Remembering Peggy Ford, the woman who brought Greeley history and beyond to life

Peggy Ford

By Dan England 

The long, winding road that led to the gazebo at Glenmere Park, where Rob Waldo asked Peggy Ford to marry him a dozen years ago, began with a 20-minute talk before the start of a city-sponsored bike ride. 

Actually, it was probably a historic bike tour, and Peggy was probably leading it, Waldo said, because that’s the kind of thing she did. Waldo respected her because he was a history major before he moved back to Greeley to work as an estate lawyer, and Peggy Ford, through her many years and duties at the museum, had the unofficial title of Greeley’s historian. 

Waldo only remembered part of the conversation — it took place more than 25 years ago — but what stuck with him was the way Peggy treated his daughter, who was developmentally disabled. 

“She was so kind to her,” Waldo said. “I just treasured those 20 minutes.”

This is a long road, remember, and it passes Waldo’s divorce, which helped him counsel Peggy through her own during a brief chat at a Greeley Philharmonic Concert, and the death of Waldo’s second wife, Lindsay, whom he married for 12 years. Peggy wrote a thoughtful, kind note to him after her passing, and that stuck with him too. Months later, when he asked her to lunch, they discovered they had so much in common besides history, like a love for long bike rides and traveling and tennis and art and family. That lunch, he saw someone as a woman for the first time after Lindsey’s death. He saw Peggy.

He doesn’t bargain with God, but he asked Him to give him a sign of a life partner during a month-long trek to Switzerland, when he thought of Peggy. He got home and called her, and another woman answered. The woman was a mother with two young children, a neighbor Peggy took in after her husband kicked them out of the house. That night, with a 5-year-old on Peggy’s lap, Waldo put his arm around her, and he felt warmth in return. 

Early on, Jil Rosentrater, Peggy’s boss, told her to either always know the answer to a question about Greeley’s history or be able to find it right away, and Peggy took that to heart.

Her photographic memory helped her, but she had to work hard to learn the history, Waldo said, a job within a job. But it was her humanity that made it special. 

Peggy, with her pointed glasses and incredible knowledge of Greeley, may have seemed like a studious, serious soul, someone who belonged down in those archives, surrounded by books and papers and records. But her kindness and care and unbiased concern for human beings, all of them, brought that history to life, Waldo and others interviewed said. Waldo and Peggy once took part in an exercise in downtown Greeley that forced residents to experience what it was like to be a refugee by attempting to overcome a series of problems they typically face. That was, Waldo said, “right up Peggy’s alley.” 

“She wanted to help people relate to the history,” Waldo said. “That was so important to her. If she did, she thought they would get it. She found ways to make people relate to it personally. That’s why people loved her so. She could translate the history and bring it to life.”

‘Have you asked Peggy?’

There are only a very few things in life that are not up for debate. Fewer than you think. You could, if you have the patience for it,  debate with someone the existence of COVID-19. You could debate whether we landed a man on the moon. You could debate whether the Earth is flat. There are people eager to debate all these things.  But no one could debate the fact that Peggy was the town historian. 

“I can’t count how many times one of us would wonder about something and say, ‘Have you asked Peggy?’ She was THAT person,” said Becky Safarik, who recently retired as Greeley’s assistant city manager and longtime director of planning after 40 years of working with Peggy for the City of Greeley.

Peggy could prove it, if she needed to, with dozens of contributions to publications and books. Some she wrote, including some that haven’t been released yet (one about the University District will be out this summer) and others that earned her first-page acknowledgements because of the hours she spent talking and researching with the authors. Many times, people don’t even realize just how much she did, say her friends. Peggy, for instance, wrote the city’s Historic Preservation Plan. 

There were others who came before her, such as Hazel E. Johnson and Carol Rein Shwayder, but Peggy, who grew up in Monte Vista, wasn’t born here, and she had to learn most of it herself, said JoAnna Luth-Stull, registrar of Greeley Museums who considered Peggy her closest friend. Peggy spent hours looking at files, sifting through books and reading newspapers: She may have read every single Greeley Tribune ever published, and then she spent hours clipping daily editions as they were delivered on the museum’s doormat.

She was self-taught, even under the guidance of Shwayder and Johnson, and she loved it. Luth-Stull, perhaps as close a contemporary to Peggy as there is now, said all that research was not a job, as tedious as it could be to others. 

“She just LOVED working with people and talking with them about history,” Luth-Stull said. “Regardless of how much you know about it, there’s a lot more you don’t know, and that’s what keeps driving you forward. History can be engaging, and you want to make it that way to everyone else. We both agreed we’d be doing it until we died. She certainly did that. When you have that passion for something, it’s just easy to do.”

Peggy believed in grit, hard work and late nights, but she used her sneaky, quirky sense of humor to make it fun and, indeed, engaging. Elizabeth Kellums, who works in historic preservation in the city’s community development office and who considers Peggy her closest co-worker, planned Greeley’s walking tours with her. Peggy loved to give those tours catchy names. She called one “From Herefords to Hippies.” On those tours, as with many of her talks, Peggy loved to dress in period costumes.

“She had all these talks, all the time, and she would dress the part,” saiid Margaret Langely, the library’s genealogist who knew Peggy because she, of course, loved genealogy and served as president of the Weld County Genealogical Society many times. “I saw her many times dragging a trunk full of costumes behind her.”

Mike Peters, the Greeley Tribune’s longtime reporter who retired years ago, had the same kind of quirky humor, although he was much louder about it. He used her 1,000 times for his stories, he wrote in a tribute to her that ran in The Tribune on Saturday.

“Peggy could always make me laugh because she also knew the funny side of history,” Peters wrote. “Because of that knowledge, Peggy’s books were informing, entertaining and easy to read. That’s how history books should be.”

Peggy was indeed the town historian, but she loved history beyond Greeley and knew more about other parts of the world than you might think, said her son, Adam Ford. She traveled frequently and made the most of it. She went to Russia in 1983, when they were making movies about nuclear war between the two countries, and learned the language so she could speak with the people there and learn their stories. 

“She knew everything, from music to art to architecture, and when we went on trips, they were interpretations of the life there,” Ford said. “That’s still with me four decades later.” 

Ford has no doubt that his mother would know as much about anyplace she chose to live. She knew more than most about southwest Colorado, where she grew up. She just happened to pick Greeley. She once said to Kellums, “Greeley’s history is a veritable FEAST.”

“We were lucky that way,” Luth-Stull.

Yet Peggy somehow balanced all that knowledge with humility, two traits that rarely manage to co-exist.

“She was so smart and so knowledgeable, and yet, you didn’t know it right away,” Kellums said. 

This is why Luth-Stull mulled over a question when it was presented to her: Did Peggy know she was the town historian?

“That would have never, ever come out of her mouth,” Luth-Stull. “She was so humble herself.”

Luth-Stull paused again. There really is no debate. 

“I think, in a way, she had to know that,” she said. “Several people know Greeley’s history well, but not to the caliber that she did. There is no one who will be able to fill her shoes. Not even close.”

Greeley was home

Peggy wasn’t born here, but there was no doubt Greeley was home, and she loved it and wasn’t afraid to show it, even when Greeley bore the brunt of many tired jokes from Denver or Boulder about it smelling like cows. Peggy’s love is one reason why City Manager Roy Otto reacts like a mother hen to bullies when he hears those disparaging remarks: He recalls his first meeting with Peggy when he became city manager.

“She told me my efforts reminded her of a quote her mother used: ‘If you belittle what you have it becomes less. If you appreciate what you have it comes more.’”

Peggy didn’t express that love of Greeley just by knowing everything about it. Greeley was her life, not just a job, Safarik said. 

“She was someone I considered "all in" when it came to her relationship with Greeley,” she said. “She absorbed its history, participated in its cultural development, joined committees and attended community events and fundraisers and helped our local history come alive.  And she did so authentically and humbly.”

Ford, her son, said his mother could be frugal, sometimes painfully so, at least to a kid who yearned for cable but didn’t even get a color TV until he was 13. She knitted sweaters and other clothes for him, a talent he undoubtedly appreciates more now than he did back then, and she could find classy outfits for less than a dollar at Goodwill and make them look good. He points this out because Ford could also spend money on fine items such as tickets to the Greeley Philharmonic concerts and events at the Union Colony Civic Center, and she had beautiful jewelry and an impressive collection of art: Ford had a limited edition of a signed Andy Warhol print hanging in his bedroom when he grew up. 

But even all that showed her appreciation for Greeley. She had jewelry and bought tickets because it was a way to support the local artists who make Greeley a special place. She spent money on them and not herself, even if those finer things made it appear she was indulging. 

“She was an amazing juxtaposition,” Ford said. “She was very generous and also so frugal.”

Pushing for diversity without the gaze of social media 

Langely and Peggy’s other friends, at times, worried about her. 

There was a time when Downtown Greeley wasn’t packed with hip breweries and Friday Fest concerts and cool taco places with rooftop views. Some were afraid to go down there, and part of that, Langely said, was the city’s homeless population. Many tried to do what they could to avoid them, even if they sympathized with their plight, as Langely did.

“We got to know them a little bit, but Peggy was particularly kind to them,” Langely said. “She would do things for them. She would give them rides. We told her to be careful, but she would do whatever she could do to help people with whatever they needed.”

In fact, Ford said, she would take them to her house and feed them dinner or let them stay with her for a few days. Peggy also believed in multiculturalism and diversity and treated everyone equally. Ford called this a “hands-on” approach to activism that can sometimes be drowned out by those putting up “woke” social media posts. 

“My mother never talked about that,” Ford said of her actions. “She didn’t have time. She was too busy doing it.”

Even those who considered her as much of a colleague as a friend spoke about her kindness. Peters, who used Ford so often as a source, lost a friend a few years ago, a retired cop who was a part of a Thursday morning coffee group that ran for years. Peters mourned his absence. 

“Peggy sent flowers to me,” Peters wrote. “To help me through the tough times. That’s the kind of person she was.”

Peggy saw no difference between anyone because she loved humanity, and that made her marriage to Waldo a special treat because of the way they came together. Waldo could talk about his late wife and know that Peggy wanted to help him through his pain. She could talk to him about her divorce. Pettiness was not a part of their partnership.  

“We grieved together,” Waldo said, “my loss and her divorce.” 

Peggy worked until the end, and Waldo admits he wishes that wasn’t so. She was 72 and died a few months after her retirement. Peggy had cancer and battled it back, but other health problems waited in line. She never really felt good after her December retirement. He’d hoped they could travel more. 

Now Waldo worries that much of that history may be lost with Peggy’s death. 

“No one could ever do it completely,” he said. 

But maybe no one has to because of her, Luth-Stull said. Peggy was so good at presenting it, in all her costumes, that it had to stick in some ways. Because of Peggy, pieces of Greeley’s history have surfaced everywhere: Neyla Pekarek spent a couple years here at the University of Northern Colorado, but she found enough inspiration to use her fame from her time in the Lumineers to write her first solo album and a musical about Rattlesnake Kate.

Waldo still worries about her legacy, but for now he loves thinking about his wife. He thinks about a time when they were in Italy. There was a cathedral, and Peggy wanted to climb it. Peggy loved to climb tall structures. Waldo and a few students nearby had their doubts, but attracted to her enthusiasm, she led the group up the stairs, one by one.

Peggy was quite an athlete despite her bookworm reputation, Ford said. She could ride a bike and jump high in figure skates well into her 60s. But she always felt disadvantaged by her short frame. When she was up high, on the roof of something, the world was out before her, where she could see it and study it and live it. 

“She always said her goal was to get taller,” Waldo said and laughed. “But she was always such a tall person inside. She really was. She was filling up that body so high that it was gonna pop.”

For more 

A celebration of Peggy’s life will take place at 2 p.m. Wednesday at the Union Colony Civic Center, 701 10th Ave. in Downtown Greeley.