In Colorado: A Great Fondness for Country Tunes

The road directions to the headquarters of the Loretta Lynn International Fan Club were the sort the skeptical traveler longs for: clear, fail-safe. East out of Denver to Limon. south out of Limon to Wild Horse, left on Road 9 and right on Road Y. Road Y, explained Loudilla Johnson, co-president of the club along with her sisters Loretta and Kay, "doesn't go anywhere but here."

An occasional wrinkle, an odd hitch in these tidy instructions pops up in the form of a fierce local sirocco that hurls itself at cyclonic force across the plains of eastern Colorado. It moves as a solid wall of dust, opaque and hard on the nerves of any ill-informed motorist it happens to catch. All a fool can do in these circumstances is listen to the finish of the car being grit-blasted away. Even with the windows closed, the dirt piles up on the dashboard and gathers in the folds of clothes and collects on the tongue. Coming as it does right out of the blue, a windstorm of such muscle is enough to give the intestate a remorseful heart.

"It can be just awful," Loudilla Johnson told a shaken guest a lifetime later. "It sucks the shingles right off one side of the house." Kay Johnson volunteered that the wind recently removed two railroad engines from a nearby track. Loretta Johnson said it once blew her from the yard outside the farmhouse to the crest of a distant hill before she could get some purchase. Their father, Mack Johnson, who had been hauling wheat, said it was nothing compared with some of the blows the family had been through. At that point, the visitor resolved that if anybody in the house answered to the name Dorothy or owned a dog called Toto, he would not stick around.

Fear of the elements soon passed, however, as talk in the cheerful kitchen turned on family reminiscences. The Johnsons moved from the Texas Panhandle to this not dissimilar ground in 1948. Until then, Mack had held a lot of jobs to cobble together his grubstake. He moved to Wild Horse to raise wheat and rear five children. He and his wife were headed toward divorce. One son would grow up to farm on his own: the other would throw in with his dad. The three daughters would chart a course that would keep them close by yet broaden them through association with singers of the country stripe. Thereby hung the tale.

In the early days the outside world reached them through a battery-powered radio, and when night or the weather drew them inside, they had Fibber McGee and Molly, Gunsmoke and music. When rock 'n' roll came along, the girls liked it, but they also developed a fondness for the country tunes their father favored so. In time they began driving the 120 miles to Colorado Springs, to attend country music concerts.