There's an old journalism adage, usually uttered by editors
who haven't had their butts out of a comfy leather newsroom chair in years,
which goes: “You know… the news just doesn't walk in the door.”
But sometimes, it does.
One day, Stan Heffner walked into the paper looking for his
family.
You have the people who walk in to do business. To place a
classified for their garage sale. To bring in a write-up of their sixth grade
daughter's basketball team. You have those who are angry about something
already printed. An error in a story. A missing phone number in an ad. And you
have those who want to swim in the newsprint sea that is the bound archives of
past issues.
Those people usually start the conversation with a date, a
time, but always, there is a story.
Heffner and his wife had lived most of their lives in
Denver. Now, they planned to move to a farm they had bought in South Dakota,
and before they left, he wanted to tie up a loose end. Or more accurately, see
if he could find the beginning of the string. Heffner said he had never met his
grandparents, Ray and Rose Gordon. Their son, his father, said only that “they
died in an accident when I was a baby.”
Then, several years ago, at a family reunion, his aunt told
him a different tale.
Ray had shot Rose then turned the gun on himself, the aunt
said. It happened on Christmas Eve. In 1915. In a town just an hour's drive
north of Denver. A town called Johnstown.
And there, bobbing in the wood-pulp waves, it sits. On the
front page of the Dec. 30, 1915, issue of The Johnstown Breeze: RAY GORDON
KILLS WIFE AND SELF, the headline shouts in all caps. “Town Shocked By Tragedy
on Christmas Eve -- No Motive Known.”
Calling it “the most revolting crime ever committed in this
part of the state,” the story goes on to say Gordon showed up at about 6:30 in
the evening at the home of his in-laws, the Haffners, where his wife was
staying with their infant son.
“Just what proceeded the shooting is known only to the
members of the family,” the story states. Today, the 24/7 maw of the News Beast
would demand more. But given the journalistic sensibilities of the time, and
the small town nature of journalism even today, it went no further in
explanation.
The Haffner Family took the baby and raised him themselves.
Two weeks after the shooting they had already adopted the child and changed his
name. His father had had no contact with the Gordon side of the family, Heffner
said. When he asked his aged father about what the aunt had told him, his dad
would only say again that he was a baby and remembered nothing.
“But my mom said later that he (my dad) was so affected by
this that he changed his name by usage from Haffner to Heffner sometime in the
1930s and went the rest of his life as Heffner,” he said.
Almost the entire patriarchal branch of his family tree had
been ripped off and carried away in the hurricane of emotion that followed the
shootings, Stan Heffner said. While the small news story answered some
questions, it only created others. He left his name and number, “in case you
find out something else.”
Several months later, a letter came in the mail.
“I'm currently researching our family's history and hope
that you can help me to find some details regarding a ‘skeleton in the
closet,'” the writer began.
The writer misspelled Rose Gordon's maiden name, but the
story was the same … but from the other perspective. The woman, who lived in
Juneau, Alaska, said she had spent hours listening to her husband's grandmother
talk about her brother, Ray, who had died in a town named Johnstown, in
Colorado, when he shot his wife and then killed himself. Worse yet, she said,
it had happened on Christmas Eve. And there was a baby, she said, a toddler,
who the Gordon family had never seen nor gotten to know.
“I have my fingers
crossed…” the woman concluded.
I called Stan Heffner. Was he interested in talking to the
woman? Of course he was, he said. And together, they began to put together the familial
pieces that had been shattered by two cracks of a pistol nearly a century ago.
The story of Ray and Rose Gordon stretches back to the
literal beginnings of Johnstown. Rose, who was born in Russia of German
descent, came to the community with her family as a 12-year-old in 1904, making
them among the first families to settle here.
Ray, born in 1886, hailed from Missouri. The story goes his
family came to Virginia in the 1760s, a husband, wife and son. The father went
back to Ireland and never returned. The mother and son eventually moved to
North Carolina and then on to Missouri. Along the way, once, a bolt of
lightning struck a house where family was living, killing two people. At
another point, "Siamese Twins" Chang and
Eng Bunker lived in the home.
It's unknown how Ray and Rose met. Ray came to the area in
1910, most likely looking for work as a laborer -- the “Go West Young Man”
mantra still rattling around the brains of young men following the lure of open
land and new opportunity.
Ray would have been about six years older than her. Family
members have a postcard written by Rose, but never sent, that talks about her,
“Having my picture taken with Ray Gordon's Kodak,” and a promise to send one
when she got it. They also have one of Ray sitting on a motorcycle.
In another picture, date unknown, the couple pose together.
Rose is sitting on Ray's lap, his hand holding her right shoulder tightly. Both
are smiling broadly. It's unusual, people remark, to see two people even
smiling in photographs from that era, much less sitting on each other's lap.
They were married in Victor, Colorado, on Sept. 6, 1914.
Their son, Stan's father, was born just a bit more than a month later.
Supposition is that they had moved out of the Johnstown area, all the way into
the mountains, to prevent people from knowing about the out-of-wedlock
pregnancy.
Then, about a year later, just before Christmas, Rose showed
back up in Johnstown with the baby. On Christmas Eve, there were reports of Ray
being seen around town drinking during the day. One rumor is that he found out
his wife was having an affair. In another, he simply saw her speaking to
another man on the street and became enraged.
He showed up at Rose's parent's house early that evening. At
first, her father wouldn't let him in, but then relented. While the baby was in
the other room with one of Rose's sisters, the two were, it is imagined, left
alone to talk.
What they talked about, and what happened next, either was
buried within days with the both of them, or if there were any witnesses within
the house, the story got held tight and has probably also gone to its final
rest. One sister of Rose's, it is said, was so affected by the tragedy that
pictures found later would have her scratched from the image. Another story
that is whispered is that she worked in the Weld County Courthouse at one time,
and long ago had all the records regarding the case destroyed.
Stan Heffner and I stand in Johnstown Cemetery and try and get
our bearings. We follow the notes from the records at Town Hall and find Rose's
grave. Somewhere out here, in a still unmarked grave, also lies his
grandfather. Stan says he heard that Ray's family showed up days after the
shooting from Missouri, quickly buried him, and left. He doesn't know if they
were able to see the baby.
I hang back, giving Stan some time alone. He takes a
picture. He stands and he stares at the headstone. Finally, he looks around and
I feel like it's okay to again intrude.
“I literally found an entire side of my family,” Heffner
says quietly. “I went from not knowing anything about my grandfather, from not
even knowing what he looked like, to seeing pictures of him and being able to
talk to people who could tell me about him. That happened because I walked in
the door of your office.”
“No, it happened because it happened,” I said. “The
newspaper is just the place where the first rough draft of history sits. It's
where people come to look. I'm glad we were able to help.”
Later, after the earnest handshake and departure of Stan
Heffner, I sit in the office alone thinking about him and his family. I get up
and go to the back room and pull the 1915 archive volume off the shelf.
Flipping pages, I again find the boldface BIG NEWS in the small town paper
leaping from the grey point-typed page. Drunken shouted words. Maybe a moment
of tender connection, a pleading, a searching attempt at reconnection and
reconciliation. Another harsh flash of angry denouncement. The embarrassment in
the small community. The coming holiday tomorrow. The cold December night wind
that carried two sharp cracks and then cries.
I look at a picture of Ray and Rose I have on the wall by my
computer that I put there when I was writing their story, trying to conjure
some sort of connection by being able to stare into their eyes. “You're writing
about people,” I always tell reporters when they start here. “It may be just
another story to you, but it's their lives.” It's a happy picture. The one
where she's sitting on his lap with that smile, and he sits with his arm around
her, a strong-jawed Son of the Soil and his beautiful frontier bride.
Nobody really knows what goes on in a relationship. What
happens when it's nobody but the two of you alone. Something obviously went
wrong for Ray and Rose. But on this day, in this picture, they are in love.
That's the way I want to remember them. Not on that December night, Ray
drunkenly pleading for his family back. Not now out under the sky and the earth
at the cemetery. Not even necessarily as Stan Heffner's grandparents.
But rather as they are in that picture. Young and laughing,
a prairie version of Sid and Nancy. On that motorcycle of Ray's -- Rose's arms
wrapped around his waist in a tight hug as they go through the jog in the
intersection just a bit too fast at night -- Ray's tires skidding for a moment
before he regains control. The jolt of adrenaline from the moment of fear
making both of them feel a bit more alive and more in love, as Rose squeezes
Ray tighter, burying her face in his broad back and smiling, as he rolls into
the throttle and they head out of town toward the lights of the saloons in
Milliken.
