After reading a recent letter to the editor about small towns being unaccepting of outsiders, I have to disagree. We came from a fairly large town, New York City, and moved to outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, and lived there for 20 years. We moved to Parachute this past fall. Having eight great grandchildren here was the motivating factor. My wife Betsy and I have come across lots of warm, friendly, welcoming people both here and in Rifle. The letter writer warned “do not tell people you are from out of state.” Heck, one or two sentences and they know I’m from out of state.
When I was serving as a New York City fireman (for 20 years) there was a fire in an apartment building that I will never forget. It was a large apartment building, but the fire was confined to one unit. Unfortunately a woman was a fatality — the fire was caused by her smoking in bed. I had to get some information about her (name etc.) and spoke to the neighbors. All I could find out was that she was the lady with the brown dog on the fourth floor. No name, was she someone’s grandma, mother, sister? No one knew. She had lived in the building for 12 years and no one knew her. I got her name from some mail I found. My point is, this could not happen in a small town. My wife Betsy has always commented on how friendly the people are here. We have met several of our friendly welcoming neighbors and two of them have shoveled the snow from our sidewalk before we could do it. What a blessing! Whenever we have gone to school concerts, football and volleyball games or just plain shopping, people will smile and say hi and even talk with us, and no one has been negative about our coming from another state, just interested.
Art Knack,
Parachute