Home Boys

Over the next few years, the former farm experienced a building boom. A school. A dining room. An infirmary. A boiler house to supply hot water for bathing and to heat the new buildings. Boys' and girls' dormitories. A dairy barn. An administration building. The Field home, now renamed Campbell Hall after a boardmember, was used as a nursery and for more girls' housing.

At the home, children were divided by both sex and age. Siblings would arrive together, only to be pulled apart as each was sent to the appropriate building. They might never see each other again, except perhaps in passing. Some arrived young enough that they soon forgot they had siblings. Then, on certain days, they'd be lined up for inspection by couples looking to adopt--usually just one child, rarely siblings. Younger children, especially Anglos, went first; older children were less likely to be adopted and tended to go to couples deemed too old or poor to qualify for infants.

No matter how many children were adopted, the population of the home kept growing. Soon the board bought land to the north of the main grounds across Iliff, where it built a new school named after boardmember Dora E. Reynolds. The children attended Reynolds through the sixth grade, then moved to Grant Junior High for seventh through ninth grades and South High for the rest of their education. Otherwise, the children were generally kept at the home, away from the rest of the city. In 1924, architect Frank E. Edbrooke donated his money and expertise to build a gym on the grounds that was named after him.

The children's clothes and other necessities were donated by various groups, often church-related, with supplements from the legislature. But the home provided most of its own food from its gardens and dairy herd. The children did their bit--and then some. Girls worked at housekeeping jobs such as sweeping, dusting, washing the 624 window panes, setting tables, serving meals, ironing and helping in the nursery. The boys collected the laundry, carried meals to the infirmary, cut and watered the grass, kept up the grounds, helped in the boiler house, cleaned the schoolhouse, milked the cows, hauled manure, worked in the gardens, took away the garbage and cared for the pigs.

During the summer, farmers and ranchers from the surrounding area were allowed to take boys home to work for them. Sometimes it turned out well for the boys, who might be adopted or at least kept on with pay. But at other times they were treated no better than indentured servants.

Although the home was largely a community unto itself, whatever was happening in the rest of the state--in the rest of the world--had an effect. When the country sank into the Depression, people were constantly on the move looking for work and families were homeless and hungry. Desperate parents gave up their children as a last-ditch effort. Even though the state home had a capacity of 200, in 1933 it averaged 347 children in residence.

The State Home wasn't easy. One thing I give credit to the Home for is I learned how to work. Boy, did we ever work!

I worked in the boys' dining hall. We were up at 5 a.m. so we could get to the dining hall to set tables. While the boys were seated, us girls would serve them restaurant-style.

Sometimes the boys would trip us girls while we carried the trays. If Mrs. Reibush, the dining hall supervisor, saw this she would hit the boys' legs with a radiator brush. "That hurts," the boys would cry. She would dare them to do it again. The boys didn't.

After the meal, we would clear and clean the tables; sweep and wetmop the floors. After school, us girls had to be at the dining hall at 3:30 p.m. for the dinner meal.

--Daniella Garcia, who lived at the home from 1930 until 1940, when she turned eighteen.

Jim Long has such an open, pleasant face that it's easy to believe Ann, his wife of more than fifty years, when she says she's never known him to speak a cross word. "The sweetest man on earth" has a name tag stating that he first arrived at the home in 1929 or 1930--such was the state of record-keeping at the time.

The Longs have visited these grounds before and gone over to the cemetery where Jim's mother was buried a few years after she brought him to the home. But this is the first time Jim Long has reunited with other alums of the home.

He was born in 1920 in St. Louis, the youngest of five children. His father died and then the hard times of the Depression hit. In the middle of winter, his mother bundled all the kids into a broken-down Model T with curtains instead of windows and drove west.

They made it as far as Denver before getting into a terrible accident. One of Jim's two sisters was killed; Jim's legs were pinned under the car. "He still has scars," says Ann.

His mother had now lost everything--her husband, her meager finances, her hope. Unable to care for her children, she took them to the Colorado State Home for Dependent and Neglected Children. At least there, she knew, they'd have a warm place to sleep and something to eat.