Larry Batson’s America, Aguilar, Colo.

Not a lot happens in Aguilar to crowd out old memories. The first seven men and women I encountered there remembered by mother as a girl. She was born in 1910.

Each of the seven also remembered the that my uncle, Woodrow Diskin, broke his neck in a high school football game. He died the next morning. That game was played on Nov. 21, 1936.

“Memorial Day is big here because it brings the children back.”, Mike Scarofiotti said. Probably 75 percent here are retired on the miners’ pension or Social Security. “The children come and decorate the graves for their mothers and grandparents”.

St. Anthony’s Cemetery is on a hill at the edge of town. Barbed wire and crooked fence posts mark its’ boundaries. Sagebrush, cactus and the tough wiry, grayish plants that hold down the sandy soil of the nearby desert cover all but those graves newly cleared. A clump of yellow roses are beginning to bloom. So is a cluster of lilacs around one family plot.

Scarafiotti and Joe Arnone came out to the cemetery to help me look for a grave. My sister Diane was buried here 45 years ago. She died of pneumonia at the age of _?__. A picture of her, “a color portrait made from a black and white snapshot”, stood on my mothers’ dresser until she died 32 years later.

I have two memories of Diane, who was about 5 years younger than I. In one she looks up at me, grinning with quiet glee over something she has just done. In the other she tugs at my sleeve and leads me from my own play to show me something, I don’t remember what.

Now, 45 years later, I had thought that I would visit Diane’s grave. Mike and Joe and I walked the narrow dirt drives, reading markers. Then we got off into the weeds and cacti.

“Not to scare you,” Mike warned, “but snakes might be out.”

My folks talked of putting a stone on Diane’s grave. There was no money in the beginning. For years, it seems, my father Ernest wrote a $5 check every month to pay off the hospital bill. We moved back to Missouri, started farming. There was a war and then a three year drought. And before that I had left home.

I have a faint memory of my father saying they had bought a marker, but Mike and Joe and I could not find it. Many graves were marked with metal crosses with isinglass holders for name cards. The names had faded into nothing.

“Some people painted a rock”, Mike said.

One corner lay beyond the driveway. “For suicides” Joe said. “and babies who died before they could be baptized ,” Mike said, “But the church changed that.”

Cactus had almost taken over that corner, but one small grave had been scooped clear, and a bundle of plastic daisies lay there.

We found my grandfather’s grave. John T. Diskin died in his 40’s of natural causes, unusual for a miner in those days. My Uncle Woodrow’s grave was beside my grandfathers. There also is a monument to Woodrow in the Aguilar Schoolyard. On a cobblestone base stands a wrought-iron symbol of the school mascot, a wildcat, and a bell taken from an old rural school.

In memory of Woodrow Diskin AHS Fullback “1936”

At it’s peak, Aguilar was a coalmining town of perhaps 2500 and, more important the hub of a number of camps, “company towns” with company housing and stores and prices. By choice, miners shopped and roistered in Aguilar with its 14 saloons.

“Real saloons,” said Teresa Bertolino, “not like the bars today. Big spittoons and no women.”

Bertolino is past 70, was born in Aguilar, worked in the post office for 45 years and has helped out in one of the four remaining bars since then.

“I knew your mother. She was slim, wore her hair straight. I knew your grandmother, Lucy, when she worked in a government sewing project, I talked with her every day.”

Prohibition brought a second industry to Aguilar. Outsiders moved in to make whiskey and beer for the rest of Colorado. Old newspaper stories- some of which my mother wrote- indicate that about half of the population was already doing the same.

The outsiders laughed and nicknamed Aguilar “Little Chicago..” Later, when bootleggers gunfights and killings became commonplace, the title was even more appropriate.

The professionals and the locals didn’t mix much. The local manufacturers’ interests were not much social as commercial. They gave a lot of parties, supplied neighbors and, thriftily fed the mash to their pigs and chickens. Records show that revenue agents made many arrests by backtracking drunken livestock.

With shootings, mine accidents and odd natural death, Aguilar’s mortician was kept busy. My Uncle Tony Farandelli (he married one of Mom’s sisters) helped him now and then.

Uncle Tony told of delivering bodies to a wake at one of the mining camps.

Bodies were transported in wooden cases like a mummy’s, and on one trip, said Tony, it was his custom to deliver liquor for the wake in a second wicker case.

One night, said Tony, the hearse door flew open and one case fell out and down into a canyon, disappearing in the darkness.

When Tony told the waiting mourners that half the cargo was somewhere on the back-trail, a threatening silence fell over the group.

A grim miner leaped into the cab and opened the remaining casket. There was a clink of bottles.

“It’s all right!” he shouted.

Uncle Tony might have made up this story, but it rings true enough to survivors of the era .

Gaudy, bustling Aguilar was a strange world indeed to my father, and Diskin clan was a revelation.

The widow-by-then, Lucy, her three sons and five daughters were demonstrative and so noisy, he said, that he wondered how the roof stayed on their little adobe house on the rim of Gonzales Arroyo.

But Myrtle, slim and quick and bright, with blue-gray eyes and creamy skin and dark brown hair in a stylish bob, was not something he wanted to let go.

They married in 1928, and two years later I was born - in Aguilar, a fact that still startles me.

“I had a loose universal joint in the car,” Pop said once. “Couldn’t get you back to the Ozarks for a proper arrival. “

Marie Hughes, born in a mining camp, has lived most of her 92 years in Aguilar. She taught 43 years in the local school. Her graves include that of her father, killed by a rock fall in the Peerless Mine, and her husband, longtime superintendent of schools. Her daughter, a retired nurse, is in town from Denver.

“The poppies came on early and we have yellow sweet peas from the hills.” Hughes said.

Emma Zanatell has visitors too, somebody said. “They’ll be at mass tomorrow (Memorial Day).”

In 1914, six miles from Aguilar, Colorado militia turned machine guns ona a tent colony of striking miners. They killed 18 men, women, and children.

Zanatell’s first baby was born in that camp, and she and others escaped when a railroad engineer interposed his train between the machine guns and the tents.

“The coal around here was steam coal,” said Scarafiotti. “Good for railroad engines. When they changed to diesel the market went and one by one, the mines closed.”

Aguilar dwindled through the Depression, through wars, through cycles of prosperity and recession.

“Only been a couple of houses built in the last 50 years.” Mike said. Some houses burned, were torn down or moved. Some literally melted, untended adobe walls sinking back into the earth.

There are about 700 people in Aguilar now. You see chickens in many yards, goats in a few, hay, garden plots, a few fruit trees.

Sunday morning, Mike and other members of the American Legion decorated the graves of all veterans at St. Anthony’s and the Knights of Pythias, cemeteries in town and at two rural ones. They have been doing it for more than 40 years. Our search ended by mutual, unspoken agreement. “Maybe your sister is buried in your grandfather’s plot,” Joe said. “That’s probably it,” Mike said. We got in the car and drove out through what residents call the “new section”, opened about 20 years ago.

“This” said Mike, “is the only part of town that’s growing."