I used to drive Highway 85 quite often between Greeley and Denver. South of Brighton, off on the eastern side of the road, there was a big white farm house with a front porch framed at the corners by thick supporting pillars with the same white shingles as the rest of the house, covered by an extension of the roof out from under the one window dormer. Just to the back of the house was an old wooden outbuilding that always caught my attention. When I came into possession of a camera, I stopped one afternoon in January, knocked on the door and asked the older woman who answered if it would be all right if I took a few pictures. She was very gracious, even flattered, and said yes. She told me that forty years earlier, her husband and sons had hauled the building across from the west side of the highway, to use as a tool shed and workshop. It had been a gas station from -- was it the 20s, or earlier, she said? I can't recall. But when nights out here were far darker; Highway 85 probably a primitive two lane, but still the best road around, the main route from Denver to Cheyenne, paralleling the railroad through Brighton, Platteville, Gilcrest, Evans and Greeley, Ault, Pierce, Nunn and Rockport. Later traveled by Jack and Neal, Dean and Sal.

Where rural electric service was rare away from the corridors of commerce, a little corner of the world become news and information nexus in that era's next wave technology, in a tradtion going back to the Tabard Inn on the road to Canterbury and beyond.