Uncle Rod and Aunt Lena Hammer had sold their fam in Hanover and were moving to Arizona. They had a farm auction at their farmstead the day after Thanksgiving in 1946. Before the auction was over, it started snowing hard. Dad and his Army Jeep, with Paul Jenkin’s help, pulled many people out of the snow onto the road.

The next day, Bill and Fannie Reble’s house caught fire. We heard about it on the phone via the emergency call number. Bill and Fannie lived about ten miles from our house. However, we lived about two and one-half miles from the maintained county road. Dad and Paul heeded the call. I was eight years old and got to go with them.

Dad would drive a ways, the he and Paul would have to shovel snow. It took us two hours to get to the maintained road. We knew we weren’t going to get to Reble’s in time to help fight the fire. Their house burned to the ground.

This was a big snow that covered a lot of the country. We had at least three feet of snow on the level. They didn’t have quite as much snow to the west of us at Camp Carson and up into the foothills. The Camp Carson officials opened up the whole camp to ranchers who could drive their cattle there to graze.

There were ranchers as far as 50 miles east who drove their cattle to Camp Carson in the fall of 1946.

As I said, I was eight years old, and went to school in Fountain, which was fifteen miles by bus. We lost two weeks of school due to the heavy snow. We made this lost school time up by going to school on Saturdays.

Many of the grade school kids listened to a radio program on Saturday morning called “Let’s Pretend.” Our grade school principal had an office on the second floor, and she had a radio in her office. She would let the first thru fourth graders come up to her office to listen to “Let’s Pretend.”

My dad, Henry Hammer, and some other ranchers who lived close to Camp Carson drove their cattle back to Camp Carson the following fall uninvited. This turned out to be an annual event each fall for several years. However, Camp Carson worked out an agreement for the ranchers to pay an annual grazing fee.

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