Home of the Brave: A Small Town, its Veterans and the Community They Built Together: A small town, its veterans and the community they build together - Softcover

Bryson, Donna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785356364 ISBN 13: 9781785356360

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A small town struggling, like many communities, with the question of how to remain vital and vibrant in the 21st century, took on another problem altogether: that of the difficult homecoming of Iraq, Afghanistan and other war veterans. Melanie Kline knows a little boy who tenses when his family goes to the airport. He's sure his father is headed for another deployment in Afghanistan. The child's father is dearer to him and his world a little less safe, since his country went to war on terror. No one in Kline's own family has been caught up in the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but she has come to see that it affects her entire community. And she has rallied her small town to respond. Kline founded the Welcome Home Montrose project to offer mental health support, job and housing advice and other aid for returning warriors who are burdened by memories of war and uncertain of what their homecoming will mean. What she did not count on was how much the men and women who had served their country still had to give. Home of the Brave is about community and military service, and the possibilities born of creativity and commitment.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Donna Bryson is an award-winning author and freelance journalist who has written for The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera and VICE. Her previous book, It's a Black-White Thing, won first place in the nonfiction book category in the Colorado Press Women's Communications Contest in 2015. Bryson lives in Colorado, USA.

Donna Bryson is an award-winning author and freelance journalist who has written for The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera and VICE. Her previous book, It's a Black-White Thing, won first place in the nonfiction book category in the Colorado Press Women's Communications Contest in 2015. Bryson lives in Colorado, USA.

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Home of the Brave

A small town, its veterans and the community they build together

By Donna Bryson

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Donna Bryson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-636-0

Contents

Introduction, 1, 
Chapter 1: Identities, 6, 
Chapter 2: Getting to Home, 23, 
Chapter 3: Building on an Idea, 36, 
Chapter 4: Programs and Possibilities, 45, 
Chapter 5: Family Stories, 63, 
Chapter 6: Expertise, 78, 
Chapter 7: Word Spreads, 87, 
Chapter 8: A Newcomer, 90, 
Chapter 9: A New Idea, 99, 
Chapter 10: Seeing Potential, 107, 
Chapter 11: Limitations, 120, 
Chapter 12: Hometown Heroes, 135, 
Chapter 13: Revisiting Vietnam, 154, 
Chapter 14: Jared's Challenge, 172, 
Chapter 15: Not Alone, 185, 
Chapter 16: Self Medicating, 201, 
Chapter 17: Getting to the VA, 212, 
Chapter 18: A Measure of Success, 223, 
Epilogue, 236, 
Afterword, 241, 
Personal Interviews, 246, 
References, 248, 

CHAPTER 1

Identities

Sticky notes in a rainbow of colors and pens were passed around at a town hall-style meeting. Montrose residents used the humble office supplies to jot down comments on plans that business leaders hoped would bring new energy to a small community that, like so many across America, had been exhausted by the Great Recession. Its Main Street was in such tatters that Montrose residents grumbled they had to go to the next town to find a shoe repair shop.

It was 2011. Leading entrepreneurs were convened as the board of directors of the Montrose Downtown Development Authority. They were searching for something that could enliven the kinds of brochures you find on the racks at tourism centers, go viral on social media or catch the eye of a potential angel scanning a prospectus.

They invited their neighbors to brainstorm about links to the romantic Wild West that might appeal to the nostalgic. Maybe foodies would be drawn by a campaign around the fresh produce featured at the weekly farmers market.

Montrose was too far from the interstate to present itself as a potential manufacturing hub, though it does have a candy factory attached to a supersized store that is a sweet tooth's dream. Maybe the key was to portray the town as a gateway to escaping urban crowds and seizing outdoor adventure.

One Downtown Development Authority board member, Melanie Kline, had scoured the Internet for background on famous people who haled from Montrose. She found information on such luminaries as Dalton Trumbo, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who a few years after Kline was researching him became the subject of a movie starring Bryan Cranston about the blacklisted Hollywood 10.

Trumbo's link to Montrose illustrates an aspect of this rugged, rancher, Republican country I would come to understand more deeply with each visit: it is a rich resource of sometimes unexpected talents, skills and points of view.

Still, while Trumbo may have been born in Montrose, he left with his family in 1908, when he was only three years old. He had been a southern Californian for decades by the time he was making a name for himself as a writer.

Kline's neighbors were unimpressed with the ideas they were hearing at the meeting. Those no-nonsense citizens weren't looking for Hollywood glitz. They prided themselves on a rough, pioneering authenticity.

Their town's original 320-acre site was laid out by D.D. Loutsenhizer and Joseph Selig in 1882. The former had been a member of the infamous Alfred Packer expedition that passed through the region in 1873. Loutsenhizer had the sense to question Packer's guiding ability and split off before the party found itself snowbound in the high mountains during winter. Packer dined on the men he had been leading in an episode of cannibalism that has fascinated chroniclers and even inspired a movie musical.

Loutsenhizer and Selig originally called their town Pomona, a Spanish name for a Roman goddess of orchards. The reference was aspirational for a region that would not become known for its agricultural bounty until the early 20th century brought a major irrigation project. Town lore credits Selig for the name change to something that, while sounding more prosaic, actually had literary pretensions. The new name came from a character in Sir Walter Scott's novel A Legend of Montrose, a stirring tale of love and war set in 17th century Scotland. Selig, who died in 1886 at the age of 36 from stomach cancer before he could see what Montrose would become, was evidently a Scott fan.

In the early days, mules would winter in Montrose after spending the bulk of the year helping men work the silver and gold mines in the surrounding hills. Ranchers headed to the train depot drove cattle through the main streets, kicking up dust, noise and the pungent-sweet aroma of manure. At the depot, the beasts were loaded into cars to be taken to market. It is an image, like the profile of a Native American in a feather headdress gracing a wall to greet visitors at Montrose High School that brings to mind the cherished, gritty icons that have shaped the idea we have of ourselves as Americans.

For centuries, the region where Montrose would develop into a town "was a land known only to the Ute Indians and a handful of white men who ventured within its borders," local historian Elaine Hale Jones wrote in Many Faces, Many Visions: The Story of Montrose, Colorado.

Jones recounts that "following much publicity about the removal of the Utes from the Uncompahgre Valley in 1881, this isolated area now open for settlement held a type of mystique for people seeking new opportunities and adventure 'Out West.'"

"Removal of the Utes" is a sterile phrase for a bloody and protracted chapter of American history. The tendency to gloss over the subjugation is reinforced in articles like one I saw in the local newspaper. The Montrose Daily Press told readers in the summer of 2015 about the upcoming family reunion of the descendants of a town pioneer. The story quoted so engagingly from his unpublished autobiography that I sought out the manuscript in the main library, an example of sleek modern architecture that contrasted with that of the traditional courthouse nearby.

In the library I found a photocopy of a closely typed pamphlet bound with tape and cardboard and, according to a hand-scrawled note, written in 1940. The publication date was given only as 19 followed by two question marks. It was grandly titled: Passing of the Two-Gun Era: Memoirs of the late Alva W. Galloway, Cowboy, Rancher, County Official and Businessman.

Galloway wrote that he had been working for a newspaper in the southern Colorado town of Pueblo when an uncle persuaded him he could find his fortune farther west. He arrived six weeks after Montrose's incorporation papers were filed. He wasn't the only dream-chaser.

There were young men "seeking work in the mines, little co-ed graduates of the East just landing in the big open West seeking a job as school teachers and eventually landing a good-looking cow puncher in marriage and growing up with the country," Galloway wrote.

"Montrose wasn't much for looks," he added. "But, boy, there were things doing that you had no idea of. One could at anytime of day or night strike a $5.00-ante poker game or over at the hotel meet all kinds of mine promoters just returning from the east with pockets of money gleaned from the poor suckers who wanted to own a gold mine and suddenly become rich."

He concluded his reminiscences...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1785356364
• ISBN 13: 9781785356360
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar