Then Gretchen Diefenderfer came barrelling down Main Street in the firehouse’s
jeep, and she had the chief’s hat on.
Oh m’gosh she is the chief.
Whoaa, what going on here?
“Simple,” Gretchen tells me. “I’ve lived in Gold Hill for 15 years and I’ve been
on the fire board for 15 years. I guess I’ve always been civically responsible.
And in Gold Hill, it really matters.
The first year I lived here, I watched a house burn to the ground by a flue
fire. We had one fire truck then and when we emptied it, that was it. When we
were electing a chief this year everyone just looked at me.
“You know,” she says, fixing me with her Great Gretchen Gaze (an indefatigable
look), “you can train someone to fight a forest fire in 5 minutes, cause you
don’t fight a forest fire, you contain it with shovels, but a house fire, that’s
another thing. It’s your fight.
“But, but, but, Gretchen, how’d you get involved in all this in the first
place?”
Gretchen looks sheepish. “I moved to Gold Hill when I was 25, with a daughter.
When I was a kid I always wanted to do everything and I was trying everything
out. I’d done a lot of that groovy stuff Boulder people do. But I don’t like to
be yelled at much.
“Gold Hill’s out of the hustle bustle. You can walk out the door and be gone or
walk a ways to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor. It’s like a large
family here. You don’t always get along with everyone but you live with ‘em. And
you’re known. Who can you fool? They know whether you keep your commitments or
don’t. This place is the center of my world. It keeps my soul together.”
Gretchen is a nurse during the workweek. She manages Dr. Julie Carpenter’s
office. She’s one of many women who moved to Gold Hill 5, 10 or 15 years ago
when the Search for Self was happening in America. Only those who moved to Gold
Hill seem to have found what they were looking for. They’re still there.
Many of them talk of the strong energy they feel in the “Hill” 12 miles above
Boulder. (They’re sitting on top of gold and silver and tungsten and uranium,
after all..)
Holly Hirsch, 37, a poet and early-childhood teacher who lives in the town with
writer Tom Huth, calls Gold Hill a spiritual place to live. She says there’s a
great geography and energy level which supports what the individual can do and a
caring quality about everything you choose to do. You don’t have to be afraid to
say the word God up here. We also do a lot of things by hand --- chopping wood,
hauling water and working in gardens.
Holly recently outlined her odyssey to the mountains when pressed: “I went to
Bennett College in Millbrook, N. Y., then worked as a fashion editor for
Harper’s Bazaar. When I was married I traveled a lot with my husband.
We lived in Chile, for instance, while he worked for A.I.D. (Agency for
International Development). Then we came back to Cambridge, Mass., then on to
Reston, VA. --- now there’s a liberal town. But all the time I felt I was only a
number”.
“I wanted to be outdoors and backpacking. After my divorce I moved to Westport,
Conn., and I felt myself getting simpler and simpler. I felt myself opening up
to ‘new waves’.
Holly runs classes called “creative expressions” in the mountains for her
friends’ young children. And she has just published a book (available at Brillig)
on “Relaxation Techniques for Young children.” She says, “A lot of people think
children are relaxed, but in our society, especially, they have to learn how to
be quiet to restore their creative energies.
A lot of people say of those who choose to live in the mountains that they’re
dropping out. I think it’s just the reverse. They’re dropping in. You have to be
more responsible here. You depend on each other.
----------------------------
|
