Rope the Moon

By C. Nunes

This is the first of a two-part autobiography. These stories are remembered from1936 when I was five years old until I joined the Air Force in 1950. They are presented in chronological order and will show how life was while growing up during that time frame. This was written in the year of my ninetieth birthday, and because of the drastic changes over the years, some stories may seem to be fictional. But this is my honest and true personal account from that time. Some names have been changed to protect the innocent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664170520

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Copyright © 2021 by Chuck Nunes.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

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Rev. date: 05/17/2021

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Contents

Abstract

My Father’s Family

My Mother’s Family

My Parents

First Lessons

First Grade: 1937

Hard Times

Joe The Tease

A Trumpet

New Sister

Leaving Home

School

My First Horse

Family Move Out Of The City

The Platte Canyon Ranch

Three Big Hats

ABSTRACT

This is the first of a two-part autobiography. These stories are remembered from 1936 when I was five years old until I joined the Air Force in 1950. They are presented in chronological order and will show how life was while growing up during that time frame. This was written in the year of my ninetieth birthday, and because of the drastic changes over the years, some stories may seem to be fictional. But this is my honest and true personal account from that time. Some names have been changed to protect the innocent.

MY FATHER’S FAMILY

My dad, Alvin Edward Nunes, was the son of immigrant parents. His father, Ambrose Nunes, came from Portugal. Soon after arriving in New York, he went to work shining shoes and sweeping up hair in a barber shop. He later met Hannah O’Connel, a young immigrant from Ireland. They were soon married and moved to Denver, Colorado, where they raised three boys. My father was the youngest.

Grandpa Nunes became a barber and eventually owned his own shop, a nice home, several rental houses, and 60 acres of farmland in the country. He had realized the American dream, and he always said, It does not matter what we do for a living. Just do it the very best you can.

*     *     *

When I was about five years old, we sometimes visited Grandpa and Grandmother Nunes. It seemed to me then that we would do the same thing every time we visited. We would always go to church and then come home for a ham dinner. After that, Grandpa would take the whole family out for a drive to visit his land in the country. Then in the evening, we would go to the Denver City Park for a band concert where we would have a picnic on the grass and listen to the music. Sometimes, our dad would rent a rowboat for us to go out on the lake and join all the other people gathered around the bandstand in their rowboats.

My grandmother spoke with a heavy Irish brogue, and she often spoke Gallic. I learned that after painting her tricolor cat with glue. She angrily said a lot of things to me that I did not understand. One time, she told me a story that I will never forget. When she was a little girl, they lived in a shanty, and animals lived below it. She had a very beautiful white dress that her mother had made for a special occasion, which was her first holy communion. It had been neatly laid out on the bed. They returned to find that the goats had gotten in and were eating it and walking all over the white dress. Her mother cleaned and patched it up and told her that it did not matter what she wore; it was the girl inside that was important.

MY MOTHER’S FAMILY

My mother’s people came from Iowa, and most of the family were farmers or country people. My great-grandfather served in the Civil War, and I was told that another member of the family was a math professor at a university. Charles Minard, my grandfather, also loved mathematics, but he made his living working with leather. He owned a small shop on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, where he repaired shoes and boots and made saddles and harnesses. He was a tall, lanky man who chewed tobacco and never talked much. But sometimes, after a big dinner with guests, he would recite The Face on the Bar Room Floor. It is a very long poem. I would go outside and play, and when I came back much later, he would still be reciting it.

They had a few acres not far out of Denver and lived in a little house my grandfather had built himself. Like many houses and barns of that time, it was never painted. I still remember the natural brown color of the buildings. They did not have running water, but there was a bucket and a dipper just inside the door that everyone would drink from. Electricity had not been brought out that far past the city limits, so they used kerosene lamps. They raised chickens and grew a large garden. Grandmother canned a lot of vegetables and fruits, and she also made some of their clothing. When Grandpa passed, Grandmother moved into the city, within a few blocks of the State Capitol building in Denver. She was a very outgoing lady who had many friends, and she loved to have them over for card parties. I liked staying with her, and she taught me manners and how to behave like a gentleman around her lady friends.

MY PARENTS

When my mother, Marie Lorain Minard, met my father, she was working at her first job just out of high school. Mom was a telephone operator at the Shirley Savoy Hotel in Denver. My dad, a year older than her, must have appeared to be a typical middle-class city boy at that time. Old photos show him with his Ford Model A, a canoe, and a camel hair coat. Actually, he was planning to go to Paris and be an artist when he turned twenty-one, but that plan was put aside when he met my beautiful mother. They were very soon married and started to raise a family. I was the firstborn, and eighteen months later, my brother Joe came along. My dad was a devout Catholic, and he wanted a large family, so my mother seemed to have a baby about every year. They eventually raised a family of sex boys and two girls.

FIRST LESSONS

In kindergarten, the teacher was playing the piano, and all of us children were sitting on the floor, singing. She was sitting on a stool, with her long dress covering everything. I wondered what was under the dress, so I crawled under it and looked up. I still remember how shocked I was when I looked up to see the underside of the stool. So, I thought, that is why she always wears a long dress.

When I was about five years old, I remember lying out on the grass one evening with my dad and younger brother Joe. We were all looking up at the night sky, and Dad was pointing out the Man in the Moon and the Big Dipper. Like most children at that age, we were probably squirming and moving around a lot. Then our dad told us to be very still for a minute and listen to all the different sounds we could hear. Suddenly, I heard all kinds of things: the crickets, the breeze in the trees, and a mother way off in the distance calling someone in for supper. I didn’t know until that moment that there was so much going on all at the same time.

FIRST GRADE: 1937

I started first grade at St. Vincent’s, two city blocks from our house. My mother showed me how to go back and forth to school and then allowed me to go there alone. I still remember how proud I was to make that trip by myself.

I often wore bib overalls with a large image of Popeye sewed on the bib. Of course, the other kids all called me Popeye, and the older kids would tease and chase after me. One time, they chased me all the way to my front door, and my dad just happened to be home. I must have been crying and told him that the kids were chasing me.

He said, Don’t you run away, ever. Those kids can’t hurt you as much as a spanking will if you ever run from them again. They just want to bully you, and you are playing their game when you run away. The next day, when school was out, I just started walking home, and the kids all circled me while yelling, Popeye! Popeye! Then the biggest boy came up very close and gave me a hard push. So I hit him in the face, and we started fighting until a nun came out and broke us up. I don’t know who won, but the other boy had a black eye, and I just had a bloody nose. We later became good friends, and that was the last time anyone ever bullied me.

My ears were big and stood out. One day, I was walking up a stairway at school, and there was a sunlit window above. Some girls were walking up behind me, and one said, Look how the sun shines though that boy’s ears! It did not bother me at the time, but I wonder why it is a remark that I still remember. Maybe it’s because my ears haven’t changed that much? The sun still shines through them.

My family moved to the other side of town while I was still in the first grade. My mother wanted me to complete that year, so she showed me how to take the streetcar and transfer to a bus. I was very proud to make the trip by myself and soon learned that the first in a series of transfers from the streetcar to a bus could be avoided by walking through the Denver University campus. There was a pond on the way, where I often tried to catch crawdads. One day, while I was getting on the bus behind a bunch of grown-ups, the door closed on my foot while I was getting up, and the bus started moving before I was in. I was dragged by one foot across the intersection and halfway down the block before the conductor realized what had happened. A man who had witnessed the accident gave me a card with his name and phone number, saying he would be a witness if ever needed. I gave the card to my folks, but they just told me not to get on when I’m behind a bunch of