People

: Helen Elizabeth (Maher) Bowman; Helen (Maher) Bowman was born in Salida, Colorado to Matthew B. Maher and Priscilla Bessie Crossley. The 1910 US Census shows her father working as a brakeman for a railroad. Helen moved to Grand Junction with her parents in 1918. There, Matthew worked as a railroad conductor while her mother was a homemaker. Census records show the family living at 560 Teller Avenue in 1920, when Helen was ten years old. She attended grammar school in Salida, Bakersfield, California, and Grand Junction. She attended Grand Junction High School, where she was active in Glee Club, Operetta, Latin Club, Rhetorical Club, and in the Rhetorical Club play. After graduation, census records show that she found work as a bookkeeper in a bank. The 1930 census shows her as single and living with her parents at the age of twenty. She attended Chillicothe Business College in Missouri in 1927-28, and graduated from Barnes Business College in Denver in 1929. She married Marion George Bowman in Grand Junction on November 16, 1937. She moved with him to his family's land in west Palisade, where they ran a fruit farming operation. They had two children.

: Helen Gladys (Rambo) Hyde; She was born in Whitewater, Colorado to William H. Rambo and Charlotte (Baer) Rambo. Her father was a farmer and her mother was a homemaker. Her family often sang songs together until the death of Helen’s brother when she was twelve. US Census records show that they lived in Kannah Creek in 1920, when Helen was eight years old, and on California Mesa in Delta County in 1930. She married Fred L. Yates in Moab, Utah on February 24, 1935. The 1940 Census shows them living in Garfield County with Fred’s five children from a previous marriage. The 1950 Census lists Helen as separated from her husband and shows her living with her three children by their marriage in Lake City, where she worked as a grade school teacher. She later remarried, but that marriage also ended in divorce. She played and sang music with her family as a child, and had a good knowledge of folk and cowboy songs of the era.

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