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Okay, hello. Oh, okay, go ahead.

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So it's Jeff and Debbie answering questions from our daughters. And it's March 1, 2026.

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And it's a key year for us because this will be our 50th wedding anniversary. And we've been kind of keeping company since 1972 spring.

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When he stalked me. But we'll get into that, I digress.

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Okay. I'm stalking.

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We're ready. Hi, I'm Kelly, Jeff and Debbie's oldest daughter.

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What were your grandparents like? What special memories do you have of them?

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Well, there's a lot of information to impart on that. I knew three of my four grandparents.

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I'll start with the grandparents on my dad's side, who would have been Douglas and Gladys Hill.

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Unfortunately, Douglas Hill died in 1947 from tuberculosis before I was born. He'd be ravaged his family, all of his siblings, but one died of it.

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His mom died of it. So that was really hard.

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So I didn't get to know him. I knew of him.

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He was a giant of a man, physically tall, 6'7", 6'8", very skinny, probably didn't even weigh 200 pounds.

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And I heard he was a very kind, gentle, caring person. But I didn't know him.

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My wife, my grandmother, Gladys, and Gladys is about 5'2", so quite the opposite of Doug.

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And she was a spitfire. All you can say is she was a crazy, wacky lady.

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She was a strong woman. I think about her.

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Her husband died in '47. Her dad had died in 1946.

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Her mom was already deceased. And she had three little children to raise.

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And that was a lot in that period of time. But she was strong and good to it.

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And I loved being with her. She was just a crazy lady.

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In her later life, she wore wigs and you'd go over to her house and she said, "I'm going to flip my wig." And she'd pop it on and off.

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A lot of fun to hang out at her house. Have great fond memories of her.

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She lived in Cherry Creek too bad. We don't still own that house.

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It was between 1st and 2nd Cherry Creek on Jackson Street. Great huge front yard, big front tree.

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We'd play in it all the time. But Gladys was a great lady.

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She liked to drink her whiskey. She liked to bowl.

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She liked to smoke. And just had a good time.

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On my mom's side, it was a whole different kind of people. My mom's dad was a lawyer and a judge from Minnesota.

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He grew up on a farm there. He was raised with a real strict constitution.

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They were Methodists. Kind of like Methodists, they were more strict than, although they did drink and play cards.

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Where in Minnesota? Mankato.

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I should have said Gladys and Douglas were in Denver. But Leslie and all of my mom's parents lived in Mankato.

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He grew up on the farm. Family homesteaded in 1864 in Eagle Lake, Minnesota.

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And then they moved the kids to town 25 years later so they could go to high school and have a good school.

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Leslie was about 5'8". I don't think he ever weighed over 150 pounds.

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He was just religious about staying fit, walked all the time. He was a municipal judge for some 50-some years and he was 80 years old.

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He had a great crop of hair until he died at 96. It was just white and he had a nickname of "Old Silver Dome".

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He taught a lot about discipline, but also about fun.

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At age 70, he learned to water ski because they would take us out on the lake and we'd go water skiing.

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He went on a backpacking trip with my family then. But I learned a lot of values about compassion and caring from them.

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My grandmother, his wife, Olive, was extremely smart, fluent in four languages. She knew how to cook and sew and bake.

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It was a delight spending time with her and special fun when they would come out.

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I have great fond memories of all the three grandparents that were alive during my youth.

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I feel blessed to have known them. They were all dead by the time I finished college, but it was a great time to know them.

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So my grandparents, like your mom, my paternal grandfather, Samuel Lathrop Fowler, died when my dad, Will, was probably 11 or 12 years old of Alzheimer's.

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He moved back to Texas and actually died there with his sister. My grandmother, Louise Randlund Fowler, was from Texas.

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Her father and mother lived there and then her mother died. And so then there was another litter, if you will, of step-siblings and they were all from Texas.

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So Louise lived, the little Fowler boys, all four of them grew up in Boulder.

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They were all born in Boulder. And they lived up Boulder Canyon on Sunshine Ranch.

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Later, Samuel had built the road from the top of Flagstaff over to Green Mountain and Green Mountain Reservoir.

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He was a civil engineer. And he then, they were able to buy a house, 935 Ninth Street, which you guys have probably seen.

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Anyway, that's where my dad grew up. My maternal side was Fred Stanley White from Collingwood, Ontario.

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And he was one of, I don't know, four or five kids. The extended White family was very prominent there.

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And his dad was a wheelwright. And in the archives of pictures you guys have, there's a picture of his wheelwright shop in Collingwood, Ontario, which is kind of close to Lake Huron, actually.

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And so Fred Stanley White, his mom was Flora MacDonald, who, if you remember in Scottish lore, Flora MacDonald helped Bonnie Prince Charles flee Scotland under English oppression.

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I forget which years that was, probably 1700s. Anyway, so he came from Canada, moved to Chicago with his cousin.

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And he went to pharmacy school at Northwestern and established a very nice career as a pharmacist, very successful.

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As far as my mother knew, she never went through the depression, her grandmother.

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His, what my maternal grandmother, Nina White, was part German. Her dad was a T-merchant in England, but he was German.

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Don't know that much about that side of the tribe, but there is quite a bit of trickle-down from the Fred Stanley White side and his brothers and cousins, the pharmacy crew, in Chicago, Winnetteka.

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So that's kind of it. My fun memories, Fred Stanley White had one eye.

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He had a glass eye and he used to take it out when we were little kids and he would put it on the counter in the bathroom.

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He also, they both, my grandparents, and I don't remember if Grandma Fowler did have false teeth, but Fred Ninam did have false teeth.

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And we always thought that was, my brother and I thought that was hysterical. We lived in a little house down on Prospect, kind of between Jackson, so Jackson, no, it's LaSalle and Monroe or Madison.

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And I see it from the street all the time driving up Old Teagap. And so a lot of times when we lived in Boulder, we would come down here and see them.

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And it was interesting because Fred White was very averse to driving at night. And that's kind of an interesting story because, you know, we lived so close to Palmer Park and down where they lived, I always thought that was a big deal to go to Palmer Park for a picnic with Jim and Flo and Craig and Bitsy.

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And it turns out it was no big deal at all. You could walk practically.

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So that was kind of an interesting thing. Fred White loved boxing.

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And when we would stay over at their little house on Prospect, it was usually Friday night fights or something. Anyway, we would watch with him on their black and white, and he would give us money, and we would bet on who was going to win the fights.

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And then so my brother and I used to win, sometimes we'd win 15, 25, 30 cents betting with Fred, whose name was Bumpaw. So I have a lot more memories of them.

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I do have some good memories of Louise Fowler. She'd raised four kids in the Depression, much like Nana Hill, all boys all in Boulder.

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And she'd worked at the University of Colorado. And by the time I remember her, she was old and a bit frail and pretty quick had to go to the nursing home out by where Lauren, out where you lived on Baseline right there.

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And that's where she died when I was in second grade. Fred and Nana lived much longer.

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Fred lived until I was like a junior, sophomore in high school, was when he died. And the funny family story you probably remember, Flu and Jim used to always have Thanksgiving at their house, and they lived down on Calibre.

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And the whole time I was a little kid, Nana would always say, "Well, this is Fred's last Christmas." Fred's last Christmas, Fred's last Thanksgiving.

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And about the time I was five or six, I said to my dad, "Why does she say that? He's sitting right there." And so that became a joke that I still talk to my brother about and my cousin Craig, whose house we were having this.

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And we all found that as kids. Like, why does she say this time and time again?

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Fred's sitting right there and he lived another 15 years. So that's kind of a weird story.

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But that's kind of it from my memories of grandparents. And there are some great-grandmothers' paintings from Boulder that you all each have one, as you know.

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So, up I should talk while... You have other stuff?

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I don't have a memory of this, but I know of a story. And I was just reading about it of my great-grandfather, great-grandfather, on my mom's side, J. Iris Lee Knot.

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And, excuse me, Morse, and he was the one that homesteaded in Minnesota in 1864. And he was part of a posse.

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Literally think about that on horseback, on a posse. And he was helping defend a bridge to keep the young field...

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Youngers. Youngers and the Jesse James and his brother from getting across that bridge.

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He was also part of a posse that would defend their territory from the Indians back then. And my mom can recount stories from that from the 1930s.

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So it's...you know, they were kind of original pioneers of this area called Eagle Lake in Blu-Earth County in Minnesota. And so my grandfather had some stories that he would regale us with.

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One fun story about my grandfather, Pop Morse, on my mom's side, is he smoked a cigar. He loved smoking cigars.

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But remember, I said he was kind of a rigid constitutional person. He stuck to a schedule and he would smoke one cigar a day.

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That was all he would allow himself. And when he turned 80, he thought about giving up cigar smoking.

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80, mind you. And we told him, "Pops, that's what we called him, pops. You just can't...you're 80 years old." Well, remember, he went on to live to be 96.

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So...and the only reason he stopped working at 94 is the city of Mankato, which is where they lived, condemned his building that he'd been in since he first started practicing law in 1920s.

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And they tore it down to build a mall. And so he decided he was too old to move offices and so he retired.

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But again, that shows you kind of the strength and structure he had. But he wasn't a man that you were afraid of.

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You really...he brought you in. He endeared to himself to you. So I remember my grandparents in Minnesota lived in this old big house.

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It had four stories. And the laundry was in the basement.

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And it was down these stone winding stairs that you kind of had to duck. And it was kind of just this dark cave.

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I kind of liked going down there, but I never went down there by myself. A fun story about my grandfather.

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So this is where the girls get the angst. Yeah. Well, then the other fun thing is the bats like to come into the fourth story.

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So my grandfather would arm us with baseball gloves and fishing nets. And we'd go up the stairs to the attic room.

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And these were normal stairs. It wasn't creepy. You're a drop down and we'd walk up the stairs into this big room and we'd go around catching a bat.

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And if we caught a bat, that meant we could go get ice cream. And so we loved doing that.

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So he had a lot of fun. Even though he was kind of strict and stern, we had a lot of fun.

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So I think we both are blessed to have known our grandparents for when we did. Yeah, some...you should tell them about pops in the Supreme Court.

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The last case he tried in Minnesota. I think you know that better than I do.

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Okay. Well, pops was getting really old. And I think he was...

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80s plus. Oh, no, he was in his 90s.

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This was like... But his mind was super sharp.

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But he was...yeah, he was probably 93. And he did a lot of probate and a lot of probate of farms in Minnesota.

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Because there's a lot of big farming. A lot of big farms, a lot of turnovers.

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He said, "You know, now I'm taking care of my original clients, kids, or grandkids in probate." And he had one difficult probate case that there was tax implications and this and that.

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And we went through the appellate court in Minnesota, ended up at the Minnesota Supreme Court. And I think by this time he'd had a botched surgery on his right cheek.

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So he had a droopy face. He had a cancerous spot right here.

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And unfortunately not a good surgeon. So he cut a nerve.

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And so he ruled. Got his facial nerve.

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Oh, and he just had this terrible drop. Because he was so proud.

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So anyhow, fast forward a tiny bit. So this has climbed through all these courts.

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And I don't remember exactly what the issue was. But, you know, here's pops this old, old lawyer.

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And he gets this judge who's probably in his fifties on the Minnesota Supreme Court. And at the beginning of the trial, the Supreme Court, one of the justices said, "Well, Mr. Morse, what is your anticipated outcome?

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And why, what do you aim to get out of this?" And he said, "Well, Judge, I aim to get this done before I die." And the judge laughed.

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And he did. Yeah.

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He was not somebody you messed with. I mean, he knew his stuff.

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So thank you for sharing that. That's a good story.

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Yeah, he was a good man. And the judge cited in his paper.

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Yep. Okay.

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