Apps, Auctions, Words, and Weather Trackers: The Changing Face of News for Smokey Rim Ranch

R.S. Thompson is home again after “a siege with truck trouble” in La Junta. Mr. and Mrs. Clyde Sammons were in town from the ranch on Tuesday, “having made their way partly by tractor, partly by truck.” It’s Friday, November 29, 1946, and the town is Kim, Colorado, in the state’s largest county, Las Animas, in the far southeastern corner of the state. 

This was front-page news. Open up the Kim-Country Record, which served this largely rural county dotted with family ranches and farms that’s still wide-open high desert prairie interrupted by jagged canyons with no Denver-style condos or suburban McMansions in sight, and you could get a read on national news: the threat of communism—“red sympathizers”—in the CIO (the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which would merge with the AFL in 1955) as well as a national strike in Washington D.C. by landlords in post-World War II.  

It was that same year, 1946, just a little over a year after the end of World War II, that Everett  Jackson, the oldest of three boys on a small ranch about thirty miles south of Kim, got his first calf—and his own brand to go with it. He was six.