On that seriously hot Monday at the end of July an East-Champion woman was on her way to town when her car slowed down and stopped out on the grassy edge of 95 highway somewhere up on the north side of Prior. Roy Crouch had seen it happen and reckoned that something was wrong, so he turned around, drove back and asked the driver if she was alright. She was okay, but her car was not. Roy took her on into town where she was able to arrange to have it towed into Simons Automotive. Roy was already a hero in the community for his good work with the Eastern Douglas County Volunteer Fire Department. Add a feather to his cap for being a kind good neighbor willing to help a stranger. Bravo.

Beethoven said, “Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.” Music lover Dean Upshaw has a birthday on July 13th. That is also the birthday of Skyline School’s kindergarten teacher Sarah Goss. Morgan Johnson was in the 8th grade at Skyline last year and has a birthday to celebrate on July 14th. That is also the day all of Champion will celebrate Blaine Denlow’s favorite old cowboy, her dad, the patriarch of the Wolf Pen Cattle Company. On the 15th we remember Mary Graham. The 16th is for Lee Borders who will be in the 5th grade at Skyline this year. Somewhere between 9,800 and 10,000 people are born in the United States every day. Welcome citizens, and happy birthday.

From Champion, going north on Cold Springs Road it would be easy to miss Orville Hicks’ old barn on the left side of the road. Vines and trees have overtaken it. In recent years it was a roosting place for buzzards. Long years ago, it stored the hay and served all the purposes of a barn on the farm. East of Fox Creek and the OK Corral out on Highway 76 the place we call the old Coffman place is almost invisible now. Driving by it twenty years ago, we saw the sturdy log construction and an interesting stone structure beside it–maybe a cellar or well house. Ranson Proctor built the house sometime in the 1880’s according to one of his distant kinfolks, a great nephew of a couple of his wives. Ranson went off to Washington state in later years where he operated a hotel. Perhaps it was his first wife or his second one who planted the flowers that still bloom there every spring. By next spring those flowers will be the only evidence that anyone ever lived there. There is mystery and rich history in Champion—Looking on the Bright Side!

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