People
Collection for person entities.
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- John Duncan Hart
- He was born in Nevada, Missouri. He lost his father, an Irish immigrant and devout Catholic named Mike Hart, when he was very young. Gertrude (Duncan) Hart, his mother, was a devout Methodist. His maternal grandfather was a cattle rancher and former Confederate soldier who was buried in his Confederate Army uniform. Sometime soon after his father's death, John's mother married William A. Lowe, who was also from Missouri. They moved to Grand Junction, Colorado in 1910, when John was nine years old, because his stepfather wanted to raise cattle and work in the mines. John grew up on a dairy farm in what was known as the Slocum Division, on Grand Avenue near the bend in the road west of 1st Street. US Census records list the family's address as being in the Pomona area. As a boy he had polio. This left him lame and he started school on crutches. Later in life, his disability influenced his choice of employment. He completed his formal schooling at the Lowell School. He did some vocational training at Colorado State University and the Emily Griffith Opportunity School in Denver. In 1919, when he was eighteen, he joined the Colorado State Department of Fish and Game and policed the Grand River State Game Refuge. He policed the Colorado River and made $40 per month. He worked all over the state during his career, although his primary duties were in Western Colorado for all but 3 ½ years. From 1924 to 1928, he worked in Denver. At one point in his career, he was charged with the reduction of both elk and buffalo herds introduced by John Otto to the Colorado National Monument. This ran him afoul of Otto and certain "sentimentalists" in the Grand Valley, but, according to Hart, they killed only two animals of each species, and did so humanely. He married Dorothy Bryant, the sister of the artist Harold Bryant, on June 7, 1934 in Glenwood Springs. Due to being in federal service already, he was not a soldier in WWII - instead, he taught survival courses on Mt. Evans. He retired in 1959, whereupon he was appointed Deputy State Fish and Game Commissioner. He was a member of the Masons, a wildlife society, and the Colorado Sheriff and Peace Officers Organization. He was the brother-in-law of local artist Harold Bryant, and knowledgeable about his work. He was a state and federal law officer, and Bryant often accompanied Hart on his horseback rides through Western Colorado and Eastern Utah.
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- John E. Held
- John Held was the music director for Salida High School from 1941 to 1975, a representative of the Colorado Music Educator's Association, and directed the Methodist Choir in Salida for 50 years. He was also one of the key players in the startup of the Salida-Aspen Concert Series.