Brief by Central Staff
Local Lore – January 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Hillsdale College was recently rocked by a national scandal involving its long-time president. It’s in Michigan, about 80 miles west of Detroit — and that’s 1,100 miles from here — but there is a strong connection. Central Colorado is where that president of Hillsdale College grew up and first worked, and our region is a place he wrote about.
The scandal at Hillsdale involved George Roche III, president of the college since 1971. His son, George Roche IV, worked at the college, as did George IV’s 41-year-old wife, Lissa. On October 17, George III was in the hospital, and Lissa and George IV went to visit him.
George IV told National Review that in the hospital room, Lissa confessed to carrying on an affair with her father-in-law, George III, since 1980. That afternoon, she killed herself. Shortly thereafter, George III resigned and left town.
The scandal garnered national press coverage because Hillsdale isn’t just any small liberal-arts college. Under Roche, it had become well known for its conservative stance, decrying moral relativism and making an issue of rejecting Federal funds and disdaining Federal intervention. Founded in 1844, Hillsdale was among the first of American colleges to accept women and blacks. With Roche as president, Hillsdale earned the devotion of American conservatives, and became a forum for some of their foremost speakers.
Several years ago, we happened upon two books in the Salida Regional Library — Going Home and A Reason for Living. Both were fiction written by George III, and the stories were all set in Central Colorado — Buena Vista, St. Elmo, Chalk Creek, Leadville, Salida, etc.
With an eye toward incorporating his remarks into a review that we never got around to producing, we wrote to Roche to ask why he set the stories here. He replied:
“My father’s family had lived in and around Denver and had been a Colorado family for several generations. My mother was born in Leadville, the daughter of a Scottish mining engineer. We moved to the upper Arkansas valley at the beginning of the 1940s, living on a ranch near Salida in an area called Adobe Park.
“As a child, I could look up from the ranch house and see the Angel of Shavano when the snow conditions were right. In those days, Salida was our primary shopping town. I well remember the drug store on the main street, complete with an old-time soda fountain. On the ranch we raised chickens for a little extra money and sold fryers to Jenny’s Chicken-In-The Basket, a great place to eat. Jenny was located just south of town on the road to Cañon City.
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“In 1944 my family moved to Chalk Creek Gulch, between Mount Princeton and Mount Antero. For the next two decades we ran a family business at Mount Princeton Hot Springs. I attended elementary school at Gas Creek school — eight grades in one room with one wonderful teacher, Mrs. Georgie House… the old red-brick school house is still there on the west side of U.S. 285, a mile or two south of Nathrop.
“I went away for high school, and enlisted in the Marines in 1953. After completing college, I lived at the Hot Springs and taught junior and senior high school American history in Salida. Those were great times for me and I enjoyed some fine young people as my students, many of whom are still active members of the community in and around Salida.”
Roche’s stories, set in this area, “are fiction, not history or biography. I drew on the times and places and personalities of my own experience and my family’s experience to evoke a mood, to tell some stories about some strong people living in a beautiful part of the country….”
Roche left in the early 1960s to get his doctorate in history at the University of Colorado, then taught at Mines and in New York before arriving at Hillsdale.
One Central Colorado place name got attached to a Hillsdale subsidiary — the Shavano Institute, which puts on seminars whose featured speakers are prominent conservatives. William Bennett (author of The Book of Virtues) is scheduled to speak at one this month, and former special prosecutor Ken Starr at one in May in Dallas.
The suicide and Roche’s resignation have inspired debate among American conservatives. One side has attacked hypocrisy, saying Roche should have “walked the talk” of “honor and integrity,” while others have argued that he was an effective spokesman, even if he stumbled along the path.
So we’re not sure what to make of this: “Most of the values and attitudes vital to me,” Roche wrote us, “have their roots in my mountain upbringing.”
