Category: Hein Family Stories

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Dorothy’s Cat

I remember my sweet mother-in-law every day of my life. She died in 2008, at the age of 98. I often wear her fuzzy bathrobe when I get up in the morning. I wear one of her sweatshirts it the winter, when it is cold outside. Snuggled in my memories of her, I am cozy and warm.

I loved spending time with Dorothy. She was pretty and funny, sweet and a little naive. But Dorothy was also determined and brave. She survived losing her father in the influenza outbreak when she was eight years old. She survived diphtheria and being quarantined at Denver General Hospital for six weeks when she was ten. She was the mother of six children, two of whom died before she did. Even as she approached 100 years old, she was determined to stay in her own home.

For many years, Dorothy and I spent every Friday evening together. Often we would go to the neighborhood restaurant for dinner and a glass of wine. Other times, we would sit in Dorothy’s kitchen and talk about our week. At various times, Dorothy shared her home with her husband, her children, her nephew, her mother, and Jim’s dog, Adolph.

Adolph was a medium-size, brown dog. Not a big dog, but not small, either. He was part Airedale and mostly mutt. Adolph was happy and  lovable, but not especially smart. Although Dorothy tolerated Adolph, her real love were her cats. She nearly always had a cat in the house. When one died, usually from crossing busy Grant Street, another one showed up, asking to be adopted.

One Friday afternoon, I stopped in to see Dorothy and I knew something was wrong. Her grey kitty was meowing around the kitchen. Dorothy poured each of us a glass of wine.

“Is everything ok?” I asked. “You seem a little flustered.”

“I am flustered. I had a weird phone call today.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. It was a man’s voice. He said he saw me at church.”

“Are you sure you don’t know him?”

“His voice wasn’t familiar at all. He said he wanted to see my pussy.”

“Oh, my. That’s terrible. What did you say?”

“I was very cross with him. I asked him why he would say such a thing. My cat was right there in the kitchen with me and I wasn’t going to take her outside to show her to him or anyone else.”

“What did the man say then?”

“Nothing. He hung up.”

Dorothy told that same story to everyone she saw that weekend. No one had the heart to tell her why we thought the story was funny.

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A Pandemic Tragedy ~ 1918

This is a story of a good man who died too soon, and the family he left behind. It is a story of a hard-working Irishman, with a wife and two small daughters, who died at the age of forty-nine, a casualty of the influenza epidemic. John (Jack) Gorman was the father of my sweet mother-in-law, Dorothy Gorman Hein. Dorothy was eight years old when her father died. Her little sister, Margaret, was six. The year was 1918.

John Gorman was born April 9, 1869, in Donagal, Ireland, one of the poorest counties in all of Ireland. According to family stories, when John and the other Irishmen arrived in New York City, the locals threw rocks at them and shouted, “Get back on the train. We don’t want you here.” 

And that’s what they did. John and his fellow Irishmen, got on a train heading west. They came to Colorado, in search of gold and silver and plenty of work in the mines.

John rode as far as Denver and eventually arrived in Nederland, Colorado. I would love to know how he got there. Did he take a stage coach from Denver? Did he go to Boulder first? Maybe Central City? How old was he at the time? 

We know that John did not just work in the mines, although he must have when he first arrived. By 1911, he was also working in partnership with another Irishman, Jim Nolan. According to newspaper clippings, they were assessors ~ evaluating  the quality of Pine Creek gold, part of the Apex Mine system.

Later, John purchased James Noonan’s interest in mines in St. Anthony of the Lake Gulch. He sunk a shaft in St. Anthony of the Lake Gulch and by 1911, he and another partner, John Smith, successfully mined gold that was worth a considerable amount of money.

I tell you all of this, to illustrate that John Gorman was a smart, ambitious man. An immigrant who was determined to make his fortune mining gold in Boulder and Clear Creek counties. 

In 1909, John met an Irishwoman, who was also hard-working and determined to survive a hard life in the Colorado mountains. Margaret (Maggie) McNulty was born in Hannibal Missouri. She moved to Memphis, and then came west to Central City, where she met Jack. Together they had two girls, Dorothy, born in 1910, and Margaret, born in 1912. 

From all accounts, Jack and Maggie, had a good life. They lived in a small house in Nederland and Jack worked in the local mine. Dorothy remembered seeing her father ride his donkey up the hill to the mine. When he arrived at  work, he gave the donkey’s rump a slap, and the donkey turned around and came home by himself.

All of that ended in 1918, when Jack died of complications of the influence pandemic. The family was devastated. Maggie and the girls had  just enough money to come to Denver, and move into a little house at 500 South Broadway. They sold candy out of the front room, and lived in the back. The girls attended St. Francis de Sales Catholic school. 

Maggie later went to work at the Good Heart laundry, near the corner of Broadway and Alameda. The work was grueling and the pay was low. It was a very hard life for Maggie and her girls.

The girls grew up, married good, hard-working men, much like their father. Dorothy married Bill Hein and Margaret married Harry Gessing, two of the finest men on earth. Margaret and Dorothy were more than sisters. They were always dear friends, who loved to laugh, and dance, and have fun.

Maggie moved in with Dorothy and Bill and their six children. One day she was hit by a car, crossing the street as she left the Shamrock Bar with a friend. Maggie’s leg was broken and never healed well. She eventually lost her leg and had to move to a nursing home, where she died. 

Jim Hein, Maggie’s grandson, remembers his Nana as a woman who lived upstairs, wore a big fur coat, liked to tell stories and laugh. We can only imagine how her life would have been different if only her husband, Jack, hadn’t died ~ much too young, in the pandemic of 1918.

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When Irish Eyes Are Smiling!

Next Wednesday is St. Patrick’s Day. I’m writing this story in honor of two strong, amazing, Irish women in my life: My grandmother, Irene Fay, whose mother came from County Sligo, Ireland, and my mother-in-law, Dorothy Gorman, whose mother was born in Hannibal, Missouri.

Irene and Dorothy had a lot in common. Both lost their fathers at a young age. Dorothy’s father died in the flu epidemic of 1918, when she was eight-years-old. Irene’s father was crushed between two train cars, while he was working for the railroad. Irene was in high school at the time. 

Both Irene and Dorothy grew up poor, raised by single mothers, at a time when jobs for women were scarce. As adults, they were hard-working, brave women who loved their spouses, their children and their grandchildren. They also loved to drink, now and then. Dorothy drank wine out of a pretty wine glass. Irene drank whiskey out of a porcelain cup.

I don’t know if Irene Fay was proud of her Irish heritage. My Welsh grandfather didn’t approve of her Irish family. I loved all of them, however, even though they were often in trouble with the law. Grandma died she was seventy years old.

Dorothy, on the other hand, was enormously proud of being Irish. St. Patrick’s Day was the most important day of the year to her and her sister, Margaret. They had their own booth at Duffy’s Shamrock Tavern in downtown Denver. They arrived early and stayed all day, wearing green from head to toe. Dorothy died just before her ninety-eighth birthday, still strong-willed and determined to live on her own terms.

One of the sweetest love stories I’ve ever heard was the story Bill Hein told about meeting his Irish sweetheart, Dorothy Gorman, at church, one night in the rain. Here is his story, told in Bill’s own words:

“My Uncle, George Hein and Aunt Mim had already moved to Denver. I stayed with them when I first moved to town. We used to go to church at St. Francis De Sales on South Sherman Street and we always attended the Tuesday night services together. Very quickly I noticed that six young, pretty girls always sat together in the front pew on Tuesday nights.

One Saturday afternoon, I came into church to go to confession. When I was finished, I saw one of the pretty girls from the front pew, praying in the back of the church. And then I noticed that it had started pouring rain outside. 

I ran as fast as I could, through the rain, the two blocks to where my sister, Anne and her husband, John Kastle, lived. I ran right in their door shouting,”Where’s the car keys!”

I jumped in their car and went back to church, dripping wet. When I saw the girl I was looking for, I said, “I wonder if I could take you home? It’s raining outside.”

“Is it?” she answered, as she looked at me, dripping wet from the downpour. She agreed to let me drive her home.

That night we got lost all over South Denver. Dorothy said turn one way, and I turned the other. I didn’t want to take her home just then. I wanted the ride to last forever.

Later, I took Dorothy to Canon City to meet my folks. We were married at St. Francis De Sales Church on June 2, 1937.”

~ Bill Hein

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John and Euphrosina ~ Early Westcliffe Pioneers

I love learning about family history and documenting stories, especially stories from long ago.

I learn to tell stories by listening to storytellers. My father’s family were a very quiet bunch. They were reluctant to talk at all, much less share their history. On the other hand, my mother’s family, the Hunts, were good storytellers. I hope to tell you some of their stories later.

But the best storyteller, by far, was my father-in-law, Bill Hein. Born in 1901, he had an excellent memory and a treasure chest of stories from his family tree.

I can still see my father-in-law, pipe in his hand and sometimes a drink on the table, as he told stories after dinner. He loved hearing his own words as they came out of his mouth. He’d laugh before he even got to the punch line. In the tradition of good storytellers, he’d re-tell the same story many times, using the same words over and over. That way, his stories were carried down from generation to generation. until, eventually, I started writing them down.

Here is one of Bill’s stories, just as he told it to me.

“The year was 1873. Colorado was not yet a state.. That was the year my grandfather, John Hein, arrived in Denver with a team of big mules, a large wagon, and his bride, Euphrosina.

John was a bridge builder in the German army. When the army got too close to Holland, he decided it was time to split. John left the army, came to America and went directly to a German colony in Illinois. Before long he convinced his parents, Nicholas and Catherine Hein, his brother Conrad, and his sister Christina to join him.

John, a Lutheran, met  Euphrosina Schneider, a Catholic, in Illinois. They were young and brave and very much in love. They wanted to take advantage of the Homestead Act, leave Illinois and start a new life in a beautiful place. 

John’s family decided to tag along. They signed on with the Colfax German Settlement and headed for Colorado. Soon they were joined by Euphrosina’s brother and his wife in what is now the town of Westcliffe.

To be part of the settlement, men had to be of good moral character, between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five. They had to be in good physical and mental health, and pay a huge sum of $250.

John, Euphrosina and the rest of the Hein family traveled together across the prairie by covered wagon, pulled by two big mules. In Denver they loaded their belongings onto a train going to Pueblo ~ the wagon and mules in one boxcar and the family in another. They unloaded in Pueblo, and once again traveled by covered wagon to their new home in the Wet Mountain Valley.

John and his neighbors were among the first settlers in this early German farming community of one hundred families. The first thing they did was to throw up a big, long barn. In the beginning, everyone lived together in that great big barn.

Farming was tough for people coming from Illinois. The elevation was 7000 feet, and the growing season was short. Frosts came early and many of their crops died.

John was a woodsman and fine carpenter. One of the first things he did was to build a sturdy cabin about eight miles out of town. Next he decided to keep cattle, in addition to farming. He started with longhorn, but with their long horns and skinny behinds, there wasn’t that much meat on them.  

One day, John went to the state fair in Pueblo and bought a big Hereford bull for $600.00. He hooked the bull on the back of his wagon and pulled him back to Westcliffe. At first his neighbors thought John was crazy. But when he started to breed his bull with the longhorn cows, everyone saw why he had done it. He soon had the finest beef cattle in all Westcliffe.

John and Euphrosina had three children, each two years apart: Pauline (Lena), John Edward (my Dad, known as Ed) and George. On the morning of December 16, 1891, John went outside to ride his horse. The horse reared and John lost his balance. The horse fell on top of him and crushed him. The saddle horn went right through his spleen. 

The family hurried outside to see what had happened. My Grandmother, Euphrosina, yelled to my Dad, “Ed, run for Father Servans. Then get the Lutheran minister and then the doctor. Your father is hurt bad.”

My Dad found the priest who volunteered to go after the minister while my Dad ran for the doctor. By the time they returned, my grandfather was nearly gone. He died with Father Servans holding one hand and the minister holding the other. He was fifty-two years old.”   

~ told by W.E. (Bill) Hein