Socrates Cafe Online, each Tue, Fri, Sat, 1st. Sun, 6:30 pm Denver MDT (303)861-1447 Socrates Cafe Dialogue Groups: Watch1 Lead1 Start1. Meeting ID and password emailed to members 30 minutes before each meeting. For free membership write JohnScottWren@gmail.com.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

The Denver Post editorial this morning asks the question, can the Colorado Symphony make it?  See my comment and link to the editorial on my "test" blog, Denver When & Where at http://www.DenverWhenWhere.com (Have an event you'd like me to announce there and then cover in person? Contact me for the details.)

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

2305 S. Jackson Street, Denver, CO
After moving once in Loveland, then to Elm Street here in Denver where my brother Randy was born, and then to Hoffman Heights in Aurora, on Halloween, 1954 we moved into this house that mom and dad had built. I still remember being on one of our Sunday drives and dad going to talk to Mr. Peck on the corner to talk about buying the vacant lot. We lived here until my brother Jay was born, when we moved a couple of block to our Monroe St. home.

A couple of years after moving into the Jackson Street home, Dad built his final warehouse at 6265 E. Evans. The building still exists, but it has been converted to retails stores.

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

558 W 5th, Loveland CO
 Labor Day, 1949 my parents, John and Jane Wren, moved into this house from Amarillo, Texas with me.

Mom and I visited the house again yesterday, it's improved considerably over the last 62 years in part because it is now part of an historic district.

It's made me wonder what is the difference between starting a business today and what it was like then, in those pre-Small Business Adminstration days.

Dad had bought a new car right after WWII and "flipped" it, then used the profit to build a new house which they sold to use as capital for the new business they started here in Colorado.

Dad was working for West Texas Wholesale company in Amarillo, selling non-food items to grocery stores in the Panhandle. A visit to my Uncle Jerry and Aunt Lillian had created the thought that they could do the same thing here in Colorado on their own, since Derby Market, a store in Loveland, wasn't stocking toothpaste, Rite dye, and the other items that were carried by West Texas.

I'll be forever grateful dad never had the "help" of a SCORE or SBA councilor. I'm sure they would have told him he was crazy for thinking he could make it on his own.