Bill and Beverly Noe - oral history interview

              BEGIN INTERVIEW
ANNETTE GRAY: Good morning. This is Annette Gray, and I am an archivist with the Douglas County History Research Center, and I’m also a member of the Historic Preservation Board, and this morning I am in the Beverly and Bill Noe home. We’re going to be talking about their lives and how they grew up here in Douglas County. First of all, I want you guys to give me your full names and who your parents are so that we can have that for the record.

[Quiet “mumbling,” cannot determine speaker(s).]

BILL NOE: Okay. Well, my name’s Bill Noe. My full name is Richard William Noe. I was born on June 9th, 1938. My father was Richard Campbell Noe. He went by the name of “Cam.” My mother was Esther Elizabeth Anderson Noe. They were married, I guess in about 1937, ’36 maybe—can’t remember. I was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado. My grandfather was Charles Fred Noe.

BEVERLY NOE: Okay.

BILL NOE: My grandmother was Jennie Katherine Higby. My great grandfather was Isaac Jegirtha Noe, and my great grandmother was Jennie T. Cain. They came from Indiana and Virginia. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was John Clarence Anderson, and my mother’s name is Esther Elizabeth Anderson. They came from Iola, Kansas, or [on a farm in] that area—Prairie Hall, actually is the little place they had a farm and ranch. They migrated to Colorado in, I guess it was probably when my mother was in grade school. The Andersons came from Sweden. My great grandfather was John, or John C. Anderson  from Sweden. His wife, my great grandmother was—I forgot her last name, now. [laughter] Anyway, she was also from Sweden, so my grandfather’s parents were Swedish, and he could talk a little Swedish. When I was a kid, I remember that. Then on the other side, my mother’s family was the Dennis family that went back to—I think, Ireland. My great grandmother on that side was Louise Louella Bell, before she was married.  So, that’s kind of where I came from.

GRAY: Uh-huh. Alright. Beverly?

BEVERLY NOE: I’m Beverly Jean Higginson Noe. I was born July 26, 1941 in Colorado Springs. My parents lived in Monument at that time. My parents were Russell Earl Higginson and my mother was Amelia Pearl Stewart Higginson. My grandfather, Harold Higginson and his wife, Essie Vorhees Higginson, established a ranch about a mile and a half north of Palmer Lake in 1907, and my father was born on that ranch, and we later, as a family, bought the ranch in 1949. We still own part of that ranch. My mother’s side of the family has been in Douglas County since 1864. Her mother’s parents came from Illinois and their names were Marcus Linzy James and Margaret James.

GRAY: Hmm. Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: They came out because my mother’s grandmother had asthma, and they came in a covered wagon and did not expect her to even make the trip. She lived until she was—I’ve forgotten how old—eighty, perhaps. [laughter]

GRAY: The air agreed with her. 

BEVERLY NOE: She was a small lady, but a strong lady. They established the—well, she married Newton S. Grout, and they established the Jackson Creek Ranch. I think it was 1873. My mother’s father was George Herbert Stewart, the son of George Patrick Stewart, who was very active in Douglas County in the Castle Rock area, had a ranch over there. He had married Amelia Ann Curtis McInroy, and she had five children of her own when she was married, and they had five of theirs. Is that right? I can’t remember.

BILL NOE: I think that’s right. [laughter]

GRAY: Big family.

BEVERLY NOE: I could be wrong on numbers. Yes. So, anyway, we were related to the Curtis, the James, the Grouts, the McInroys and the Stewarts. Who’d we leave out? 

GRAY: Quite a few family names in Douglas County.

BILL NOE: They say there’s about two hundred ancestors buried in Douglas County.

BEVERLY NOE: There’s about over a hundred and forty ancestors buried in the Bear Canyon Cemetery.

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: --of which Margaret Adair James was very active in getting this cemetery started and so forth.

GRAY: And the Curtis were—

BEVERLY NOE: The Curtis were very involved and still are-- 

GRAY: Right.

BEVERLY NOE: --involved in that. Yep.

BILL NOE: Okay. I remember now what my great grandmother Anderson’s maiden name was: Anna Olson from Sweden. So, get the record straight on that maybe.

GRAY: Are they “ens” or “ons” with the spelling?

BILL NOE: “Ons.”

GRAY: Okay. I know there’s a difference between what it is.

BILL NOE: Yeah, there sure is. I.J., Issac Jegirtha, we call him I.J. for ease I guess, had two brothers that settled in Douglas County. One was William Pierce Noe, and he owned land in Larkspur, helped develop some of that, plus around the area. He married a gal here in Douglas County named May Norris that owned land right next to the Eagle Mountain Ranch. Never stayed there too long. He traveled back and forth to Indiana and to Kentucky and back to Colorado. The other was Jerry Reason Noe. We call him, Jerry R., but he also came out here. He was I.J.’s other brother. He owned a ranch also, the Jerry R. Noe Ranch, off Fox Farm Road, which is just kind of diagonal across from Eagle Mountain Ranch. We, also, had a cousin that lived in Douglas County. She was Anna Noe. She was a cousin of I.J. Noe’s. She married Carr Lamb, so the Lamb Ranch is adjacent—connected to the Jerry R. Noe, the I.J. Noe, and the Carr Lamb place together at one corner over there, so they kind of shared the whole Larkspur area. They came to Douglas County in about 1872  or a little later. I.J. worked on the, helped putting the Greenland Ranch together, and, eventually, bought the Eagle Mountain Ranch and developed all the land there, all the buildings and all of that. There was an existing old building there before he moved there, but it’s more of just an old shack.

GRAY: On the Eagle Mountain?

BILL NOE: Yeah. It was ranch hand’s quarters, ranch house of the time.

GRAY: Did you know your grandfather?

BILL NOE: I knew I.J.—he died in 1943, so I was not too old. I remember him being tall. He walked with a cane. He had a beard. I don’t know—but there is a picture of me with him somewhere. I don’t recall going to his funeral. We may not have been living here in the area at the time. My grandmother, his wife, Jennie T., had a stroke fairly young, I guess, for the times, and died I think it was in ’29 or something like that, so I never knew her.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: But, I knew both of my grandparents on my mother’s side. They built a little homestead down by where the Air Academy is now.

GRAY: Oh. Okay.

BILL NOE: If you know where the “Interquest” interchange is—

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BILL NOE: They own land on both sides of there. You can still see on the southeast corner of the exit or entrance to the Interquest Parkway there, the bunch of trees, that my grandfather’s house was located in that. 

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: My grandfather, when they—actually, his land was condemned, his ranch was mostly condemned at the time along with all the other ranches in the area—so they moved to the city  after that.

GRAY: It was condemned for the highway?

BILL NOE: For the Air Academy. It kind of spelled the demise of what their lifestyle. That was their life. They got very little money for the land. They paid them for what they thought the land was worth but not for what it would produce.

GRAY: Right. How old were they?

BILL NOE: I guess they must have been in their sixties.

GRAY: Sixties. Okay.

BILL NOE: Early sixties, at the time. Anything you want to add about your family you’ve thought of?

GRAY: Where’d you go to school? 

BEVERLY NOE: I started school in Steamboat Springs in a one house school.  We moved from Monument to Steamboat Springs where my father was manager of a couple of ranches over there in 1942. We lived over there until 1948. I started school there. We then went to Watsonville, California, with the cattle that the ranch manager sold along with my dad [laughter] to California. We lived there for a year.

GRAY: How did you get the cattle? Were they put in trucks or was it old-fashioned trail drive? How was it accomplished?

BEVERLY NOE: I think they were on the railroad.

BILL NOE: Yes, the cattle were shipped to California on a train. 

GRAY: Okay. 

BEVERLY NOE: On the train out there.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: Your dad actually had to ride in the cattle cars to tend the cattle.

GRAY: To keep them quiet?

BILL NOE: Well, not too much, but to make sure they were fed. Whenever the train stopped, they had to water the cattle and so forth.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: Yeah, he rode out.

BEVERLY NOE: Then came back and got us.

GRAY: I was just going to ask you if you guys were in the luxurious seats [laughter]—

BEVERLY NOE: No, we did not get to ride in the cattle cars. No. We were out there for a year, and my grandfather was getting older and decided he wanted to stop ranching and move to Palmer Lake. My dad had an opportunity to buy the ranch.

GRAY: Okay. Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: So, we came back to Colorado, which my sister and my mother and I were very delighted, because we don’t like fog. [Laughter]

GRAY: California can get some good fog.

BEVERLY NOE: So, we were happy to have the Colorado sunshine. After we moved back, I was in third grade and started going to the Greenland School, the little one-room school that my dad attended. I graduated eighth grade there. There was, I think, there might have been ten in the whole school. Two in the eighth grade.

GRAY: Okay. Big class. [Laughter]

BEVERLY NOE: Big class. It was rather scary going into Douglas County High School.

GRAY: I can imagine. How did you make the adjustment? I mean—it must have been very scary the first few days.

BEVERLY NOE: It was. It was a big step. I’m not a real out-going person, so it was difficult, but I guess you just do what kids do, and I made new friends, had a lot of fun in high school.

GRAY: Were there buses or how did you get to high school?

BEVERLY NOE: In grade school, my parents drove the school bus.

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: Which at that time was their 1938 Ford. Went around and picked up part of the kids that lived in Greenland and were able to come that way. By the time we went to high school, yeah, there were buses.

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: My father drove the school bus until he lost his arm in 1958. Because of not being able to shift the gears, he was not able to drive the school bus after that. I was the first one on between 6:30 and 7:00, and we got home by 5:00 maybe. [GRAY: Long day.] But, it was interesting. It was a fun time. 

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BEVERLY NOE: Graduated from Douglas County High School in 1959.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: I remember way back when I was, oh, about six or seven months old, we lived in Colorado Springs. I think that’s my first memory. I can remember my dad going to work—he worked over at Peterson Air Force Base in that area at the time. For some reason I had a terrible backache, and my mother put me in the sunshine, and I can still visualize and feel that sunshine.

GRAY: Cool.

BILL NOE: Sometime after that, we moved to California. I was probably one year old or thereabouts. We lived in an area close to Long Beach. My dad couldn’t join [the service]—he had Scarlet Fever or Rheumatic Fever when he was a child and they didn’t draft him for the War—because the War [World War II] was going on at that time. He worked out there. I remember a little bit about the house. It was—we rented from the Jenkins—they had a little cottage in the back. He, my dad, worked in wood, got a job at a furniture factory, then he migrated to a steel mill. They bought a house in Linwood, California, which is just a suburb right in the same area, about ten miles from the beach, I think, at the time. My brother was born in Bell, California, out there, so he was born in 1941. They bought this house for eleven hundred dollars, if you can believe that. Brand, new house in a subdivision. Remember quite a bit about the house. Small white house, two bedrooms. Neighbors on one side were good friends of my folks for the rest of their lives. People across the street remained friends until they died, so that was in the ‘40s.  Thing of it I remember a lot about that. They had air raids in California at the time. They’d require everybody to shut out the lights in their houses. Then they would turn on the big old search lights around the Long Beach area, because that was a naval area. You’d see these spotlights searching for airplanes up in the sky, and they’d start shooting. You don’t know what they’re shooting. [Laughter] Pretty soon after all this was done, they’d give the “all clear,” and you’d go back to your houses and continue on. That was kind of—you know, something that struck me about World War II.

GRAY: Yeah.

BILL NOE: Then, I think it was because my Noe grandparents needed help, we moved back to Colorado during the War, which was kind of a steep ticket—gas and tires—to do that. 

GRAY: Oh, so you drove?

BILL NOE: Yeah. Yeah. We came back and lived various places. Can’t tell you, but we wound up on the ranch adjacent to the Eagle Mountain Ranch, to the west. It’s called the “Roberts’ Place,” or the “Lockhart Place” . The picture I showed you about the hog barn and the still, that’s where we lived for a while. We lived there—that’s where I started school, which was kind of an interesting thing because all my family, the Noes, went to Greenland. Well, we lived just a few feet on the other side of the line. My parents didn’t know that, so they took me to Greenland to go to school for my first day. Greenland said they couldn’t take me, that I was, had to go, was in Stone Canyon district. Well, there was a school house in Stone Canyon but it was not an operating school at the time. They had merged with Larkspur, so then I went to Larkspur for a while. I was the only one in the first grade. The teacher let me watch trains most of the first grade. Sent me outside, [laughter] in the swings, to watch the trains go by.

GRAY: You didn’t get too much out of your first grade, did you?

BILL NOE: Well, before first grade was over, we moved to Englewood because my dad had a job then in a munition factory that was in Englewood at the time. So, I went to school in Englewood for a little bit, and when that job was over, we moved back, I think, to Monument somewhere. Went to Monument for a few days, weeks. Eventually, we moved back out east on the county line, so I went to Cherry for a few days. [Laughter] I say a few days because they decided I was the only elementary kid, or younger kid there. They had a lot of five, six, and seven graders at the time. They decided to send me back to Monument on the bus, just ran up and down there. So, I went to school in Monument for a period of time. Then, in December of ’46, we lived out on the Roberts Place. We had a terrific snow, and my dad had found a job in California because he has friends out there, so we were going to move to California. He’s going to work out there. [Telephone rings].

GRAY: Okay. We’re starting back up again. The phone was ringing.

BILL NOE: Okay. Anyway, this is December of 1946. We, basically, were packed, ready to go to California, and we got this blizzard. It was one of the worst blizzards in that time. We were snowbound for eighteen days—

GRAY: Oh, my God.

BILL NOE: --before they got the road opened. The drifts were twenty feet high in places.

GRAY: Oh, geez.

BILL NOE: They had supplies they air-lifted and dropped in to different places around. My little sister was born then. We had no baby food or anything else, because we were packed and ready to go. So, it was really a bad time for us. 

GRAY: Oh, yeah.

BILL NOE: So, we went back to California—lived with some of the friends, until they could build a house. The folks bought a lot, but you couldn’t build a house because all the materials and everything was in short supply after the war. So, we bought a nice lot out there. They built a platform for a floor out there and put a tent over it. 16 by 16 surplus army tent. So, we lived in a surplus army tent for close to a year.

GRAY: This is still in California?

BILL NOE: Still in California. So, I went to another school in California. Then, my grandmother called and said, “Hey, the Robert’s Place —which was adjacent to the Eagle Mountain Ranch—was for sale.” Was my folks interested in ranching? They said, “yeah,” so we moved back to actually Monument because the people were leasing a place in Robert’s Place—didn’t leave for six months to a year. So, we lived down there at ranch houses at the North Air Force Academy gate, on the east, big house down there, so I went to Monument school there. Then, we moved back up here on the Robert’s Place, and we went to school at Palmer Lake, finish out that school year. From that point on, we stayed put on the Robert’s Place, and, I guess, it was from the fourth grade on that I graduated from Larkspur Elementary and then went to Douglas County High School.

GRAY: So, is that where you guys met—in high school?

BILL NOE: No. We met after they got back from California in ’49 or ’50. That’s when we first, Bev and I got to know each other, as 4-H-ers and just neighbors.

BEVERLY NOE: I lived on one side of Spruce Mountain, and he lived on the other side of Spruce Mountain, and our parents had been friends for years.

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: My dad and his dad went to school together. 

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: I guess they—grade school.

BILL NOE: Grade school, yes. And High School.

BEVERLY NOE: So, you know, they had been friends for a long time.

GRAY: Your family place was the Ben Lomond Ranch, or what was known as the Ben Lomond Ranch?

BEVERLY NOE: It was part of the Ben Lomond Ranch to begin with.

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: When Harold and Essie Higginson were married in 1906, they came and bought about one thousand forty-five acres, something like that. I guess it was larger than that because my grandfather and one of his brothers bought acreage and then his brother decided to go back to the hills because this was too flat. [Laughter] They were—my grandparents were both raised up near Pine, in that area, Buffalo Creek, so he went back to the hills, and my grandparents stayed here. Then they built the buildings that are down on the other side of Spruce [Mountain], north side of Spruce there. It’s Spruce Mountain Ranch, now. 

GRAY: Okay. I think I need to look at a map and try to picture it. You know, where all these places are, because there are quite a few rather large ranches down in this area, right? 

BILL NOE: Yeah, around a thousand acres or more. Not twenty thousand acres.

GRAY: Right. A thousand acres seems big to me.

BILL NOE: Yeah, it is.

BEVERLY NOE: A thousand acres was quite large, actually, in the early 1900s.

GRAY: Were they mostly cattle ranches or was there some dairy or a little bit of farming as well?

BEVERLY NOE: My grandfather [Higginson] had both beef cattle and dairy cattle and raised oats and corn and potatoes and other farm crops.

GRAY: What did your dad raise?

BILL NOE: Well, he raised mostly beef cattle, and also they had crops, mainly to winter and fatten up the cattle. 

GRAY: Right.

BILL NOE: Back then, it was kind of interesting the way people did business because when you had cattle, you sold them at whatever time the market was there, and that’s when you got paid, basically. So, in order to have some cash flow, most of the small ranches or ranches had a dairy operation at the same time. They had the dairy for their own use, but they also sold milk and cream to both north and south. Some of them went to the Colorado Springs area, and some went to Frink creamery, some actually went to Denver area somewhere.

BEVERLY NOE: Beatrice Creamery.

BILL NOE: Yeah. They did that as supplemental income. Later, the big dairies, basically, forced the small farmer/rancher out of business because they started requiring stainless steel refrigerated tanks and all that. It was just not economical to do a milking operation, but we did keep a cow for our own use.

GRAY: Uh-huh. Did you guys sell to Frink Creamery then? 

BILL NOE: At times, [GRAY: in Larkspur] because it depended on who was buying at the time. [Laughter] You kind of had—you didn’t know—sometimes they’d sell it down south because they needed milk. 

GRAY: Were there contracts so that you knew from year to year--?

BILL NOE: No. Word of mouth and a hand-shake and that was it.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: Interesting thing is the way they bought milk. Because most people probably don’t know that—they bought it by the amount of butterfat in the milk. They would take a sample out of each of your ten-gallon milk cans, put it in a centrifuge and the more butterfat, the higher the price, particularly like for Frink that did the cheese— 

GRAY: They wanted the butterfat.

BILL NOE: Right. Plus, they wanted to make sure [that the milk was pure]—they did a taste test to make sure the cows hadn’t eaten weeds or anything like that.

GRAY: Uh-huh. Because it very much depends upon what the cow is fed, the dairy cow is fed, as to how good a taste as well, too.

BILL NOE: Yup. The other part of that is—because they sold beef, their yearlings once a year—they got paid once a year, but in the meantime, they had what they called, “on the book” at the grocery store. Larkspur store down here, I think, was run, initially by Piermans and then Nortons and Andersons. Anyway, they maintained their little tablet, receipt book, showing all the items you bought, and they just added on the list. Then, when you sold your cows, you went down there and paid, settled up. That was always kind of an interesting concept to me, you know, that the grocers, the stores had to finance everything, basically, a year at a time.

GRAY: Ranching wasn’t easy. I mean it was very dependent upon the weather and all kinds of things, but the people that supplied the ranchers, it was hard for them, as well. 

BILL NOE: Yeah.

GRAY: Did you guys both do chores? [Laughter] Okay, talk about the chores.

BEVERLY NOE: If you’re ranching children, yes, you have chores. There was, you know, you had to help feed or milk or shovel to get to the—with the hay in the wintertime to feed, help take care of the horses. You know, gather the eggs, help with the canning that was done.

GRAY: Uh-huh. So, you were inside and outside.

BEVERLY NOE: Oh, yes. Inside and outside. I husked a lot of corn to help my mother dry corn for the winter.

GRAY: Did you guys grind your own corn?

BEVERLY NOE: We did not.

GRAY: Okay. My grandfather did. That’s why I asked. He would raise his own and then grind it for corn meal, and it was the best. [Laughter]

BILL NOE: Most of our feed, like corn, we raised corn, but we ran it through what they call a “hammermill” [and fed it to the cows]. 

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: Instead of taking the corn kernels off the cob, it just ground the stalks and everything and made cow feed out of it that way.

GRAY: Insulage?

BILL NOE: Well, it was dry.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: Because we didn’t have a silo. Others that had a silo, filled their silos with chopped corn and fed it through the winter, but we didn’t. We had dry feed, so we—

GRAY: So, what was your favorite chore if you had to, if you can pick a favorite? Or, which one did you hate the most?

BEVERLY NOE: The one I did not like was milking. 

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: That was probably due to my mother because she milked like ten to twenty cows before she went to school, and she said, “Don’t ever learn to milk.”

GRAY: [Laughter] She prejudiced you.

BEVERLY NOE: She did. So, my sister—I think she enjoyed the milking. She helped my Dad milk. It was done by hand at that time. Then later, we got milking machines, and it was done that way. I think my favorite chore was probably helping with the baby calves. In the spring time, often it was stormy, we’d have to go get the calves because they’d been born in a snow storm, put them in a washtub back of the old coal stove in the kitchen. It was fun to play with the calves.

GRAY: Nurse them along.

BEVERLY NOE: I played. I’m not sure my parents thought that was that much fun. When we moved back to the ranch in 1950, there was no electricity, no running water, no bathroom, all that kind of stuff. 

GRAY: So, you’d been used to those things—

BEVERLY NOE: Right. We had never been without electricity.

GRAY: That must have been a real adjustment for you. 

BEVERLY NOE: It probably didn’t bother me near as much as it bothered my mother.

GRAY: Yeah. Right. That’s true.

BEVERLY NOE: It was kind of fun in a way, because, of course, we’d been used to taking baths in bathtubs, and now we had the old washtub, the old round washtub that got put in the middle of the kitchen floor and the water’s heated on the old coal stove. It was a unique experience. That was one of the first things we did—within a year, we had electricity.

GRAY: I would imagine, at your mother’s instigation.

BEVERLY NOE: My mother did—

GRAY: She pushed for that.

BEVERLY NOE: --push for that. Yes.

GRAY: Because, yeah, if she hadn’t—well, did she grow up with learning how to use the coal stove or the wood-burning stove? So, she was, at least, familiar with that because that would really be hard for someone that had no experience.

BEVERLY NOE: Oh, yeah. I don’t remember when they got electricity down there. Well, maybe before my parents were married—probably. They were married in 1933, so they probably had electricity before then.

BILL NOE: Yeah, your Granddad Herb served on the board, so he probably got it [Laughter]—made sure they got it. 

GRAY: That helps.

BEVERLY NOE: He probably—

BILL NOE: I don’t know about my favorite chore. Probably, it’s cutting hay and making haystacks.

GRAY: Okay. Did you guys bale hay?

BILL NOE: No. Well, not originally. Didn’t have balers. [Laughter]

GRAY: Because you’ve got early pictures of, you know, with the great big haystacks.

BILL NOE: Yeah. 

GRAY: I wasn’t sure when the transition was to hay bales.

BILL NOE: Well, we used—in ’43—the first time we lived on that place there, we only had horses. Basically, that’s all my Granddad used was horses. They had quite a stable of horses. They also had an old tractor, but it was for special occasions. It had a pulley on it that they could use to power different pieces of equipment, so, but it [most work] was mostly done with old horse mowers, buck rakes, hay stackers, to stack the hay. After the War, that made a big difference because there were—equipment became available that was previously tied up with the War. I think our first tractor was in the ’47 area. That made a big difference.

GRAY: Uh-huh. Mechanizing really does make a big difference. 

BILL NOE: Yeah.

GRAY: So, did you—I mean, is it an art to get the hay to stack properly, take some figuring out?

BILL NOE: It takes knowledge. I don’t think it’s an art particularly, but, yeah, the idea, when you stack hay, is to protect the hay. Other than having a convenient spot. You stack in—we called it “tromping it down”—there’s a hay stacker to put the hay on top, you’d take a pitchfork and spread it around so it’s, basically, an even layer. Then, you pack it down by walking on it, and you try to get all the air out as much as possible and make it tight so that when you’ve finished it, the top layer would shed water over the side, kind of like a thatched roof. Most of the stacks didn’t rot in this climate without any protection. It was not an art, but it was something you had to know how to do. Later, they started baling hay and using more modern equipment. 

GRAY: So, you’re doing the square, oblong bales as opposed to the great big, round ones? I think the round ones are more of a more modern variation?

BEVERLY NOE: My dad had a round baler, but they were the same size as the small rectangle.

GRAY: Oh, okay.

BEVERLY NOE: You had the rectangle baler. But, yeah, those great big round ones are relatively new—

BILL NOE: Yeah, the big round ones. They didn’t have the equipment to handle things like that back then. [BEVERLY NOE: Those things were huge.] Huge. My least favorite chore was cleaning the chicken house. 

GRAY: [Laughter] Yeah, I could see that.

BILL NOE: That was not [an easy job]; it was dusty and dirty and smelly—

GRAY: Smelly—

BILL NOE: Yeah, it was just dirty work. Yeah, that was kind of hard.

GRAY: You mentioned early that you all had pigs, as well.

BILL NOE: Mainly, just for our own use, but back when the still was in the building down there, they just used the pigs—I mean, sold the pigs through the market. They also used to get rid of the spent grain from the still.

BEVERLY NOE: It was their cover-up, the evidence.	

BILL NOE: The evidence of a still there.

GRAY: You said that wasn’t your father that had the still, right?—

BILL NOE: No, it was back during Prohibition. 

GRAY: Before your father purchased the ranch.

BILL NOE: Oh, yeah. I was glad that ten years, twenty years earlier when they owned that, so—

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: Yeah, that was quite an operation there. 

GRAY: So, talk about the whole—you said there was a flood.

BILL NOE: Oh, okay. Well, it was called the Roberts Place at the time. The Lockhart Place, it goes by now. Lockharts are related to the Stewarts in a roundabout way. So, I don’t know who actually had the still, but the scheme of things was that the spring water was fed into the tank where they stored it. Then, that was piped down to a still in one end of the hog barn. There they made whiskey and put it in barrels and so forth. Then, the mash, after it was worked, they fed to the pigs. Must have been in the ‘30s when Prohibition was still going that there was a big flood at that time, and it washed off the hillside, flooded the barns and flooded the valley where the hog barn was and washed the barrels out of the still and washed them down the creek clear into Larkspur, and Sheriff back-tracked and shut the still down.

GRAY: I love that.

BILL NOE: Then, there’s a history, a little bit of history in one of the Douglas County papers about that, I’ve seen it but I don’t have it. So, there’s a little bit of history, but there’s a lot of stills in this area that people know about but, you know, never got caught or they did get caught and so forth.

GRAY: This is an interesting part of the history, and I don’t think it’s been researched all that much. 

BILL NOE: Not much, no. 

GRAY: We should.

BEVERLY NOE: There was a still west of my, of the Higginson Ranch, up Butler Canyon and around in that area. They tracked that down because one of the sacks of sugar that they took up on the horses was punctured, and it left a really nice trail. So, they were able to track that one, shut that still down. There’s still some of the metal bands off of the kegs from the stills that are in that area.

GRAY: Okay. I thought with stills, maybe it’s just television, I don’t know—I thought they bottled it. But, they were putting it in kegs then? Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: They must have brought it somewhere and then bottled. I don’t know. Or, maybe they sold it from the—I can remember my dad telling me that people around used to hide their bottles, so they must have bottled it somewhere—by the fence posts.

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: They’d, you know, do their farming and have a little sniff as they went past the—

GRAY: Sure, why not?

BEVERLY NOE: My dad didn’t. He was a definite non-drinker. 

GRAY: Was he a teetotaler? 

BEVERLY NOE: He didn’t even drink tea.

BILL NOE: A little more about my background. Graduated from Larkspur Elementary [School], went to Douglas County High [School] in 1950—something, “3” I guess.

GRAY: How many kids were there? In your class?

BILL NOE: We graduated with 47.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: So, I don’t know what it started with. It was about—pretty steady as far as number kids in that area. I wrestled, lettered in wrestling, two years, I guess it was. So, I enjoyed doing that. 

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BILL NOE: During this period of time, I had an ambition to be a rancher also, but my dad said I couldn’t do that.

GRAY: Why?

BILL NOE: Well, he explained the “why.” Land was becoming so expensive, you couldn’t buy the land, make the payments, pay the interest, pay the taxes, and still make a living because agriculture products were just not that profitable. So, that made sense to me, so I decided I’d do something else. I was interested in flying, being a pilot or electronics, which was kind of really becoming a big industry right then, so—the pilot thing didn’t work out because you have to get a lot of hours in and without any money, you don’t do that. My dad said he couldn’t send me to college because we were quite poor at the time, so I joined the Navy Reserves, thinking that I’d get, you know, electronics education there. Bev and I got serious when we were in high school, so I decided I didn’t want to float around in a ship for one thing, [Laughter] and the other thing—

GRAY: --Does have an impact on a relationship.

BEVERLY NOE: I was very important.

BILL NOE: Yeah. Most important thing in my life, that’s for sure. So, I was in the Navy Reserves for a year. Went to Great Lakes Naval Training Center for training. Then, the Army came out with a plan where they would guarantee you schooling. So, I resigned from the Navy and enlisted in the Army the same day. I went to Electronics School, Electronics Missile School, with the intent that when I finished my enlistment, I’d work at the Martin Company, which was just moving into the Denver area at that time. So, I served my three years and was an instructor at the Air Defense School during that time. 

GRAY: Where was that?

BILL NOE: Fort Bliss, Texas. 

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: Bev and I got married and had about a year to go on my enlistment, so [we lived in Texas].

GRAY: So, you got married down in Texas?

BILL NOE: No, got married here [in Palmer Lake]. Lived in El Paso, which is where Fort Bliss is, for a little over a year. Got out of the Army, came back to Colorado, and I did get a job at the Martin Company, worked there for four years. So, my training paid off in that respect, and, of course, we were building Titan missiles, and when the, all the missiles were built, they laid off close to fourteen thousand people. That was a big impact on the Denver area. So, I helped my dad on the ranch and stuff for a couple of years, finally got a job in electronics in Colorado Springs. Worked there for three years until all the contracts fizzled on that. So, out of a job.

GRAY: There’s a pattern going here.

BILL NOE: Well, if you’re a defense contract worker, you follow contracts. I didn’t want to move the kids, based on my experience with moving when I was a kid, so I vowed to stay put, and we did that. We managed to stay in the Larkspur school district and Douglas County High [School] for all three of their lives. That was a high priority to me, so I took a lot odd jobs. I learned planning at that time. I guess I can’t remember when. That was in the ‘70s, I suppose, because your dad was commissioner. The law—Colorado passed some laws requiring all the counties to come up with land use regulations and subdivision regulations. It was called Senate Bill 35. It also required them to form a planning commission. The new commissioner that replaced Bev’s dad nominated me for being on the planning commission.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: So, I was on the planning commission for two months, and they had a surveyor that was supposed to be the planning director. He didn’t know a thing about planning, so he left after two months, and the commissioners asked me if I would run the planning department until they found somebody. He didn’t find anybody. 

BEVERLY NOE: Convenient.

BILL NOE: So, I was trying to maintain my other job in, working in the planning office, so finally, they asked me if I would become Planning Director. So, I was thinking about it. I decided to go that route because it was more interesting than what I was doing.

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BILL NOE: So, I can’t remember—that was in ’73, I become the Planning Director for Douglas County, and then the following year, the State [State of Colorado] put in another law called House Bill 1041, which was a land use law, but it required identification of all the hazard areas, non-building areas, and incorporate those in the regulations and so forth that they’d put together in the earlier law they’d passed. So, I was appointed Director of Land Use, Commission for Douglas County as well as Planning Director. What else—let me talk a little bit about how planning was a foreign thing for Douglas County. The citizens, the Planning Commission [phone rings in background]—

GRAY: Start this back up again?

BILL NOE: Okay. That was a funny thing. About the Planning Commission, they were appointed by the County Commissioners. So was I. The first meeting I attended when I was on the Planning Commission, I was given a subpoena by the Sheriff. He walked in and asked my name and said, “This envelope’s for you.” So, Perry Park, which was Colorado Western Development, Lee Stubblefield’s group, that the Planning Commission had, prior to my appointment, had turned down, the big master plan for Perry Park, from Larkspur clear to the mountains. So, I got sued along with the rest of the Planning Commission at my first meeting, for five million dollars. That’s kind of a shock.

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BILL NOE: But, I guess that became kind of normal for people that didn’t get their way, to threaten to sue you and then harass you—

GRAY: --and end up settling?

BILL NOE: Well, yeah, with the court. 

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: But, because they really didn’t have a case because, you know, they [the Planning Commission] had valid reasons for turning down the project, but anyway, that was kind of a shock. After I was appointed Planning Director, we implemented a lot of planning. We had, on average, over a hundred applications for re-zoning, subdividing a year. The highest peak was over three hundred per year.

GRAY: Ooh. What time frame was that? Do you remember?

BILL NOE: ’73 to ’78.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: There wasn’t much control over developers at that time. They pretty much had a free hand, and they promised a lot of things, and the commissioners would approve stuff. A lot of the roads were never put in. They were supposed to put in the water and sewer and so forth. The original lot owners pretty much got stuck with a lot of stuff. Over time, they, you know, re-financed. The developers usually skipped out and sold off to somebody else.

GRAY: That’s too bad.

BILL NOE: Yeah, it was kind of bad, that thing there. As Planning Director, I had one secretary to start with and finally got a second secretary. Back in those days, we had to record everything in our public meetings. It was all done by shorthand. They wouldn’t let in these [tape] recorders back then, so my secretaries had to be highly skilled. Douglas County doesn’t pay very much, so it’s pretty hard to find good secretarial help. Eventually, I acquired a second secretary, and kind of made an assistant for me.

GRAY: So that was the whole thing, the department?

BILL NOE: Three.

GRAY: Three of you.

BEVERLY NOE: And where was your office?

BILL NOE: Okay. Yeah, that’s a good thing to mention. 

GRAY: I was just going there.

BILL NOE: Now, started out in the old Courthouse.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: Had two offices. One was on the main floor, next to the Clerk and Recorder’s, as I recall, across from the Treasurer’s Office. It was my public office that I had my secretaries down there and my desk. That’s where I do most of the meetings with the people. Then, I had a private office up on the cupulo, on the west end. It is a very narrow, steep stairwell to get up there, and then it had a doorway that went in so you could go up in the dome up there or whatever they call it, but the peak in the Courthouse there. Had this little office overlooking the west out there. That’s where I got most of my real work done. 

GRAY: The view must have been fabulous.

BILL NOE: Yeah. People don’t realize it, but the squirrels—you know, with big old trees around there—they figured out how to bore holes through the roof, and so there was squirrels up there, too.

GRAY: Company for you.

BILL NOE: I had a lot of my personal items, for planning and so forth, when the fire happened, so I lost 100% of everything up there. 

GRAY: Oh, yeah. Were you in the building when the fire started?

BILL NOE: No. It started somewhere at midnight? I got a call shortly after that to get down there. I mean, that’s a really bad fire because, you know, a whole lot of old [unclear] stuff really burned fast. So, we spent about three days without sleep trying to salvage what we could. We worked with, I think it was the State Archives or one of those organizations that most of the clerk’s records and the Treasurer, I think, and probably the Court Records, too. We salvaged a lot of them, but they were all wet. The State had this facility which was like a big vacuum chamber, so we packed everything up, took it down there and vacuum dried it under controlled conditions, so it wouldn’t mold and so forth for weeks, it seemed like. Eventually, we salvaged a lot of documents. Most of the subdivision maps and that sort of thing were flat, stored in drawers and so forth. They couldn’t be dried that way. A lot of them were on vellum and different types of materials, so the State also had a new building down there. One big floor, must have been close to, you know, several thousand feet, twenty thousand feet or something, of open area, so it was my job to take all those maps and all that, un-roll them, lay them on the floor, get them dried—

GRAY: Oh, okay.

BILL NOE: So, we did that. Took a couple, three weeks. 

GRAY: So, the whole floor was just covered with maps?

BILL NOE: Maps, yeah. Should be a picture in the paper somewhere, tending my maps. It was really a sad time. That old building was really a wonderful building to work in. A lot of history and so forth.

GRAY: Oh, yeah. It was a beautiful building, too. People are still—they still remember that building. 

BILL NOE: It was pretty disappointing what they built in its place.

GRAY: Yeah.

BILL NOE: The other part of being Planning Director, it was not a popular job. The Planning Commission were pretty well educated people, several geologists, realtors on there, a rancher was on there, but one was an oil geologist and the other was a seismic geologist. They were very interested in getting planning going in Douglas County and stopping the development free-for-all, so there was kind of a contention there all the time between the County Commissioners, who were pretty much pro-developer, and the Planning Commission that they appointed that was trying to get some order and structure to implement new planning laws that were passed. So, that was an interesting time. My particular job was really interesting because the County Commissioners appointed me as an appointed position. It wasn’t an elected position for being a Director. But, I worked for the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission’s policies and ideas and all that, I was implementing, which was kind of cross-purposes with some of the Commissioners. 

GRAY: Who were the Commissioners at the time?

BILL NOE: Carl Winkler, Gil Whitman, and Dave Curtis. Carl Winkler was probably the most pro-development. Eventually, after he was re-elected once or twice, he sided with the developers and decided to get rid of me, but not much fun going through that process. Anyway, County [Planning] Commissioners were pretty firm about what they wanted. They developed the land use plan, finally, which got kicked around. The County Commissioners met regularly and explained exactly what they were doing, and that was all fine. It’s more of the speculator developers rather than the legitimate developers, pressured the [County] Commissioners into declaring it null and void. Well, it still was in effect, effectively, because, you know, even though they said that, the Planning Commission hadn’t rescinded it. So, it was kind of a no-man’s-land for quite a while. As Planning Director, they appointed me to all the committees they could think of that they didn’t want to go to, so I was on the board for the Denver Regional Council of Governments, DRCOG, Northeast Health Planning Agency. I was coordinating between all the counties around, El Paso County, Jefferson County, Arapahoe County, City of Littleton, because they were impinging upon our area, Elbert and El Paso County. So, I did that. I spent about seventy hours a week as my normal week. Some weeks, a hundred hours. We usually had three meetings a week at night, on the normal job. Planning Commission held at least one hearing on every project, and we usually had three projects on each meeting. So, sometimes we had two or three meetings a week, processed all those projects that were proposed. A couple of things that we did. Adopt a comprehensive Land Use Plan. It was a major accomplishment. The other thing is the Arapahoe County Airport. Douglas County and Arapahoe County worked together to develop that, get the plans all done and coordinate, because part of that is over Douglas County. It’s now called “Centennial” [Centennial Airport]. That was another major accomplishment for the Planning Commission and myself. Another fun part was we had people that were not the best law-abiding citizens developing Parker area. 

GRAY: Go figure.

BILL NOE: If you’ve heard of Parker City, that was the beginning of development for the Parker area. 

GRAY: Hmm.

BILL NOE: Big project. Basically, a money-making scheme. The developers would take dirt from one pile, move it to another pile, move it back, and bill the banks back east for all this work they were doing. Anyway, I wound up testifying against the Mafia.

GRAY: Oh, my goodness.

BILL NOE: I had to testify in Federal Court as an expert witness. So, I was kind of leery about that because their reputation wasn’t too kind. One of our planning folks was on the way home one night, and she got stopped by a—had a breakdown in her car. She went and knocked on the Mafia’s home out there, and he met her with guns and so forth and sent her on her way.

GRAY: Where was that at?

BILL NOE: Just a little east and north, actually, downtown Parker now.

GRAY: Okay. Okay. [unclear]

BILL NOE: Anyway, they went up in Federal Court for fraud and so forth.

GRAY: This was in Denver? The courts in Denver? [Yes]

BILL NOE: Federal Court. So, got to do that. Also, part of my job was to testify before the various places, legislature, the State. I had to go testify on behalf of planning regulations and so forth on that. Testified for the [State] Joint Budget Commission. What else? I did a lot of testifying for the State Land Use Commission and Board, State Land Board and so forth. It was kind of interesting but very stressful. 

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BILL NOE: The other thing I felt was interesting in my life was I taught a little bit on the side, not for pay, but as Planning Director and all the work we had been doing, this kind of leadership in the whole State. I lectured at Red Rocks Community College on planning. Also, what’s the one downtown? Metro? 

GRAY: Okay. Metro State? Uh-huh.

BILL NOE: I think it was Metro. I did some planning, teaching [unclear] for their classes, and then C.U. [University of Colorado] had an urban planning group course there, and so I had interns from that for one year that worked for me. Really interesting, you know. I enjoyed that part, probably one of the most fun parts of my job.

GRAY: Were you teaching for an entire semester or were you a guest lecturer?

BILL NOE: Guest lecturer.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: It was kind of funny because I got a high school education. In the Army, I had the equivalent of an Associate’s Degree in Electronics. I attended D. U. [University of Denver] Law School to get some law courses. Other education I picked up. It’s kind of funny that they called me to do these guest lectures, so with a high school education, but I was competing with other planners with Master’s Degrees —

GRAY: You had O.J.T. [On-the-job training] training though—

BILL NOE: Yep. I did that. That was confirmed. The Governor says I was one of the top planners in the State, so I kind of appreciated that.

GRAY: Excellent.

BILL NOE: So, that takes me up until I got let go in 1978. 

GRAY: So, how long were you in planning?

BILL NOE: ’73 to in ’78.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: End of ’78.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: Then, the State Department of Natural Resources, Local Affairs, had me come in and work for them on a grant for a year. My job there was to interface with all the counties and cities in the State, trying to get a bigger voice in the federal decisions on land use, both the Forest Service and the BLM [Bureau of Land Management] because there was—back then, State rights issue was kind of a political issue that—they wanted more control in the State and less with the Feds [federal government], and this was their attempt to try to work that out. That fell by the wayside because, basically, business pressure—[Ronald] Reagan was President back then—to stop that program because they didn’t want to deal with forty-eight or fifty states on different regulations for every state. So, they killed that. That was a very interesting job, too. 

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BILL NOE: Then, I went back to work for Martin Company which changed their name to Martin Marietta at that time. I finished the rest of my career as a Program Planner for Lockheed Martin, when I retired. Worked on some fantastically interesting project.

GRAY: Uh-huh. Can you name any of them?

BILL NOE: Well, the—you’ve heard of “Peace-keeper Missile System?” That replaced all the old missiles that’s still in effect today, the ICBM [Inter-continental Ballistic Missile system]. Worked on that, test program. My job, basically, was to identify every task to build all this and schedule it. 

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: Check the cost, make sure what was going on with that. I also worked with the National Test Bed in Colorado Springs. Small airbase called “Schweiber” now. It’s about a square mile. But, it’s a very highly classified facility, and I had to—we had to set up a test facility there on pure, vacant land. There was nothing, no water, sewer, roads. So, in less than six months, we had to move 500 people, actually 600, into facilities down there and be ready to work—in six months’ time.

GRAY: That was a fast time frame.

BILL NOE: That was fast. We got it done. My job was to do all the planning to get that done. I did a lot of star wars work. That was a pretty interesting. One of the projects I worked on pretty much convinced [Mikhail] Gorbachev to re-negotiate because we were so far advanced of where they were with our development in these projects that they decided to re-negotiate and tear down the Wall [Berlin Wall] and all that, so it was kind of a personal milestone to be involved in that little piece of it. My last project was to build an intelligence satellite to collect a lot of information about our enemies, wherever they might be located. I spent a year in Cape Canaveral, getting that thing ready to launch. Survived five hurricanes while we were down there. Four-month project turned into a year because of all the hurricanes and re-starting and all that sort of thing. Most of the work that I was involved was “Top Secret” or higher, so I can’t talk too much about the actual work, but the technical part of that was really fun. I enjoyed that a lot. I retired after—I had 24 years, all total, with Martin and Lockheed Martin.

GRAY: Oh, okay.

BILL NOE: Retired with 21 years of credit for retirement, so—retired in 2005.

GRAY: Do you regret not continuing on with ranching?

BILL NOE: Oh, yes and no. The emotional part—yeah, that would be really fun, done that, but the practicality of it and what it would take, I’m glad I didn’t. 

GRAY: It was so uncertain. I mean, you really couldn’t plan anything. You didn’t know from one year to the next whether you were going to make it. 

BILL NOE: Well, the cards were kind of stacked against you because to stay in this area, which my folks wanted to do, land prices were going up because of the development pressure. You know, it would have been more practical, and some of the guys did it, moved to Montana and bought cheap land up there and did their ranching up there. I miss it. I’m glad I got to know it as a kid, that my ancestors were able to do that.

GRAY: Your kids didn’t really have that experience, right?

BILL NOE: Well, they were exposed to it because of being around here and know what it’s all about. They were in 4-H, so they got exposed to animals and all that sort of thing.

BEVERLY NOE: Both your parents and my parents were still ranching when our children were small, so they were able to be on the ranch.

GRAY: It’s kind of like me. My grandfather was a farmer, and so I got to go and help in the summertime and stuff like that, but when he passed away, the farm was sold because there wasn’t anybody in the next generation that wanted to do it, so my kids, my grandkids, don’t have the opportunity.

BILL NOE: That’s kind of like what happened at the Eagle Mountain Ranch that my grandfather, I.J., back in his day, they did “generation skipping” as a way of conveying property, minimizing the estate taxes. Well, of course, between then and the time that happened after he died, the land went to the grandkids, basically, managed by my grandfather Charles Fred. Then, when Charles Fred, it was the estate taxes that had to be paid which is a big chunk, so they had to sell off a good portion of it just to pay the estate taxes. There were eight kids that divided up the balance of the land. The other three kept it, which is north of Noe Road, and that’s Uncle Jim and my Aunt Helen Arsten Noe and Ida Mae’s husband, John. They had three parcels north of Noe Road. 

GRAY: It looks like all of those are for sale now? When I was driving down Noe Road, there were a lot of “For Sale” signs right up there, so I wasn’t quite sure what is part of the original property?—

BILL NOE: Well, the big sign you saw with big trees around it, then barns down below, that’s Eagle Mountain Ranch there.

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: The other one, just west of there, is called the Babcock Place. Babcock built the house there and so forth. It was not part of the Noe Ranch.

GRAY: Okay. That’s that big two-story yellow place?

BILL NOE: Uh-huh.

GRAY: [unclear]

BILL NOE: That ranch, at one time, had all the parcels between Eagle Mountain Ranch and my folks’ place. 

GRAY: Okay.

BILL NOE: It was—probably 180 acres on both sides of the road there, along the creek. It’s been sub-divided into parcels, so those houses west that are for sale were split off the Babcock Ranch.

GRAY: There’s still a central Eagle Mountain Ranch left?

BILL NOE: Right. It’s got 200 acres plus the ranch buildings. Two houses on it.

GRAY: Okay. Okay.

BILL NOE: That was all that remained after the estate was settled. 

GRAY: Okay. What about your family place? Is there still a core ranch left?

BEVERLY NOE: Yes.

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: The original ranch that my grandfather built was off of Spruce Mountain Road, and my parents, in 1955, sold everything that was between Perry Park Road and Spruce Mountain Road, that they owned. They didn’t own the whole thing, but they sold their portion of it. So, they had seven hundred and some acres on the west side of Perry Park Road, which they sold all, eventually, sold all but 80 acres. They built the house in 1955 on the west side of Perry Park Road. We still own that--

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: --and 80 acres.

GRAY: Who lives there?

BEVERLY NOE: Actually, there’s two houses. My sister lives in the house that my parents built. They moved in a small house when my sister was divorced, and our daughter lives in the other house.

GRAY: Oh, okay. [unclear] close, that’s good.

BILL NOE: I might add about that, that the 80 acres now has been put into a “conservation easement” which joins two other “conservation easements” further into the mountain.

BEVERLY NOE: So there should be a little chunk of Douglas County.

GRAY: That’s one thing I like about Douglas County. There is so much “Open Space” land, and there’s so much pride in the land that we’re keeping it so that it’s not—you know, Denver to Colorado Springs and all urban—that’s a good thing. I like that.

BEVERLY NOE: Yeah. We’re real pleased that my parents were able to put the 80 acres into it and preserve it for us. My daughter was—she is such a horsey person—she’s a farrier.

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: She loves that ranch up there, so it’s exciting that she can live on it. My parents were really pleased that she was up there.

GRAY: How did she get into farrier work?

BEVERLY NOE: She was divorced and had two little girls and re-married, trying to find a career that she picked to take care of the girls, still make some money, and do something she enjoyed. Her Gramps taught her how to shoe horses, and she went that way. She’s fifty now, and it’s getting a little difficult.

BILL NOE: Not only that. She not only learned it from Dad, she became the first woman journeyman farrier in the State.

GRAY: Awesome. I like that.

BEVERLY NOE: Yeah.

BILL NOE: She works with veterinarians for special cases. She’s got a pretty good reputation for doing all that.

GRAY: Cool. That’s cool. You mentioned, both of you, that your kids were in to 4-H, and you guys were in 4-H, as well. Talk about—because we had mentioned earlier that you went over to Camp Shadybrook. Talk about that a little bit.

BEVERLY NOE: We did. Bill and I, both, were in 4-H. I don’t remember the years that we went to Shadybrook, but there were a lot of years. I don’t know. Six, something, that we went to Shadybrook. The 4-H clubs from Douglas County went up, I don’t remember, July or August or something for a week, and the Greenland 4-H club. Most of us would pile into the back of a couple of pickups, very old pickups that sometimes boiled over, and we’d have to stop, going up toward Deckers and that way. We had a lot of fun up there. Good experiences, just learning about nature and leadership and camaraderie—

GRAY: Were you staying in cabins or were they tents? How were the-- 

BEVERLY NOE: They were cabins when we were there with a central dining hall.

BILL NOE: All-purpose room actually, because they did their crafts, meetings,—

BEVERLY NOE: Right. We did lots of crafts. 

BILL NOE: —entertainment and all that.

BEVERLY NOE: That kind of thing there. What do you remember about Shadybrook? Besides teasing girls?

BILL NOE: I only went once. That was about it.

GRAY: You only went once?

BEVERLY NOE: You must have been a terror. I thought you went more than once.

BILL NOE: No. Talk about some of your accomplishments in your career, not mine. 

BEVERLY NOE: Well, as a girl on the ranch, I was in 4-H, I guess from the time we came back until Bill and I were married in August of ’59. Most of that time, I had Angus cattle, of which I took quite a few championships with.

GRAY: Cool.

BEVERLY NOE: I had a little heifer that I raised. She, later, had a calf that I took. 4-H was a big part of our lives. My Dad was 4-H leader, Bill and I were on the square-dance team. Was it—yeah, it was just Greenland square-dancers went to Fort Collins twice. Won. Got to go up and square-dance up there. I was on the stock-judging team. It was a county team, although I think there were three out of four of us from Greenland, and we went throughout the State and judged not only cattle, but sheep and hogs. 

GRAY: Was this at the different county fairs that you would do the judging or--?

BEVERLY NOE: They had special events for the judging.

GRAY: Okay. Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: We went to Gunnison one year over there. Had a pretty good team over there that year. I was in the Order of Rainbow for Girls, was the advisor for that 1958-1959; held most of the offices in that. Learned a lot of leadership through 4-H and Rainbow and that kind of thing. Of course, all those high school activities [unclear], going to the wrestling matches, watch Bill, cheer him on.

GRAY: Cheer him on.

BEVERLY NOE: So, you know, it was—I was fairly active for living out—it was much harder than it is nowadays to get to Castle Rock to do a lot of things. Of course, we learned to drive—we had cars, of course, and learned to drive—but gas was expensive and we weren’t allowed to take the car very often. Occasionally, we’d get to do that. After Bill and I were married, and we started our family—we have three children, a daughter and two sons—I got to be a stay-at-home mom and raise the kids while Bill was doing a lot of planning—

GRAY: Typical situation, yes.

BEVERLY NOE: As Bill said, we chose and were able to live in Douglas County most of our married life and raise our children here, which was a major goal for us. All three of our children graduated from Douglas County High School. As I said, our daughter lives in Douglas County on the old ranch. One son lives in Palmer Lake with his family. The other son lives in Castle Rock with his family. So, we’ve been very fortunate to have them want to stick close. We’ve had seven generations in Douglas County, so—kind of neat—

GRAY: Uh-huh. Definitely.

BEVERLY NOE: After our youngest started to first grade, I became a Teacher’s Aide at the Larkspur School, worked half days, which worked out great because then I had the same time off as the kids had off. I had mornings to do things at home or vice versa. I guess probably it was the other way around. So, that was interesting. Then, the last, I think it was, three years, I was at Cantril, which was different. At Larkspur, I worked in the classroom with the teachers and the children. At Cantril, it was more “recess” duty and clerical, helping in the office and everything. A little bit of classroom, but not as much.

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BEVERLY NOE: While I was working at Cantril, I decided the kids were getting older—they were all three in high school—and maybe I ought to do something else with my life. I went back to school at Arapahoe Community College and achieved my Associate Degree in Health Information. Graduated from Arapahoe College the same year our daughter graduated from Douglas County High School.

GRAY: Excellent.

BEVERLY NOE: Worked at several different hospitals, but ended up working at Rose Medical Center for twenty-six years.

GRAY: Where’s that one?

BEVERLY NOE: It’s down on 9th and Colorado, near where the old Colorado Hospital—

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: Put on a lot of miles driving that car.

GRAY: What did you do at Rose?

BEVERLY NOE: Most of the time, I was a “coder.” I don’t know if ever—diagnosis and every procedure has an international numeric number that goes with it, which involves reading through the entire medical record that they have and determining from that and from the doctor’s diagnosis and so forth, what the code should be that will [unclear] into it, and then it goes into a worldwide database. 

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: I was fortunate the last five years. I got to work from home, which was very nice. Yes.

GRAY: Didn’t have that drive up there.

BEVERLY NOE: Didn’t have that drive up there. Three of those years, my parents had moved in with us. They were here for eight years, but three of those years I worked, and I decided I couldn’t do both. 

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BEVERLY NOE: So, I quit. During the years the kids were growing up, I was involved in the Little Log Church in Palmer Lake, as a member there for a long time. Well, I went there when I was a kid. Sunday School teacher, PTA officer, and so forth. Home demonstration. They had so much of that in those days. 4-H leader, Republican Women’s Club. Nominated and presented as an “Outstanding Young Woman of America” in 1970.

GRAY: Cool.

BEVERLY NOE: That felt—felt good about that. The Larkspur Friendly Larks Home Demonstration Club nominated me for that. That was kind of neat.

GRAY: Friendly Larks doesn’t meet anymore, right?

BEVERLY NOE: No. I think most of those have disbanded. Doesn’t seem to be the interest in young women. Their time--so many of them work any more. 

GRAY: Yeah.

BEVERLY NOE: Did a lot of that. Did lots and lots of canning. 

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BEVERLY NOE: Had big gardens. Canned between 200 and 300 jars of fruits and vegetables and meats during the summer, you know.

GRAY: My grandmother did a lot of that. I can remember coming back in the summers and helping with doing that. 

BEVERLY NOE: Made butter. I loved to make breads. 

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BEVERLY NOE: We kind of got hooked on bread and butter.

BILL NOE: It’s good stuff.

BEVERLY NOE: Yeah.

GRAY: Definitely good stuff.

BEVERLY NOE: Yeah. Did a lot of hay with my dad when I was—before we were married. 

GRAY: Uh-huh. Did you drive the team?

BEVERLY NOE: We didn’t have a team. We got to have a tractor. 

GRAY: A tractor. Okay. So, did you drive the tractor?

BEVERLY NOE: I did. I was out there almost sunup to sundown every day in the summer. Poor Bill, when we were married, I could make cinnamon rolls and I could boil water. I’d much rather be out with my dad than in the house. I was out in the hay fields when my dad caught his arm in the round-baler.

GRAY: That’s how he lost his arm?

BEVERLY NOE: He did. We had to amputate it. 

GRAY: You had to take him to the--? You were the only one out there with him?

BEVERLY NOE: I was the only one out there with him.

GRAY: That was horrible.

BEVERLY NOE: That was a unique experience, though. I would never have made it through that experience except that he was such a strong person and he remained so calm. Step by step, stepped me through what we needed to do—

GRAY: How old were you at the time?

BEVERLY NOE: Sixteen. Almost seventeen.

GRAY: Still young.

BEVERLY NOE: Still young. Yeah. He kept saying I saved his life. I think the Lord and I did that. But, anyway, after that he was an inspiration to a lot of people. He never let it get him down. He continued to ranch (with) modified equipment. Spoke before school children on disabilities and that they aren’t disabilities. So, anyway—

GRAY: Sounds like a very special person.

BEVERLY NOE: I think so, but I’m prejudiced.

GRAY: That’s a good thing.

BEVERLY NOE: So, I was busy while Bill was doing all his things.

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BEVERLY NOE: We’ve had a good life.

BILL NOE: Do now.

GRAY: I think so.

BILL NOE: We lived here near Eagle Mountain, (which you can see) straight out the window, [unclear]. It’s not on Eagle Mountain Ranch property but it adjoins it. Right out there is where the corner is. We’re fortunate we’re that close—

BEVERLY NOE: Yep.

BILL NOE: The long mountain over there is Spruce Mountain, and over the top is where Bev’s folks’ ranch was—

GRAY: So they’re close.

BILL NOE: Yeah. As the crow flies.

GRAY: And I saw some big ones today.

BILL NOE: Yeah.

BEVERLY NOE: When Bill and his brother and a friend decided they were going to scare us girls one night because we were sleeping out, they hiked from where his parents lived up and over Spruce Mountain, and they didn’t scare us. I don’t know if they ever made it clear down the other side or not.

BILL NOE: Oh, yeah. We did, yeah.

BEVERLY NOE: I don’t think they found us.

BILL NOE: I think you guys had already went in the house by then.

BEVERLY NOE: It was probably that night we laid there and talked about flying saucers. Pretty soon, we got scared so we took our bedding and went between the barn and the grainery, and we put them there, so they didn’t know where we were.

BILL NOE: Wild girl chase instead of a goose chase.

BEVERLY NOE: That was before we were even thinking about liking each other. 

BILL NOE: Yeah. 

GRAY: How long? Couple of miles? Is that how long the hike would have been?

BILL NOE: Oh, yeah, at least a mile each way. Probably closer to three miles round trip.

GRAY: Gee. 

BILL NOE: Of course, back then, you did a lot of walking, too, you know.

GRAY: Definitely did. That’s the thing when I was growing up, you know, the kids spent a lot of time outside. Kids don’t do that so much anymore. 

BEVERLY NOE: No, they don’t.

BILL NOE: Might just mention, just to tie things together a little bit, that you donated the early plats of the ranch, survey, to the county library and the family tree—

BEVERLY NOE: The Higginson Ranch.

BILL NOE: The Higginson Ranch and also the Higginson Tree, the original of that and what else? 

BEVERLY NOE: The Curtis Book.

BILL NOE: Curtis Book, yeah, so done that.

BEVERLY NOE: And, I believe my mother’s “Douglas County Roots” video, DVD that we did. We donated that. I have a tape that I would like to donate, or have copied, have the original that my dad did just for the family, called “Rambling with Russell”. He did ramble.

BILL NOE: A lot of history.

BEVERLY NOE: But there is quite a bit of history of this area that I thought maybe they would like to preserve.

GRAY: Oh, yeah. I’ll see if I can get it copied. I know there’s—there’s been a couple of things that people dropped off—I haven’t figured out how to do the copying bit, but I will give it a valiant effort. 

BEVERLY NOE: We had it put on a DVD this past year, and there’s one segment of it—

BILL NOE: Didn’t come across.

BEVERLY NOE: Didn’t come across at all. So, [unclear] original papers.

GRAY: Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: Or take it down when we take all this stuff of Bill’s.

GRAY: Okay. Sounds good.

BEVERLY NOE: I think I donated, think I donated the little pamphlet that I did for the Stewart Reunion a year ago. We had that.

BILL NOE: It’s got some family history.

BEVERLY NOE: Uh-huh, it’s got some family history, and it tells where all those ranches—

GRAY: Oh, okay.

BEVERLY NOE: --of the family were.

GRAY: That’s good. That’s what I need in my head, to figure it out, to get that sort of knowledge.

BEVERLY NOE: There’s a little map of that part--

GRAY: Excellent.

BEVERLY NOE: --of my mother’s side.

GRAY: Uh-huh. Okay.

BEVERLY NOE: Well, anything else wonderful that you can think of?

BILL NOE: No, not really. Highlighted just about everything.

GRAY: I think you did a good job. Excellent. I appreciate that. Thank you very much for doing this with me. 

BEVERLY NOE: Thank you.

BILL NOE: You’re welcome.

BEVERLY NOE: It’s a privilege to able to share our history and heritage.

GRAY: You guys have had such an important part of Douglas County history, and I appreciate it. 

BILL NOE: Go back a long ways.

GRAY: Uh-huh.

BEVERLY NOE: I said when I married Bill that I would then be related to almost everybody in the County. Missed the Parker area, but—

GRAY: You got the central part. You definitely got that. 

BEVERLY NOE: It’s changed since then. No way now. 

END OF INTERVIEW