Bob, the businessman

Well, soon I offended just the right amount of people, and was canned by the three county commissioners. I immediately commenced on a mission to gather enough signatures to have a recall election of all three commissioners. I walked the streets gathering petitions. As I walked the streets, I learned that my favorite store, The Greenery, was for sale. The swarm of hornets known as the local medical society eventually got the commissioners also to fire my best caseworker, who worked with seniors and disabled adults, a woman named Judy McDaniel. Judy had been trying to convince me to get on with my life after losing custody of my daughters in the divorce from Lil. We decided to scrape up enough money in 1977 to buy The Greenery. Most of the money came from Judy, who sold her Porsche.

When we bought The Greenery, it was located one block off the town's Main Street. It was a store filled with high-end gifts, and right at the beginning of the house plant craze, we decided to emphasize house plants. Soon we realized that the most potential customer traffic was on Main Street, especially in the summer, when tourists swarmed Durango. We moved the store to 8th and Main, right in the heart of the business district. We became a full-fledged florist, and added greeting cards. I don't mean just a few greeting cards. This was the period when Hallmark Cards was being challenged for the first time by a number of alternative card lines. We soon developed perhaps the largest selecton of alternative card lines anywhere in the nation. Tourists would stand in the store for hours laughing and listening to classical music, and come to the counter with a fist full of greeting cards from companies they had never seen before. We expanded the store to include a basement full of plants, and two more stores, one a candy store underneath a theater, and the other next to the famous Durango/Silverton Narrow Gauge Train depot. The train is one of America's treasures,

In the Spring we began selling bedding plants. That is when I learned about politics, western style. The only other place people could go to purchase bedding plants was in a greenhouse the owner of the local hardware store put up every Spring. I decided we could compete with him by personally hand-selecting bedding plants from various Colorado growers, and bring the plants back to Durango every couple of weeks. The plan worked successfully until one day the police arrested me for having the plants too far out on the sidewalk. It seems that there was an ancient ordinance that stated that merchants could not sell their wares more than nine inches beyond the exterior of the buildings where their shops were located. Oh, by the way, did I mention that the owner of the hardware store was also the mayor of Durango? We continued selling the plants and collecting tickets for violating the city ordinance.

Then, Wal-Mart came to town, in a newly built mall south of town. Catty corner across the street from us was JCPenney, who decided to join Wal-Mart as an anchor tenant in the new mall. Although there was 12,600 square feet to fill inside the store, Penney had an atrium out front, where we could legally sell our bedding plants. We moved our store into that space, with its $5,000.00 per month rent. We renovated the space, which had featured orange walls on one side, and chartreuse walls on the other. In the fall the local banker visited the store and told us how proud he was of what we had accomplished. He said if we ever needed a line of credit, the bank would be glad to help. "A line of credit," I asked, "what is that?" (we had never borrowed a penny to operate and grow the business to this point). He explained that the bank could loan us, say, one hundred thousand dollars, and all we would have to do is pay it off in twelve months. I looked at Judy, and she looked at me. We had just had a discussion with each other how we had spent all our money renovating the place, and had little or no money left to fill it with merchandise for the upcoming Christmas season. We signed on the dotted line the next day.

Durango had been a boomtown from when we bought The Greenery in 1977 to 1980, when the friendly banker had made his appearance. However, something was happening in far off Texas and Oklahoma in the early 1980s. The price of oil dropped to below $20 dollars a barrel. Tourists from those two states, normally Durango's biggest draw, did not come to Colorado in the summer of 1981. Then, it also hit Denver, where the rest of Durango's tourists come from. The occupancy rates of Downtown Denver's skyscrapers diminished to record lows. Denverites stayed home, too. We struggled mightily to pay the rent each month until our five-year lease ended in 1985.

Directly across the street the landlords renovated their building, as tourist traffic resumed to its previous levels. We moved from 12,600 square feet to 3,500 square feet and, more importantly, $2,000.00 a month less rent. Nevertheless, we continued to struggle, because we still had that bank loan to pay off. We tried putting the store up for sale, but got no takers. Finally, I decided in 1990 that I would go back into social work. I was hired as a caseworker by Jefferson County, the largest suburban county west of Denver.

The two things I have done in my life that I am most proud of are being a foster parent and doing child protection casework. Nothing can beat true intimacy and love; sharing your heart and mind and soul with another human being.