DONNA CITO RODGERS with DONALD CITO. Born 1935 (Donna) and 1936 (Donald)

Transcription

1 DONNA CITO RODGERS with DONALD CITO. Born 1935 (Donna) and 1936 (Donald) TRANSCRIPT of OH 1896V A-B This interview was recorded on September 24, 2013, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program. The interviewer is Anne Dyni. The interview also is available in video format, filmed by Dorothy Ciarlo. The interview was transcribed by Anne Dyni. ABSTRACT: Siblings Donna Cito Rodgers and Donald Cito talk about the land on North 79 th Street in Niwot that has been in their family since their great-grandparents homesteaded it in the early 1900s. They talk about dry-land wheat farming, dairy farming, buildings on the homestead including the well-known flag barn childhood chores, and the history of the naming of Gunbarrel. They also discuss their brother David s foray into ostrich farming and Donna s recent adventure with skydiving. The interview includes video photos of family members, and the end of the recording includes footage of the land as it looks in NOTE: Speakers are identified as follows: - Anne Dyni R - Donna Cito Rodgers - Donald Cito [A]. 00:00 The date is September 24, My name is Anne Dyni and I m interviewing Donna Cito Rodgers of 6090 North 79th Street, Niwot, and her brother Donald Cito of Johnstown. Their grandfather, Angelo Iannacito, homesteaded property on Gunbarrel Hill near 79th Street and Mineral Road in 1910, and their great-grandfather five years before that. This recording is for the Maria Rogers Oral History Project at the Carnegie Library in Boulder, Colorado. Just to get a little bit of information out of the way, when and where were you born? Donna? R I was born in Longmont, Colorado, on July 31st, And Donald? And I was born here, I think, in this house in December 27, And who were your parents? R Tony Anthony he was known as Tony Cito, and Lucille DeNuzzi Cito. Where was she from? 1

2 R She was from Denver. Their families knew each other, and they met. My dad was about ten years older than my mom. They met and married. I m not sure what year they were married. Before YOU was born. R Yes, before I was born. (laughs) We have a picture of him. (Arranges family picture on easel) What year did you say they were married? R I m not sure. Either 1933 or 34 they were married, in January. Your great-grandparents what were their names? R Angelo Cito and Nellie Dilemma Cito were our grandparents. Our great-grandparents Who are we looking at here? (looking at another photograph) R That s Grandpa Dilemma and his wife. I m not sure what her name was. We didn t know her because she had passed away while we were little. He first homesteaded this area? R Mm-hmm. We have a copy of those papers, signed by Theodore Roosevelt and dated R Um hm. Where exactly was the land that he settled? R Right across the road here Now it would be North 79th street. I don t know if they had street names then or not. It was right across the road, so it was on north 79th Street west. I think they homesteaded all this land from where Gunbarrel starts, clear up east to what s the address up there? I don t remember that one. That was 460 acres altogether. 05:12 Was there anyone else homesteaded up here at the top of the hill along with them? Do you know? R Not that I know of. The DiGiacomos had some (land) up here this is south south of where the last house, up here just where the Vineyard Church is I assume that land was homesteaded by the DiGiacomos. 2

3 That s on the corner of 79th and Lookout Road. Then we also have papers on giving the land to your grandfather, Angelo. His name was not Cito. It was longer than that. R (Spells it out) Iannacito. They shortened it. What kind of name is that? R It s Italian. DR Where in Italy did they come from? Down in the Naples part. The boot part. I don t remember the town. R I don t remember the town, either. [narrator later reported that they came from Potenza] Why did they come here? R I suppose they wanted to come to the United States. Did you ever hear R I don t know if they talked about it. But as kids, you know, Who cares? (laughs) Back then, my mom s parents talked Italian. They never did do English. They lived in Denver, down in the Italy part, by Osage. Back then, that was a no-no. You weren t supposed to talk any of those languages anything that was They didn t want us to know what they were sayin. (laughter) R And, of course you know, hindsight. I wished I d have learned how to speak Italian and understand it. Well, your father could speak English AND Italian then. R Oh yes. And of course Grandma Cito and Grandpa always talked English. They didn t use their Italian. Just my mom s parents. Had they followed any other brothers or sisters over here? Do you have other branches of the family? R I don t think so. I don t know. These papers giving land to your grandfather Angelo, is it the same property or is this additional land that would have been deeded over to him? Because it looks like it s a homestead as well. R I think it s all the same land. 3

4 Okay. We also have a photograph of your grandfather, Angelo, and his wife, Nellie, and the children. They had four children? Six or seven. Seven, I think. One died young. R One died young. Tony was the oldest, then Angie, Uncle Mike Cito, and then Florence. Then Dan Cito, then Susie (Sue) Cito. And then they lost one in between there Elmer. And then Chuck Cito. He was the baby He is the only one that did not stay on the farm of the men. He went into the service. He was in the Navy and he had his own business when he got out. (Ed: Donna later corrected herself to say Angie was the oldest, then Tony.) 10:36 Did he come back to this area? R No. Well, Denver. He lived in Denver. Did childhood diseases take some of these other children? R Elmer died when he was young, and I think maybe it was disease that he died from. But, I m not sure. (Referring to photo on easel) We have a photograph of the one house on these early homesteads is still standing up the hill from where we are right now. (Discussion about filming the photo) That house is still standing. Who lived in that house? R Angelo and Nellie lived in there, and then Dan Uncle Dan Cito, lived in there with his There s another picture over here. You said that the house, even though it s still standing, doesn t look much like that today. R Pretty much. They just added a two-story, instead of just the one-story. Basically, the bottom part is still pretty much the same. Then the house west of that house, Mike lived in. He had five acres and Dan had five acres, where the homestead was. How old is the barn that we call the Flag Barn? Pretty old. When they built that, they had horses in there, when I was just a little kid. I think everybody can identify where your property was, or is, by that barn. Who painted the original American flag on the east side of that barn? R Danny Cito Jr., the son. He was the one that painted it first. And it kind of took on a life of its own. 4

5 R Right. They sold the property to a doctor, and that was one of the stipulations for them to sell that they would keep that flag on. They re maintaining it. And also when the county bought part of it, that was part of the deal, too, that they would leave the barn standing. As I look at this neighborhood, which your family owned a great deal of, it looks like dry-land farming to me. R It is. What did they raise, or DO they raise here? R Wheat. Mostly wheat up there. Down below, they did hay and corn. And did he do anything else? Did he do beets? Sugar beets? Yeah, they quit that when I was born cause (unclear) R They didn t do the beets very much and the corn, but just mostly wheat. Did you raise corn for your own livestock? Right. What did you have? Milk cows. R They had a couple horses. I think one time they had pigs, but didn t do that too long. Then he had chickens, as you ve seen in one of the pictures. There were lots of chickens. That was my mom s job. She got to do the chickens. Then we had a man a man would come around and buy the eggs. Back then we didn t have highways like we do now. We had dirt roads. None of all of this you know, IBM wasn t there, no church, Highway 52 wasn t there. That s why you have problems finding our house. 15:30 When we were older and got married and moved away, our dad decided that he would give us each 2 acres apiece. So Donald was the first one that built a house right here, the homestead where we grew up. That house is still standing. Then David built a house, the one way up on the south here of our house on 79th St. Then after a few years he built the one across the street. And so when I got married, we moved to Boulder because my husband worked for Public Service, and we stayed there. Then our family started growing, and we decided we needed a different house. We looked in Boulder and found an older house, and it was going to take a lot of money to remodel it. So we decided we could just move out here. My husband wasn t too anxious to be around family too much. He was kind of shy. Of course he s changed now, but back then he didn t know whether he wanted to move out here with everybody. But, you know, we can have a brand new house for less than what it was going to cost us to buy this house and 5

6 remodel it. So, we moved out here, and we re still living in the same house we built out here, so it s been about 40-some years that we ve lived here. So the house is 40 years old. R Mm-hmm. Did any of your family belong to the grange in Niwot? No, it was the one between here and Louisville. Oh, the Boulder Valley Grange on 95th Street? R Yeah. None of us ever joined the Niwot Grange either. I don t know why. Probably because they were over there and back then when we grew up we had other things, and we didn t want to be bothered with the old people s stuff. (laughs) They had dances at the grange. R They did. They did. Did your family go to those dances? R Not too much, I don t think. My dad was a homebody. He didn t like to go anywhere. My mom went to Italy with a group of people, but my dad would never go. They finally talked him into when my mom went to work for the Gondolier my cousin and Victor Fabrizio and Gary Kugel opened an Italian restaurant in Boulder called the Gondolier, and they asked my mom if she would teach them how to cook, because they didn t know how to cook spaghetti and stuff. So she went to cook for them and she ended up being an employee and stayed for I don t know how many years until they they started and one of their things, they decided to take their employees to Las Vegas. And so my dad was not going to go, but my mom convinced him. He did go, and that was his first airplane ride. They had a good time. But he would never go any other place, and he wouldn t go back to Las Vegas either. My mom liked to gamble, but not my dad. He thought that was not the thing to do. That was fun. We have a picture of your father. (Setting up photo). R Yes. 20:00 He looks like a very young man in that picture. Was he married by that time? R Yeah, oh yeah. Then we have another picture. R That s him combining. 6

7 I think Gunbarrel Hill is known for its wheat fields, and I presume that he s cutting grain here. How was this land affected by the drought and the winds and so on? Did they do strip farming back in that day? Right. R Mm-hmm. But your great-grandparents must have owned this land when a lot of it blew away. R Probably, yeah. Who knows? But they survived. Our dad went to work for a coal mine. Besides milking cows, he worked a coal mine for quite a few years. Did he do that in the wintertime when the farm was? Yeah. It worked pretty well. What mines did he work at? R Probably Louisville? Over by Louisville. I don t remember what the heck the names of the mines were now. Do you remember that time in his life when he was working in the mines? Or that was before your time? R Sort of. We were little. Yeah, I was pretty little. I can remember my ma used to have to milk most of the time. And I d milk when I was little. R I never did have to do that because I was a girl. I had to do INSIDE stuff. It was not like today when these husbands help take care of the babies and they do all that stuff. We did not do that when we were growing up. The girls stayed inside and worked, and the boys had to be outside. The boys never did have to do anything, either. (laughs) Help wash dishes or do anything. What besides washing dishes did you HAVE to do? R I ironed and I cleaned, because my mom hated to dust. She did the cooking. I didn t learn how to really cook until I got married, because it was easier for her to do because in her way. She didn t have the patience for me to learn how to cook, so I didn t learn how to cook until after I got married. When the grandkids came along, she was nice to help them. She did let me bake. I knew how to bake. She didn t like to bake, she didn t like to dust, and she didn t like to iron. So guess who got to do that? (laughs). 7

8 Did your Dad, with this threshing picture, were there a lot of threshing machines that worked together during threshing season? That one there is probably one of the later ones. They had thrash machines, stuff like that. You d go out and cut it, put in bunches, let it dry, throw it through the thrash machine, but we don t have any pictures of that. So it was all by himself at this point? R Right. When do you suppose that picture was taken? Oh, that had to be in the 40s. R Mm-hmm. Probably. Where would they take the wheat, or who would come get it? They hauled it in to Dacona. Then they got a little bigger and they combined. And trucks hauled it away. When I was sixteen, I was haulin wheat. Is wheat being grown on your land today? R Yes. They still do. Who harvests it? R Our son, actually. We sold our part our thirty-six acres. When my folks died, we divided our acres up, then we sold our he lives just next door here to us. And he hires 25Z, and I don t know what the man s name is now. He used to have one, but that man got sick, so he got somebody else. So he farms all his acres, and also the county, the Boulder Open Space, they have wheat there, so it s supposed to be open space. He farms it. 25:43 We have a photograph here of your dad graduating from Niwot elementary school. He is the back row, on the far right. I m trying to think what year that would have been. R Hmm. When would that have been? Do you have any idea when my dad graduated? Eighth grade? , in that neighborhood. Maybe 1913, but I doubt it. What building was he attending when he graduated from school? Because there have been several Niwot school buildings. There WAS a school there, but it s gone now. 8

9 R The road s there. The Diagonal, 119, is there. The two-story brick one. He first started out in that little school R right on the corner, maybe, where Franklin and Niwot Road. Where the daycare thing is, there was a school there. That s probably where he started out was the school. Where did YOU go to school? R In Niwot, which is torn down now. We went to Niwot until we were in 9th grade. Then we went to Longmont High School. Were there any high school classes being held in Niwot at that time? R No. No high school. We had to go to Longmont. One through eight. How did you get there? R To Longmont? Um-hm. R We got bused to Longmont. Although WE drove. We never did ride the bus. (laughs) I drove. She had a driver s license, and I drove. (laughter) You didn t have a drivers license? No. (laughter) How does THAT work? (laughs) R Well, I guess we Because I wouldn t let her drive. R We didn t have cops and stuff then like we do now. Most of the way was dirt road, actually. The school there now (in Longmont) is an elementary school. Was it on Main Street? Yeah. Ninth and Main Street. 9

10 R Also, Mr. Sampson was Dan Cito s wife s dad. He worked in Longmont, so he would pick us up and my cousins Carol and Gilbert and take us to school. How did you get home? R We usually had how DID we get home? I don t remember how we got home. Apparently we I don t know if he picked us up if that was the way his job was? I just remember my cousin Carol was always late. We always had to wait and wait for her, and we d get so mad at her. I remember that, but I don t remember I m sure they picked us up or one of our parents came in and got us. I think we rode with Danny er, what the heck was her name the one who lived down the hill where Wederquist is at now Daniels. Cause he was older, and we rode home with him quite a bit. Was there still a passenger train going through Niwot at that time? R Um-hm. 30:17 Did anyone ever get to school on the train? R No, not that we know of. When we went to Niwot School, we would either walk or somebody d take us. And my Grandpa, he would be down at the Niwot grocery store, and we d go, Can we get a ride home, Grandpa? And he was supposed to not do that, but he would give us a ride home. The Daniels lived where Wederwquists live now, and he d give them a ride, and he d always go Whoa, Nellie. Whoa, Nellie, with the car. (giggles) And we d have so much fun and then he d let them off, and then we d go. If he wasn t there, then we d walk home. We d have to walk home. Where was the grocery store in Niwot at that time? R Right where (searches for words) I think it s still where the restaurant was there but I don t know what s there right now. Was it Reverend Taylor s building? R Um-hm. And the blacksmith across the road. The blacksmith was there when you were growing up? R Um hm. 10

11 The post office was still on the corner there (old Niwot State Bank building) where the real estate office is now. 40s? What other businesses were in town when you were kids? Which was what years? In the 40s. And the 50s. What other buildings, businesses were on Second Avenue? There was the newspaper on the corner, the blacksmith. R The grange was still there. The grange was still there. Post office. Now they got the post office around the corner still there. R The grocery store, the feed place. Hogsetts? Yes, the feed store there. Where did your dad get his farm equipment, and where did he get it repaired? Well, most of it I think we had to repair it ourselves. I think they got it in Longmont. It s still there, the implement place; well, they re more into trucks now than farm machinery. R We have one picture of our old house, and I don t know where that picture is. Did I ever give one to Bonnie? I don t think so, or she d have found it. R She d have found it, yeah. It was just like a little shack house. We had a real nice house. (chuckles) We d look right out through the walls and watch the lights swing on the ceiling. R when the wind blew. And we had to haul our water. We didn t have water. There was a well there, but it was not drinkable. Had an old cistern. R Yeah, we had a cistern, but we had to haul our water from Longmont. So we knew how to conserve water. We did not run water. We did not have running water until we moved into the house that s there now. Where did that house actually sit? 11

12 Right on the south side of that house that s there now. The cistern was halfway under the front of the house. We had one of them old hand pumps on there, you know. Pumps water. Had a tub to get a bath in. I don t know if we took a bath in the same water (chuckles). Did you really? R We took baths once a week in a tub took turns doing that. On Saturdays, we got to take baths. We finally got the house and running water. I d wash in the morning, take a bath, and wash at night, and my dad said, Your gonna be too clean. And he d get so mad because I was wasting water. What can you tell me about the times there were stills up on Gunbarrel Hill? Do you know anything about that? The whiskey stills during Prohibition? No, I don t know if there was anything here or not. R I don t know that either. There was kind of a little cave across the street from the house that they probably had stuff like that in, but when we were old enough, there was nothin in there just a hole. Who knows what they had in there before we knew what was goin on. I never have heard of them makin any. Grandma and Grandpa in Denver used to make wine in their shanty, they called it. I remember that wine. You got different grades of it, you know. He d always bring out the good stuff. You know, we went to Denver every Sunday, and they lived right behind the church. R Mount Carmel Church. So us kids had to go to church down there all the time. But he d bring out the good stuff for us. People he didn t like, he d bring the old stuff out. (laughs) R He was blind. He was in an accident and got blinded. It blew off a couple of his fingers, so my grandmother did the her job was working for the priests. She d do their laundry and stuff like that for them to make a little money. They did their own garden. That was my mom s parents, on the DeNuzzi side. Like I said, it used to take us hours to get there in our little Model T. Was it a Model T? We had a newer one than that. Before that, yeah, it used to take two hours to get to Denver. R Like he said, every Sunday morning Every Sunday morning we d have to get up and get everything done, so we could go to Denver for dinner. Then our other Grandma and Grandpa Cito, that lived up here, they moved to Denver. R We were a mile across town, and we d always have to go by their house on the way home 12

13 R and stop and see them. I m going to show this picture. This is your father Tony Cito, and his sister Angela. Can you tell me about that picture? R They were Catholics, and that was their first Communion. I don t have any idea what year that was. It looks like he might have been nine or ten. Where did they go to church? R Louisville. It took them a while to get to Louisville. Yeah. Horse and buggy days way back then. (laughs) 39:18 that? To go to a different era, I noticed a wind sock in your back yard. Can you talk about R The guys just actually drove down there probably be jumping pretty quick. Maybe they ve already jumped. I haven t seen them drive out yet. They re sky jumpers. They come out of Boulder. They used to jump up here on the corner of Lookout and 79th at the (Vinelife) church. But they got a complaint, so the pastor there told them they could not jump there. So we offered them to jump on our land right there. They have two acres that my son cut out for them, that they re supposed to jump on. So they jump there, and that s fine. It looked like fun, and all these people would come and go. I always go out and watch em, especially when they first came. I d be out there all the time when they were jumping. It looked like fun, and people would come down and (say), You gotta do this. This is so much fun. So she did. About killed herself, but she did it. (laughs) R Yeah, I was OK. I kept saying, When I turn 80, I ll do it. But then my little neighbor boy well, he s not little, he s 20 he wanted to jump. And I said, Okay, I ll relent, and I ll jump with you. Well, it turned out HE didn t jump but I ended up jumping. I have motion sickness, and I didn t think one iota about being sick. I was doing great and just was just fine and I thought, Oh, this is pretty good. And all of a sudden he went (gestures) swoosh with the thing to land. I didn t think to tell him OK, don t do that. But when he went swish, my stomach went swish with it. We had about 50 people out here watchin, and he said, Donna, how are you doing? 13

14 And I said O-o-oh, I feel like I m gonna throw up. And he goes, Oh, we re almost down, we re almost down. (laughs). And he says, Put your feet up. And I knew it would be about 3 to 5 seconds, and we d be down. I m so short and he was long, so I didn t even feel landing, because it was fine, but I thought to myself, Do not throw up in front of these people. Do not throw up in front of these people. I didn t. I put on my happy face, and it was OK. But I did after a while when no one was looking. When was this? R August 3rd. Just this year. That s pretty plucky, Donna. R Yeah. When did your family go into the dairy business? R 1976, right? [added by narrator later: Tony was milking cows when we met in We were open when the Big Thomson flooded; we brought them milk. ] I don t know when you guys started. I wasn t here. R It was about five years It was about 5 or 6 years that the dairy shut. My brother David started it. He had cows, and he built a big building and had dairy. He did that because he wanted to have we did pasteurize the milk so you could have cream and stuff [correction by narrator, in pace of so you could have cream and stuff : we had cream line milk. ] We had a little place you could go in and buy it. He d process it right there. And we had a little store and that s all we sold, was milk, cream. It was pasteurized. We were just starting to make money and we got some corn ensilage from Tanaka s, and they had some oil spill in it or something and it contaminated some of the cows and the milk. As soon as the media heard about it, forget it, because it was all over. It really wasn t they came and tested the milk and everything, but we had to put some cows down because they had got the chemical [correction by narrator: PCB] in them. Well, you must not have been the only dairy that was impacted by that. R No, we WERE the only ones that got that, because other people didn t buy it. There weren t other dairies like ours. The dairy was across the road west? 14

15 R No, down on the hill north, where that house is now right on the corner, that s where it was. The corner of R (Highway) 52 and 79th Street. How many cows did he have? R I don t remember. About a hundred, probably. Now this was you and your husband and your brother David. R And his wife. My dad would always come down to the dairy and sit and make sure that we were doing things right. My brother did most of the pasteurizing and he had a friend, Jerry Smith, would go down and help him once in a while, too. And once in a while. Charles would. But David did the milking and mostly all the things. I d help sell the milk, and then we hired Mrs. Miller that used to live here. She came down and would help sell. 46:00 Did you have enough milk to sell in other locations as well? R We usually mostly did he deliver? Did someone pick up milk? I don t remember. I remember we just had the store. And I think we did have someone come and pick it up and deliver it to stores. I don t remember that. How much milk were you producing a day? R I have no idea. David should be here now. I don t remember how much we did. I can recall not too many years ago that you had ostriches over here. R David did have some ostriches. He did for a while. He made lots of money on those. They had huge, big eggs, and that was one of those fly-through things. Oh, that was a big deal to have ostriches, and then he sold all of the ostriches. He had elk for a little while too. He did that for about a year. Then he got rid of those. Those started costing too much money so he got rid of those. [further explanation by narrator: he got rid of them because it cost more money to raise them than he could make] Well the ostriches kind of took a dump. They were real high-priced animals and then they went to nothing. There was a guy over one of his friends had a whole bunch of them; he starts shooting them and burying them. And then David he had twenty or thirty of them left and I thought, ah, hell, Don t shoot them, bring them up to my place and I ll take them. 15

16 You took a bunch? Yeah, he brought them up there and I had them for a while. They re nasty birds. Anyhow, we what are we going to do with these stupid things? Well, one of them went through the fence and broke its leg, so. We butchered it. I can t eat that stuff. And then some guy had a place up in the mountains. And she said, You want to butcher ostriches? Yeah! So this guy buys a new truck and a new trailer and he comes down here, and he takes them home. It s been four or five years ago. Her niece was here looking for a place, something for her horses, and we come down this road up in the mountains, and can you believe it? There s one ostrich out there roaming around.. They didn t have any fences around there to keep them around. Maybe the coyotes got him or something, but there was one ostrich still there by itself. Did David raise them strictly for the eggs or did he butcher them for meat or skins? R Just mostly for the eggs, I think. Who bought the eggs? He d raise them. He bought an incubator and he d incubate his eggs and get some chicks out of them. R And then sell them He never did sell any eggs, I don t think. He d raise chicks. And he figured out that you don t feed them when they re born. You don t? They gotta go so long without eating or else they die. And he lost a lot of them till he figured out that you don t feed them until they get a week or two old or so. And then you d give them something to eat, and they d be okay. But if you fed them BEFORE that, they d die. 50:25 Well, whoever he bought his first ostriches from should have told him. Oh, God, he paid a lot of money for them. What did an ostrich cost back in that day? 16

17 He paid $2,000 - $3,000 apiece for them. Then they went down to nothing and that s when he started getting rid of them. This other guy had 400 or 500 of them. He just dug a hole and started shooting them and burying them. They weren t worth nothing no more. Wow! What years are we talking about that David had these birds? Oh, God, it had to be in the early 90s? R Probably. In the late 80s and early 90s. Well, we sold that dairy in 85. It was after that early 90s. And he had the elk after that? Yeah. Then he had a bunch of elk out here. R He s always trying to make money and be a millionaire. If all of his things would pan out like he thought, why he WOULD be a millionaire. He d do most anything and always go in the hole. (laughs) In fact, them elk, I helped him load them elk out from some guy out east of Greeley along Highway 14 way out there. This guy had a bunch of elk. I think he GAVE him all the elk he had. Is that why he has pipe fencing over there? R No, he still has some cows. He raises beef cows for our own But I wondered if he put in the reinforced fencing because of the elk. Oh, that tall fence down there was elk fence. I would have guessed that. Well, I m wondering if there is anything you would like to say about your property or your family that I haven t asked you. Well, I guess we were almost decent to each other. (laughs) R We re very fortunate. I feel very fortunate that you know, we did lose our one brother. He died from cancer. But basically, now both my brothers now have health problems, are sick but they re still maintaining, and I feel fortunate that I m healthy. And most all of our kids are healthy. Donald lost his son, so that was very sad in our family. But basically, we re all pretty healthy, and all our kids are pretty healthy. Right now, I have some [correction: all, not some] married children, and five grandchildren that are married. We have 13 grand-children and 8 great-grandchildren and one on the way. Did you just have them all here? R Umm-hmm. 17

18 What was the occasion? R We were celebrating our 60th wedding anniversary, and my one son-in-law turned 50 and one son-in-law turned 60. We had a party on Saturday. That s when I jumped. We had nine other people plus myself jump. And our daughter has a house across the street here, which they built. We had both parties there. So we had about 85 or 89 on Saturday for the birthday parties. And we had 170 people on Sunday for the anniversary party. So it was fun. Donald has two sons that are alive. 55:17 I finally got a great-grandson. R He has a great-grandson now, and they both are married. And they re pretty healthy. So when you landed and were afraid of throwing up, it was all relatives standing around watching you? R Pretty much. And friends. (Continues to talk about reunion) There were quite a few people. R It was kind of a reunion. We were lucky. All of our kids live here around, except I have one daughter that lives in California. And then we have one daughter [correction: granddaughter] that s in the Air Force. Right now, she s stationed in Virginia. Otherwise, all the kids are here. So we re really fortunate to have those all here. We had about twenty-six people from different states come. So it was kind of like a little family reunion. So it was fun. Well, I want to thank you both for sitting down to talk about your family and your land here. I really appreciate it. R Well, thank you. It was more than what I was expecting! It s fun to go back and think about those things. I haven t thought about them for a long time. all that stuff. I guess when you get old, you start forgetting. Well, that s why I think it was kind of good to have both of you here today. You prompted each other. Well, thank you again. R You re welcome. Thank you. 57:02 (End of part 1) (After filming was over, Donald and Donna spoke about Grandma Cito.) 18

19 The only thing is that if grandma had been alive when these people decided to build that down there and call that Gunbarrel, she d have probably shot em. She named it Gunbarrel. She thought from up there, it (the road) looked just like a gun barrel. R: Yeah, they cut the road down. It used to be really hilly. Highway 52 used to be really hilly. [B]. (Filming continued outside. This section includes a lot of traffic noise in the background.) 00:00 R As we re standing here to the right of the windsock you might be able to see on the panning is the homestead house where my grandparents lived. And my uncle lived there after they moved to Denver. Then the next house coming west is where my dad s OTHER brother lived Mike Cito. And they did the farming up at that area. They split the grounds. My dad bought this homestead if you want to start panning down here where our house is. Because of the trees you can t see there. But if you come right here, you can maybe see the silo. That right here is where my dad lived, and he farmed basically by himself. My two uncles farmed together 360 acres up there. My dad had his own 360 acres. He bought that from HIS grandfather, which was down here. My dad gave each one of us kids 40 acres apiece, and instead of doing them in squares, he did em lengthwise. So, I m on our property that he gave us. My brother David s property was next. Then my brother Damian s property was next. And then my brother Donald s was next. My two brothers Donald and Damon sold theirs, and my brother David and I still live here, and we ve both lived here all of our lives. So, we re still on the homestead. Your brother David lives where? R Right here. Now tell me about the name Gunbarrel. R Oh, Gunbarrel. That is Highway 52 now. It had been cut down to the highway, but when it was original, it was real hilly and it looked like a gun barrel. So my grandmother named it Gunbarrel. She is probably turning over in her grave that she doesn t want people because Gunbarrel Estates, across from us now, they think they the name, but it isn t. Is that okay? That is fine. That answers a lot of people s questions. We re looking now this is a continuation of the interview that we had with Donna Cito Rodgers and her brother Donald Cito. We re looking now at the original homestead on top of 19

20 Gunbarrel Hill. The barn is quite old, original to the property. And the house is the house that we photographed earlier. As we pan further north, we see Highway 52, which at the time that the Citos settled on this property was a dirt road, which was much hillier, according to Donna, than it is now. her grandmother had named it Gunbarrel because it was straight as a gun barrel. 04:31 (End of Part 2. End of recording.) 20