Intro to the Hazlehurst Memoirs
Nov. 5, 2024 – Election Day! Like many of us in our sadly divided electorate, I’m dismayed. If my preferred candidate doesn’t win the presidency, I think the nation will go to hell in a handbasket.
But concerned as I am by the fate of our country, I’m also troubled by the ravages of time. I was born in Colorado Springs on Nov. 5, 1940, so I’ll be 84 when either Harris or Trump ascend to the Oval Office. Will I be around for the 2028 contest? Possibly, but who knows?
A backward glance: It’s been a great ride, full of adventure, unexpected (and often undeserved) good fortune, good times, good friends, multiple careers, three wives, old age, irrelevance and decent chardonnay. Most of all, it’s been fun, fun, fun … and far from taking the T-Bird away, my wife Karen gave me one for my 80th birthday (2004 merlot-red with a sweetly rumbling Borla exhaust system).
After sharing some of my more outlandish stories with my editor Heila Ershadi, she suggested that I write a complete and reasonably truthful narrative of my life and times, spreading it out over a few issues of the Bulletin. So here goes!
My family is deeply rooted in Colorado Springs, beginning with Great-grandmother Harriet Farnsworth who came to Colorado Springs from Connecticut in the late 1880s, accompanied by her tubercular son Charles. They both thrived, built houses, and Charles made money by scamming gullible easterners into dubious Cripple Creek mining ventures. He married the beautiful and athletic Edith Winslow, and they had four children, including my mother, Edith.
TB got him, and Charles died broke in 1906. His widow Edith subsequently married Francis Drexel Smith, whose family-owned enterprises enabled him to become a full-time artist and community leader. He was a founder of the Broadmoor Art Academy, a founding trustee of the Fine Arts Center, and a wonderfully kind grandfather to me and my older sister Frances. He designed and built a beautiful art-filled three-story home at 530 North Cascade, featuring a library with floor to ceiling bookcases and a tracked ladder to reach volumes on the highest shelves. It made our comfortable house on North Tejon look like a shanty, kindling my ambition to live in a mansion.
My mother and her siblings went from comparative poverty to wealth. Frank Smith funded her education at private schools and Bryn Mawr college and underwrote a year’s sojourn in Paris. She made many friends there, among them Sylvia Beach who owned a then-obscure bookshop called Shakespeare and Company.
Returning to Colorado Springs, she opened her own bookstore in 1926, Edith Farnsworth’s Book Shop. That same year, she married stock and bond broker G. Blagden Hazlehurst, whose then-thriving firm occupied most of the first floor of the Mining Exchange Building. They had their ups and downs, but their marriage endured until his death in 1957.
Earliest memory: my 13-year-old sister took me to the movies at the Chief Theater that featured a 1944 World War II-themed Donald Duck cartoon. I was terrified and she had to take me home on the bus.
Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s was a delight. No one was a stranger, and the North End was relatively shabby and unfashionable. We kids took the bus downtown to the movies, went to Steele, North Junior and CSHS and forged lifetime friendships (SueEllen, John, Linda, I’m so happy you’re still alive and still here).
It’s been a great ride, full of adventure, unexpected (and often undeserved) good fortune, good times, good friends, multiple careers, three wives, old age, irrelevance and decent chardonnay. Most of all, it’s been fun, fun, fun. – John Hazlehurst
My aging parents couldn’t deal with an irascible teenager, so they enrolled me as a boarder in the then boys-only Fountain Valley School. My father died in January of 1957, I got suspended from Fountain Valley for drinking in May and went to Colorado Springs High School as a senior.
It was the doorway to heaven. I had my Dad’s 1950 Mercury, the classes were easy and there were girls! I went through the rapture of first love with Anne, yearned for Kay and Susie and wondered what I’d do with my life. Go to college, be brilliant, get educated, have fun and then … get a job??!!
I’d had plenty of jobs, starting as a newspaper boy at the Gazette, then cleaning cages at the Zoo and thought I knew all about jobs; they were boring, difficult, poorly paid and inevitable. Take the well-trodden path, and your life would suck … oh well, maybe something good would happen.
I was lazy and my grades were mediocre, but thanks to high College Board scores I got into Wesleyan, a then all-male school in Middletown, Connecticut. Want a girlfriend? You had to go to “mixers” at women’s colleges such Mt. Holyoke or Connecticut College for Women. I went, but I didn’t “score” as the prevailing slang had it. My life sucked, and I needed a get-out-of -jail free card … but how?
In the next installments: An unexpected windfall, a few good friends, and a sailboat brings great adventure – and a chapter of my life that not many knew of, until now.
John Hazlehurst has been deeply involved in the community, including serving on the Colorado Springs City Council and in the founding of the Historic Preservation Alliance. He has previously written for the Colorado Springs Independent and the Colorado Springs Business Journal.
