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Show THE ZEPH YR/DECEMBER 2003-JANUARY 2004. "ONLY : SCHAFER COULD GET AWAY WITH Monticello’s One-and-Only...Gene Schafer THAT’ By Jim Stiles the place. But that night the boss showed up and pretty soon he offered me the job. So I was working eight hours a day at the station and going to school six...This was in the mid-40s. Me and the teachers were the only ones that had cars at Late one winter morning, a couple of years back, Gene Schafer was busy at work on a Toyota Corolla. He was working alone in his shop, as he usually does, with the bay door closed and only the fire in stove to keep him company. He on jacks, had yanked the wheel frame, and was trying to pull his huge homemade wood had the rear end of the car to get a better look at the off the McPherson strut. school. I had an old ‘27 Chevrolet. In fact, I used to work on all the teachers’ cars or else they wouldn’t have graduated e. “Toward the end of high school, I bought a ‘41 Plymouth down there at the Chevrolet garage. I paid $29 a month or something like that on payments. This was in ‘48 or ‘49. I bought it from Tommy Nielson who was a salesman down there. He was star of the basketball team too. Selling cars Suddenly, the spring-loaded strut broke loose and the force of it drove into Gene’s lower jaw and pinned his head to the inside of the wheel well. So here he was, alone, the doors locked, nobody within hollering distance, with his head squished between the sheet metal wheel well and the mean end of a McPherson strut. and Like a grapefruit in a vice. Blood was squirting from the still going to school. That’s how it was in those days—everybody worked.” But a year later Gene joined the Army. Did he volunteer? “No.... was sort of asked to join because I was bootlegging wine.” Schafer had to tell this story... wound which should have snapped his jaw like a pretzel and for a moment, Schafer thought he might pass out. But he took a deep breath, tried to appreciate his situation, and then said out loud, to nobody in particular, “Yl be goddamned if I’m gonna end up dying like this.” “Well, I was at the station and this guy named And Gene Schafer did what he always does—the improbable, or the downright impossible. With one hand, he managed to pry the strut from under his chin, something two men could not accomplish under normal conditions, and pulled himself out of harm’s way. The entire right half of his face was blue from the bruises and swollen to the point where that side of him was “beyond recognition.” And he could barely use his whacked up jaw to chew food. thrown out of a car. I was just standing at night. So Bob says, ‘Is that your car?’ said, ‘I’ll give you $20 to run me to thought, Man that’s ok. We drove there Bob got there and it was late and I said it was. He Dove Creek.’ So I and loaded up with nine cases of wine and then when we got back, he said, ‘T’ll give you another $20 to drive me to Bluff. 1 thought, it'll be sunup before we get back. But 1 was only making $75 every two weeks at the garage. Then he said, ‘How about $30,’ and I said, OK.’ So I started doing that every two weeks . He’d But he managed. Later that afternoon, he was back on the job, trying to finish up the work he’d had to briefly abandon that morning. After all, he was in reasonably good shape otherwise. And he was only 72 years old at the time. That’s Gene Schafer. There are some people who are a legend in their own mind. Schafer is the rare individual who get five bucks for a-bottle and he was only paying ninety cents in Dove Creek. So they were wondering how all that wine was getting down there and here it was this little kid in high school bootlegging it. “So then my dad and the sheriff spotted me going down the road and I got caught. This was during the Korean is a legend long after there will hand and Conflict and they sort of gave me a choice of the Army or reform school or something. Hell, I was old enough to go in the service anyway, but I had more fun in the service than anywhere else. By the time I got in there, the Korean thing in his own time. That’s why I can assure you, not he reads this, I’ll hear a pounding on my door and be Gene, shaking his head with The Zephyr in his he’ll say, “What's all this bullshit about me being - alegend?” But he'll also have a bottle of Scotch in the other hand, wrapped ina grease rag. And then he'll say, ”...to hell with it... You got any ice?” Gene Schafer contains multitudes. He was born in Texas, moved to southern Utah when his dad saw an ad for free homestead land near Monticello. He knew practically nothing but hard work for most of his youth, but still found time to appreciate the joys of swing dancing, pretty girls, a taste for good whiskey and a well-tuned fast car. He’s walked and hunted and rode a horse over much of San Juan County, but also ran southeast Utah’s only ski resort for 20 years. Heslaughters his own beef each spring, but claims his good health can be attributed to the two or three cloves of garlic he eats whole every day (he keeps a jar of them -pickled with hot jalapenos--in the fridge in his shop). He appreciates good Scotch and prefers Glen Leavitt, but will settle for cheap brandy in a pinch. He’s the most honest man I’ve ever known, which causes "Finally. "My hell, And I said, If you'r a my son, Stan, came up to Dad, has it been like this "Hey. all you gotta do is good dancer, you can flat me and he said, all the time?” dance good, son. do anything.” mountains and just kept going. There was a piece of ground out here that talked to him so he got it. Someone had settled on it back in the early 1900s and abandoned it. But they left a little cabin and Dad wanted it. Then he brought us all out to live.” CCC His dad needed work and started to sign up with the (Civilian Conservation Corps) but when word got around that his dad was a whiz with engines, the lumber Mountains never tries to be anyone but himself, and in this godawful time of political correctness and pained pretension, just his ‘tell-it’like-it-is’ approach to life makes him a unique and unforgettable man. He once told San Juan County’s most celebrated curmudgeon/misanthrope that he, “crapped too wire..the snow won’t stick to burlap...and we’d walk out into the trees and cut cedar posts. Then I’d carry them back. We'd get thirty cents a piece for them and sometimes I could “My mother’s brother, my Uncle Aaron had worked in the hayfields near Montrose and Delta, and he brought back a little government booklet about homestead land in Utah and Colorado. So Dad got a hold of a little money...this was during the Depression..and he and Aaron came up here and found this country. They looked at the Yellowjacket area first but it was too flat-reminded him of Texas. Dad saw these up, they asked me if I could speak a “) think that was the most interesting time in my life. company that ran a mill up on the Saddle in the Blue and not only lived to tell the tale, he I signed foreign language and I said German, because my father’s dad had come over here to get away from the Kaiser. But I didn’t really speak German, exceptI knew some cuss words. Whenever I had some time off, I’d travel. I didn’t smoke so range of friends and adversaries. He grew up a Gentile in a community that is 90% Mormon; yet he has earned the’ respect of practically everyone, regardless of religion, because in the end, Gene Schafer is a straight-shooter. He made the guy laugh. No one could ever call Gene Schafer a phony. Some people work hard at being a character; with Gene it just comes naturally. And he tells the story of his remarkable life in a most unremarkable way-as if everyone has shared in the same kind of adventure... see, when But hey, after I got over there. I started to pick it up pretty Gene Schafer auto mechanic/dancer both chuckles, frowns and a squirm or two from a broad close to the house,” was winding down, so I ended up going to Germany. You hired him as a mechanic. But everyone in the family worked... “In the winter, we'd go out to the ranch in the snow, and I’d wrap me legs in burlap sacks and tie them with baling make six or seven dollars a day. We could live a couple of weeks on that.” They lived on the ranch for a few years, but when the kids needed to attend school in Monticello, his father bought a piece of ground in town (“I think he paid twenty-five dollars for it.”), hauled some logs off the mountain, had them milled and built a new home for the family. But almost from the time he could remember, Gene loved cars. He had his father’s gift for fixing things, especially cars and trucks, and by the time he was in the 9"" Grade, Schafer was already working at a service station. “I was just hanging around the co-op washing windshields and I thought I was pretty smart...One night I was there and Raymond Compton, the fella that worked there full-time, took off and went to Grand Junction and told me to watch PAGE 20 I saved a lot of money. I’d sell my cigarette rations and would use that money to take off. I went all over, even skied all over the Alps.” Now you wouldn’t think a kid who grew up ona ranch, hauling fence posts, working on truck motors and bootlegging wine in one of the most remote sections of the Lower 48 would know the first thing about skiing, but as usual, Schafer doesn’t fit the mold... “When we lived out at Dodge Point, Dad would ski out there and back, about five miles cross-country and he’d pull, a sled to haul things. Kent Frost made the first pair of skis I ever saw out of a 2 x 6 that he’d planed. But Dad bought us our skis and used to pull us with a rope down the side of the highway. Like waterskiing down the road. And we’d get behind horses, and it was sort of dangerous, but it was a lot of fun.” Schafer got out of the service in ‘53 and worked in the uranium mill for a while. In ‘55 he was the first man to drive a dual-axle ore truck up the old Comb Ridge Dugway. “It was sort of sweaty and hot on that hillside. The truck would vapor-lock a couple of times but I’d figure it out and go on...it was a hundred feet or more over the side of that dugway. There’s a bunch of cars still at the bottom of that gulch.” Like so many others who lived in southeast Utah in the ‘50s, Gene worked for and knew the “Uranium King,” Charlie Steen. “I used to go up to his parties and J] dated Charlie’s partner, Mitch Melich’s daughter for a while...she liked me because she loved a good dancer. And I had a ‘56 Lincoln too. I was the best dancer in high school. Clear up to a few years ago, people would ask me to teach them to dance. |