Page 11 - AreaNewsletters "Apr 2021" issue

C O MMU N I T Y
Did You Know This...
about The History of Castle Rock by Lora Thomas
County Commissioner
Castle Rock wasn’t always the sprawling suburban area some see it as today
It was VERY di erent in 1984...
The Colorado State Patrol
assigned me to Troop 1-C,
Castle Rock, upon my
graduation from the Academy
on August 24, 1984. I was a
single mom with a darling 4
year-old little boy. I was excited... and I was scared. Who would watch Shaun while I worked two weeks on day shift
then 2 weeks on swing shift, and 7 nights
of graveyards every couple of months? The only people I knew were a couple of state troopers. And there were only 8 other women troopers in the state — none in the Castle Rock area. It wasn’t going to be easy being a trailblazer.
I grew-up in Denver but traveled through Castle Rock every time my family
drove south to visit my grandparents in Walsenburg a couple of times a month.
We usually stopped at the gas station at
the south end of Castle Rock, on the east Frontage Road, that had cheap gas. That was the extent of my early Castle Rock interaction. But even as a very little girl, the big rock on top of the butte at the north end of town held a keen interest for me, and I wondered (sometimes aloud) every time we passed it “How did that rock get there?”
The State Patrol paid for Shaun and I to live in a hotel for a month while we looked for more permanent housing. Our rst temporary home was the Super 8 on Wolfensberger, conveniently next to the now-closed
...and what did I even know about Castle Rock?
Lora, 1984
Lora & son
Village Inn with the famous 688-3200 telephone number! State troopers didn’t have portable radios back then, so just like Capt. McClusky in The Godfather, when we stopped for a meal break we had to give a phone number to dispatch in case we were needed.
Having lived in the Denver area for my whole life, it was a big adjustment learning to “survive” in a small town of 8,000 residents that did not even have a movie theater. There was one grocery store – a Safeway where the Philip S. Miller Library is today. Walmart? No. Target? No. A mall? Uh, no. There was no gym or tness center until Castle Rock built the Rec Center in The Woodlands several years later. There wasn’t even a hospital in all
of Douglas County, although there was a small emergency department that could be reached by driving through Silver Heights. This is where troopers took suspected drunk drivers for the then-optional blood test. The original St. Francis Catholic
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Castle Rock “AreaNewsletters” • April 2021