Most of us have lifetime habits that have lodged in our minds. Are they inherited, or did you create them? It doesn’t much matter who’s to blame, but like my parents, grandparents, and their predecessors, I don’t like to throw things away. Should I declutter? Probably, but I hoard the remnants of the past, and am frequently delighted by my discoveries.
Sorting through boxes in the basement, I found the complete Society Section of the Sunday Gazette & Telegraph, dated Oct. 10, 1926. It featured a half-page photograph of the Farnsworth-Hazlehurst Wedding Party – my mother and father! The photographer? My mother’s dear friend Laura Gilpin, who would become one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. I had seen the photograph before, in Martha Sandweiss’s biography of Gilpin published by the Amon Carter Museum, but I couldn’t identify all of the wedding party. Thanks to the Gazette, I now know ‘em all! Not surprisingly, everyone in the wedding party is now deceased, including the two little flower girls (my mother’s nieces, Betsy and Edie Cowles).
According to the Gazette, “The ceremony took place on Wednesday afternoon (Oct. 6) at 4 o’clock in the new Grace Episcopal Church and was the first to be solemnized within its walls.” It was appropriately grand, with an organist and choir. “Just before the taking of the vows, a double quartet from the choir sang ‘O perfect Love’ by Barnby.”
After the ceremony, my mother’s stepfather Francis Drexel Smith hosted a party at his house at 530 N. Cascade. Designed and built by Smith, it was demolished in the early 1960s.
And the honeymoon? “Mr. and Mrs. Hazlehurst have gone on a motor trip through the Southwest.”
Returning, they built a life together. Things seem to have gone well for the first three years, but the roaring twenties ended in late October of 1929 when the stock market crashed and my father’s business virtually disappeared. His partner Clem Flannigan (who had been an usher at the wedding) apparently committed suicide, and the firm shed its employees as my father moved from the first floor of the Mining Exchange Building to a one-man office on the fifth floor. My mother’s bookshop somehow survived, but she moved from the Broadmoor to downtown.
They kept going, helped I suspect by the generosity of their parents whose wealth (although greatly diminished) was still substantial. My sister Frances was born in 1931, and I unexpectedly came along in 1940. The war brought prosperity to Colorado Springs, beginning with the construction of Camp Carson on land donated by the city.
Growing up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, I loved and respected my parents but couldn’t understand why they were so old. My friends’ parents were often 20 years younger, and my father’s ill health made him seem even older. Sadly, he died in January of 1957, but my mother lived until 94 – and both funerals were at Grace Church.
I have many mementoes and memories, including some pottery that they bought in New Mexico. We have paintings and portraits that once decorated their walls, glasses and china that we use daily, and boxes of ancient documents, and fading memories of things long past. November 5 will be my 85th birthday (if I make it!), and in the not-so-distant future everything will be dispersed. Yet I hope that future generations will be fascinated by the past, and amuse themselves by digging through the boxes.
Ninety-nine years after my parents’ marriage there are still Hazlehursts in Colorado Springs … so here’s to another century! And as for the scattered offspring, there are a few in Maine and more than a dozen in Tahiti. I’d consider heading for the South Seas, but what would I do with all my hoarded boxes of precious junk?
I guess I’ll just wither away here beneath the shadow of Pikes Peak … and be particularly happy that Grace Episcopal Church is alive, relevant and beautiful as it celebrates its 100th anniversary!
“There are still Hazlehursts in Colorado Springs.” – John Hazlehurst
