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Chance encounters have been important to Nancy and
Don Slocum. They married as the result of a blind date arranged by one
of Nancy’s brothers. Their retirement to Battlement Mesa happened
because they were stuck on a ski lift with a man from western Colorado.
Although they no longer do downhill skiing and do not hike “up valley”
as frequently as they once did, Don and Nancy are charter members of the
100 Club and participated in its earliest activities.
Don was born in Los Angeles in 1928 and grew up in El Monte CA with two
sisters and a brother. After a year at Chaffee Junior College he
enlisted in the Air Force and spent three years in Munich during the US
occupation and the Berlin airlift. On his return he began to study
mechanical engineering at UCLA with the help of the G.I. Bill. One
fateful evening fraternity brother Jim Cason offered to bring his little
sister Nancy to be Don’s date at a party. “And we just kept dating,”
Nancy says. She had grown up as a self-styled “beach bum and tomboy” in
Santa Monica CA where she and her twin brother Joe were born in 1935,
into a family that included a sister and two more brothers. Working as a
lifeguard/babysitter at a beach club while in high school, she
particularly enjoyed the little boys among her charges and decided that
“being the mother of boys was my place in life.”
By the time Don graduated in 1956 the couple had married and had two of
their four sons. In the wake of Sputnik and the accelerating Cold War,
Don worked for Douglas Aircraft as a project engineer on the DC-8, the
Nike Hercules air defense system and the Nike Zeus missile defense
system. One day at White Sands, New Mexico, while his crew was looking
for a “lost” missile, another one inadvertently exploded overhead; they
barely escaped the falling shrapnel.
As their family grew and Don changed jobs, they lived in several
California towns. The list of projects on which Don was program manager
or project engineer included the Skybolt air-launched ICBM and
composites for large solid rocket boosters, including the Titan III C.
Concerned for their boys and the illicit drug use in Orange County, Don
accepted a job with the Brunswick Corporation in Lincoln NB where he
worked on high strength composites for the Polaris and Tow missile
systems. The next three years were among their happiest. Although they
had both grown up on the beach, neither Don nor Nancy had ever sailed.
In Nebraska they joined a Snipe sailing club. “From Mother’s Day to
Labor Day,” Nancy recalls, “we would head out to the lake on Sundays
with two cars, three boats, four boys and one dog.”
The offer of a job as senior project engineer on hydraulic flight
control systems for the Phoenix air-launched missile system persuaded
Don to move the family to Tucson AZ in 1973. There he and Nancy enjoyed
tennis and golf while keeping track of their four teenagers. After five
years they moved to Valencia CA, where for ten years Don worked for HR
Textron as a product line manager and director of engineering, working
on hydraulic flight control components for the Boeing 767/757, the Space
Shuttle, and several Apache helicopter models. While Don was in charge
of Textron’s Cheltenham, England division he and Nancy enjoyed ski trips
to Zermatt and St. Anton as well as a five-week rail tour of the British
Isles and Europe.
With the boys all in college or working, it was time to think about
retirement. While on a ski trip to Steamboat Springs in 1987 they were
stuck for twenty minutes on a ski lift with a man from Grand Junction
who extolled Battlement Mesa as an ideal place to retire. The following
summer they visited Colorado, spent some time in Glenwood Springs, and
finally located “the town with the strange name.” In four hours they had
bought a lot and resolved to return in five years. Instead, they were
back in five months to build a house, after Don opted for early
retirement.
Nancy recalls that their first outing with the newly formed 100 club was
a bike ride in Glenwood Canyon in 1990, followed by a raft trip on the
Green River. She says, “One Monday I took a ‘social hike’ and the next
thing I knew I was hiking Hell Roaring!” In 1991 the Slocums were among
the few Wednesday hikers to earn one hundred mile pins. In 2002 Nancy
nominated Dan as a torchbearer for the summer Olympics. He carried the
Olympic torch for a portion of its journey through Glenwood Springs. On
2005 Don and Nancy celebrated fifty-one years of marriage and sixteen
years in Colorado. Though they’re not skiing downhill anymore, they
still often don X-C skis or snowshoes and head for Grand Mesa with their
dog Webster.
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