Page 37 - AreaNewsletters "Mar 2022" issue

las County.
he remembers. “While I was sheri , we cemented the oor and built another little room on.”
Because Douglas County did
not have an adequate jail, most prisoners were taken to Littleton or Colorado Springs, but when prisoners were kept in Castle Rock, they were taken to local restaurants for meals.
When asked how citizens reached
him since he had no radio, Hammond replied “The telephones then were
the old crank-type. You’d crank them up and get Central. You didn’t give a number, just told ‘em who you wanted to talk to and they’d ring ‘em up. Course those Central girls knew where I was all the time.”
“I wanted a radio to talk over but the commissioners wouldn’t stand for it. So I went out and bought myself one and put it in the car.”
Hammond responded to the Rockview Lounge once when 20 gang members were causing trouble. Hammond rounded them all up and incarcerated them in a single cell where they were packed in like sardines. When the judge, Arlie Gordon Sr., got around to hearing the cases, he let them all out for time served, and they never came back!
One time, on a dare from fellow law enforcement o cers, Hammond rode his beloved horse “Penny” in and
out of the jail in Colorado Springs! A newspaper article dated October 11
(year unknown)
read, “Heaven
help the thief
who pinched
Penny, an eight-
year-old trick
horse, belonged
to Sheri John
Hammond of Doug
She disappeared from his barn Monday night along with the horse of Aldon Hawks, a retired rancher.” No follow- up to that story could be located.
A call that Hammond often related was about some boys who got up on the roof of the Masonic Hall in Castle Rock and were looking in the window, watching some Rainbow Girls changing their clothes. Sheri got the boys and told them that he wasn’t taking them to jail but was bringing them home. The boys kept asking the sheri if he was going to tell their Dad what they had done but the sheri told tham that he was not. When they arrived at the house where the boys lived, the sheri walked the boys to the door and announced to the dad that the boys had something to tell him!
Continued on next page...
37
Castle Rock “AreaNewsletters” • March 2022