Author: Bill Radford

They came to America seeking a better life – and found it on the Colorado prairie. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, waves of immigrants arrived in the U.S. from Czechoslovakia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many first worked in the coal and steel mines of Pennsylvania, but the West soon lured many as well…

It was my wife, Margaret, who first noticed the poor hen’s back. The chicken had an ugly, raw back, stripped of feathers. The culprit: our rooster, apparently too enthusiastic in its mating behavior.  I remembered visiting a farm where one of the chickens, suffering from the same problem, was wearing a protective covering. We Googled…

Helen Baber has lived in Colorado Springs for decades, but her heart always has belonged to the prairie east of town. Baber, 86, was born in Calhan, one of 16 children; her late husband, Lloyd, was born in Eastonville. Helen attended Peyton High School until her senior year, when she married Lloyd, who had served…

It started with a dream.  It was August 2015, shortly after the Tuttle family had made their annual visit from their home in eastern El Paso County to the Wallace County Fair in Sharon Springs, Kan. On that fateful morning, Chad Tuttle asked his daughter, Landri, how she had slept and whether she’d had any…

It has been a tough summer for my garden, battered by several rounds of hail. And what the hail hasn’t decimated, grasshoppers have. A relatively low population of grasshoppers was forecast for Colorado in the 2016 Rangeland Grasshopper Hazard map, prepared by the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But the clouds…

There’s not a lot of escape from the brutal summer sun out on the Colorado prairie. So last year, my wife, Margaret, proclaimed a goal for this summer: a swimming pool. Sure enough, she responded to an ad on Craigslist this spring and bought a used Intex Easy Set pool, along with pump, filter and…

For 100 years, Farmers State Bank has served rural communities east of Colorado Springs. And the Pieper family has been an integral part of the bank for all but two of those years. A.L. Pieper started working at the bank, then in Peyton, in 1918; a decade later, he and a partner bought a controlling…

I’ve undergone chiropractic treatments, and so it was a familiar sight as I watched Dr. Jim Friedly work on his patient. Friedly ran his hands down the spine, pushing in at one point. He grabbed a leg, turned it, gave it a quick snap. One big difference between me and Ringo, the patient, however: Ringo’s…