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AMERICAN SPIRIT

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   Here I am a age 2

Work in the U.S.N.

College Days

  My 1st silkscreen shop - Minnesota

  Boulder Housing

  Our silkscreen shop in Boulder

  Our 1st real home in Loveland

  Our first mountain home

  Hand Hewn Log Cabin

  1st Mountain spec home

  Our Log-Sided home in the Mtns

  Our home we built in Pueblo West

     I was born in Southern Minnesota in 1950 the second son of a Welch immigrant mother and a native born and raised father.  I haven't really traced my mother's genealogy past her mother's mother, but I have traced my father's side of the family back as far as 1640 when my greatest grandmother Elizabeth, a Powahaton Shawnee, bought land with her husband George and had six children.

    I graduated from Garden City High School in 1968 and joined the United States Navy five days later.  After boot camp in San Diego, California the Navy shipped me off to Guam to join VAP-61, a Heavy (aerial) Photo Squadron and do "On-the-Job" training as an Aviation Electronics Tech. From there I was sent to DaNang, (south) Vietnam to work on our squadron's aircraft.  After service there I went back to Guam and then was returned to Vietnam to work communications with the United States Marines, some of the best men I've ever encountered. After serving 2 years I was re-assigned duty to VP-46 (Aviation anti-submarine force) in Moffet Field, California.  Within six months my "new" squadron was assigned duty to Guam for six moths, then back again to Moffet Field. The last six months of my service was spent with VP-46 in Japan.

     Coming back to the United States after the service and armed with the G.I. Bill I entered college at Mankato State College in Minnesota, formerly know as Mankato Teacher's College.  It changed its name while I was going to Mankato State University and now it's Minnesota State University at Mankato. I took a diversion some two years into college and decided to go to Mankato Vo-Tech and learn the Graphic Arts trade. Graduating from the vo-tech I went to work as a layout person for a printer, however, after a year of that I decided to go back and finish college.  I graduated from Mankato State University in 1979 with a B.A. in Psychology, minor in Sociology.

    My first job out of college was as a teacher and supervisor of a silk screen shop at a rehabilitation center in Rochester, Minnesota.  Two years of that and I made the decision to open my own screen printing business in the small southeastern town of Fairmont, Minnesota.  I had a small shop with an apartment above and it seemed it was all I could do to stay alive.  After several visits to Colorado and visiting friends that had moved there, I was enticed (it didn't take much) to move my screen printing business there (Boulder) in 1985.

     Boulder was a great place to live, all it took was money.  I opened a retail T-shirt shop there to compliment my silk screen shop, but the retail end of it took more money and time than I had anticipated so I returned to having just a silk screen business.  That's when I met my present wife.  Tired of living in a trailer park we decided to buy a real house in Loveland, Colorado (HUD homes were plentiful then) in 1989.  We sold the silk screen business and I went to work for a sporting goods store in Fort Collins, Colorado setting them up with a screen printing shop. It was then that I decided I'd had enough of being in four walls with solvent fumes and went back to school part-time to get a broker's license in real estate.  I opened my first real estate office in 1990 in Loveland, Colorado under the name Covey Realty.

     During the first few years in Loveland I remodeled and sold some homes to accompany the moderate commissions I was making selling other people's homes. Upon a tip from another real estate broker I started listing and selling vacant mountain land in the Drake, Colorado Storm Mountain area.  At first land sales were slow, but I soon found myself showing properties up there almost every day, so I figured I must be doing something right.  I sold our 3rd home we had lived in by then, about one a year, and decided to move up to the mountains where I was listing and selling most of my clients properties.  Without the long drive every day I found I had more time for family ( yes, we had 3 children by then) and to put on an addition and barn to the mountain home we had purchased.  I even had some time to look at a project that I had always wanted to do.  I built a small log cabin out of hand hewn timber growing on the acreage I had purchased.

     Selling the log cabin I decided to build a spec home in the area and assist another builder in his speculative projects, all along continuing in my pursuit of listing and selling vacant mountain land.  After some years of this I felt confident enough to take on the project of building my family a 3000 square foot log sided home nearby.  With most of the labor being my own this project took over a year to complete.  During that time, of course, many other builders decided to build on speculation, and many new home owners had contractors build them a personal home.  It wasn't long and what once was a mountain full of vacant land or seasonal cabins now had become many new permanent residences.  Whereas once the area was known as "Covey Country", and many other brokers had never ventured into the area because they saw no "good commission" in spending their time selling low priced land far from their office, the land prices had now tripled and many of them had moderate to higher priced homes on them.  Consequentially the incentive for them to now show property on Storm Mountain was great.  Not only had the numbers of agents in Loveland and Estes Park tripled (as had the houses there as well), but the affordability of housing to those in the moderate to lower incomes was eroding fast.  They needed to sell homes to keep bread and butter on their tables and Covey Country was one of the last moderate income areas to sell in.  The pie of upper income purchasers was being sliced too many ways.

     Not unlike many others I had some choices to make.  Stay and hope for the best, find a new occupation, or study Colorado and find out if I thought real estate in another area would be more stable.  What I found was this:  Pueblo boasts one of the nations highest per capita real estate ownerships.  New home prices are moderate because land prices are moderate, and with a plentiful supply of vacant land it should stay that way.  The Pre-Sold market is slow because of the availability new homes at moderate prices, but that is not all bad news.  This has left the door open to everyone that wants their own home.  Even a minimum wage earner can qualify to own real estate at the present time in the Pueblo area.  Upon this premises I decided to move to the Pueblo area and continue doing real estate. That was August 2001.  We have since built our new home here.

  My Hobbies and Interests:   Photography, Web Site Design, Hiking, Horseback Riding, Writing Poems and Short Stories.

My Office phone #  (719) 250 - 2233

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