While visiting with Bill Hazard recently, he showed me a picture of an old building, which brought back lots of memories. This building was located on San Juan Ave. where the town of Saguache established the mini-park, a few years ago.

Bill tells me that this structure was known as the Union Hall back in the early days. No one that I’ve talked to has any ideas where the name originated. I am hoping that some “oldtimer” may have an answer for us.

This building was constructed in 1880 as a recreation center. Liza Moon, who was George Hazard’s mother-in-law, was the original owner. (The George Hazard I speak of was the Great Grandfather of Bill).

Mrs. Moon sold this property to Johnnie O’Neil, who is well remembered in early day Saguache history as Red Buck’s rider. I can find no record of how long Johnnie owned the property or who he sold to.

By the time I was old enough to remember such things—Alex Gar-cia owned this property, which everyone called the Mexican Dan-ce Hall.

The American Legion rented this building for their annual “gingham and overall” dance. This was open to the public and the ladies did indeed wear gingham dresses and the men wore overalls. Charlie Quaranta’s dance band from Pueblo was hired to play for these dances. There was hardly room on the dance floor for everyone. Charlie’s band really made a name for themselves and people came from all of the valley towns to dance to his music. This was during the years of the great depression. It seems like people didn’t have much money, but they saved and really had fun at these yearly functions.

I also remember attending boxing matches in this building, which were put on by Roll Means. Roll trained and sponsored several young fighters who were matched’ against pugilists from throughout the State of Colorado.

I remember Gus Ricca fought well as a lightweight and Tom Hamm and Olaf Dohner were pretty good in the heavy weight class. Milo Means earned the ring name of “Smokey”, but that was before my time.

The thing I remember most about the bouts was how hard it was for a little kid like me to see, cause when everybody got excited, they stood up.

After the community building was built in 1937 as a WPA pro-ject, the old dance hall was seldom used and was needing repairs. Alex Garcia tore it down sometime in the mid-1950s.

Lots of fun times and good memories!