Ken Matthews & Jon Pray | Photographs by Adam Williams
Overview: In this episode of We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast, Jon Pray and Ken Matthews join host Adam Williams for half-interview, half-coffee chat.
Ken hosted a radio show called Chaffee Housing Report for several years. Jon was the radio engineer behind the scenes on that show as he often is for Looking Upstream. Adam pulls back the curtain to learn more about each of these guests and to get them to tell a bit on each other along the way.
Jon tells stories of interviewing Mick Jagger on the radio years ago, and covering a clash between the Black Panthers and riot police at a basketball game. Ken talks about his history with rugby and, on the softer side, gardening. Among other things.
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and is supported by the Colorado Public Health & Environment: Office of Health Disparities.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 1 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio in Salida, Colo., and can be listened to on-demand via khen.org.
Episode References
Chaffee Housing Report: khen.org/affordable-housing-report
Black Panthers vs. Ft. Collins Police: photographs
Jonathan Raban’s book: “Bad Land”
Timothy Egan’s book: “The Worst Hard Time”
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
Looking Upstream Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
Looking Upstream Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:15): Welcome to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream, a conversational podcast of community, humanness and wellbeing rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams and today I’m talking with Jon Pray and Ken Matthews.
As you’ll hear me say to the guys at the top of the conversation, I’m approaching this one a little differently and I’m trying to exercise some different muscles as a show host conversationalist. If you’ve seen We Are Chaffee’s documentary, A Home in Paradise, which premiered at the Salida Film Festival in May, you will recognize Ken as one of the voices who is lending his perspectives on housing affordability to that film.
You also might recognize his voice from a radio show that he hosted for several years at KHEN 106.9 FM community radio in Salida called the Chaffee Housing Report. What you might not realize is that Jon was behind the scenes for the housing report for all those years as he often is for this show.
(01:10): Jon is an engineer handling the tech side of our recording here at the station and today I asked the wizard, so to speak, to step out from behind the curtain and join in with me and Ken. I think it’s a fun one. They both have stories. Like Jon’s experience of interviewing Mick Jagger back in the day and that time he was on the radio mic covering a clash between the Black Panthers and riot police as they, well, as Jon puts it, beat the hell out of each other. Actually, Jon dug up a news link from that event and I’ve included it in the episode show notes on our website if you want to see photos.
(01:45): We also talk about Ken’s rugby playing days and his ongoing enthusiasm for the sport. We talk about his green thumb and his advocacy for affordable housing. We talk about the agrarian interests of both their fathers, which brings up the depression and the Dust Bowl among other things.
And related to that, I have a pseudo correction to make. You’ll hear me reference Jonathan Raban’s book Bad Land. It’s possible that I was conflating that with Timothy Egan’s book, The Worst Hard Time. Both are good as I recall and worth the read.
The Looking Upstream Podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority show notes with links and a full transcript of this and all Looking Upstream conversations are available at wearechaffee.org.
Okay. Here we go. Ken Matthews, Jon Pray.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (02:45): Thanks for joining me, guys. I’m going to let you in on my plan here, which is I don’t have one. And part of the thing for that is because I always have one. I always come in with pages of typed notes, thoughts, the research, everything I’ve done. I’ve met with guests for coffee or something beforehand.
And I kind of wanted to test myself on being able to be just a bit lighter and freer with it and I thought you guys would be good for joining me for this, so thanks for being here. Thanks for showing up. Thanks for trusting me even though I didn’t have any plans communicated to you.
Ken Matthews (03:24): No worries. I know about putting all those notes together and everything and sometimes they become restrictive. You kind of decide where you’re going and I’ve been on your side of the interview thing many, many, many times on the Chaffee Housing Report and you kind of get tied to them and I think it takes some spontaneity away.
Adam Williams (03:45): I like to think that I provide that as structure with a lot of freedom for organic flow or whatever in it, and I never know what’s going to come up so I can ask a follow-up question that leads down some path I could not have predicted. And yeah, there still is, but I want to get to these key points and these key things that in my mind it’s about making it an impactful, valuable thing for listeners.
And I feel like if I was a freer, maybe more extroverted sort of gregarious person, I could come in here, be fun and entertaining and light and laugh a ton and we wouldn’t necessarily get into the deep and meaningful, vulnerable things and it would just be a totally different show. But that’s not who I am and I’m kind of testing out a little bit with that today, like I said.
(04:29): Jon, I also want you to be on the mic with us today because you’re the guy who’s behind the scenes. You were for several years with Ken on the housing report. You have been for two years now with me on Looking Upstream and I want people to know something about each of you actually a little more than they might otherwise know. And I want personally to get to know more about you guys. So Jon, I want to hear a little bit about your history with radio because I just know a couple of things about you. One is retired, I think communications professor from Marquette. Is that right?
Jon Pray (04:29): Sure. That’s right.
Adam Williams (05:05): You can fix up the language however it needs to be.
Jon Pray (05:07): Yeah, it’s close enough.
Adam Williams (05:08): And a nugget of a story that you mentioned almost in passing, it just sort of came out one day … Were you a college student at the college radio station when you interviewed Mick Jagger from the Stones?
Jon Pray (05:20): Yeah.
Adam Williams (05:20): When was this? The ’60s?
Jon Pray (05:21): ’69. Yeah. They were coming through on a pre tour performance at Moby Gym, which is Colorado State’s auditorium essentially. I can’t remember the date exactly, but 1969 and I won the lottery to get a free ticket in the press box with then Jody Weezy, who was the editor of the campus newspaper. And had a good time, took some good pictures.
But yeah, so I got my start in campus radio at Colorado State. KCSU FM 107.9. Was about 10 times more powerful than this station. I got to be news director, finally went pro. Did a little work in Denver for a couple of years, finally went back to college because nobody gets paid nothing in radio.
The comical part of this is KHEN is populated in large part by senior volunteers. I mean they may not sound senior, although some do. And as a result I’ve kind of taken to calling it college radio for senior citizens. It should be an activity from the bus pulling up.
Adam Williams (06:48): Don’t skip past the Jagger thing. I mean especially we’re talking in the ’60s when … I mean I don’t know if you can pinpoint a heyday for the Stones. They’ve been going for 100 years. But the ’60s feels like a pretty strong point with some of their classics for sure. What was that like? What’s that story?
Jon Pray (07:05): Well, we got to him as a collective from campus media, which would’ve been yearbook, newspaper, radio station, and got him to agree to sit down with us for half an hour, which turned into 45 minutes. I had the Wollensak reel to reel tape recorder so I could document the thing. And there were three of us on one of him and he was sort of conscious. I mean he was under the influence of I’m not sure what at 2:00 in the afternoon.
Adam Williams (07:46): I wasn’t sure what you meant by sort of conscious. If we’re talking about with enlightenment spirituality or if he was high. Okay.
Jon Pray (07:53): No, he was high. He was high. He might’ve been drunk and high. Pretty entertaining guy, but clearly slurring his words badly and I was going to take this and edit it into a little interview and put it on the air later. Here’s us talking to Mick Jagger. And you almost needed subtitles, which never got around to. So somewhere in a trunk in my attic is still a reel to reel of Mick Jagger at seven and a half inches per second.
Adam Williams (08:23): I think we ought to get that out of the trunk, put it together, put it out somewhere.
Jon Pray (08:29): Yeah. It’s a long time ago. I mean that’s 50 some years ago ish. More than that.
Adam Williams (08:36): Was that the highlight of your, at the time, very young career? But I mean how long is that the benchmark for I talked with Mick Jagger?
Jon Pray (08:46): Oh, that was a highlight, no doubt. I had a number of them. I was also news director for the campus station and as such was generally embraced by student groups and campus populations and I got into board of trustees meetings and I got into Students for a Democratic Society and I got into Black Panther meetings and made a lot of friends and got into a lot of closed doors.
Adam Williams (09:15): Now I want to hear about that. Ken, I want to get to you because I’ve got something-
Ken Matthews (09:18): Hey man, I don’t have anything like that.
Adam Williams (09:21): I’m sure we have some interesting things for us to talk about too. And actually, let me go ahead and say I would love if this ends up turning into more of a triangular thing as if we’re having coffee, having a drink, whatever. But I am such a curious guy that I always have questions. So Black Panthers. Tell me something about some experience there.
Jon Pray (09:40): That or Students for a Democratic Society. Black Panthers most notable experience was they were protesting our basketball team playing Brigham Young University. We were both in whatever conference that was at the time.
Adam Williams (09:59): Western Athletic.
Jon Pray (10:00): Western Athletic Conference. Thank you.
Adam Williams (10:02): And tell me again, what university are we talking about where you were?
Jon Pray (10:04): This is Colorado State in Fort Collins.
Adam Williams (10:07): What was the protest against playing BYU?
Jon Pray (10:09): BYU, they perceived to be a racist institution because there were no priests in the Mormon church who were of color. And they got themselves organized and worked into a lather and about halftime of the basketball game, the Black Panthers, Black Student Association, BSA marched out onto the court and from the other end of Moby Gym, the arena marches a phalanx of Fort Collins storm troopers.
I mean these guys were dressed up with batons and helmets and the whole nine yards. And both sides knew the other side was coming and I had been advertised as doing commentary for the riot in the campus newspaper. Those were the days. And they went into the middle of the floor and beat the hell out of each other. It was-
Ken Matthews (11:09): Better than the basketball game.
Jon Pray (11:10): Police clearly won that.
Adam Williams (11:11): I’m speechless. Not only that this is happening, but that it’s so forecasted that you could essentially be promoted as the guy providing commentary for the riot, battle-
Jon Pray: In the newspaper. Yeah.
Adam Williams: Protest.
Jon Pray (11:25): Right. Hope they didn’t expect any color commentary out of me for the basketball game because I had nothing to offer.
Adam Williams: Do you remember how that got resolved and a basketball game returned or did they just say, “Nope. Go your separate ways. We’re done.”?
Jon Pray (11:39): They cleared the floor and finished the game. Campus administration promised to look further into the matter and sent all three of us … God, I can remember the guy’s face. I can’t remember his name. Big guy, as an ambassador, the campus student body president, and me as the journalist to Brigham Young to see if it really was a racist institution. And I don’t think they really were. It was just another world, another time.
Adam Williams (12:12): Is that something they’re going to say, “Well, you got that right. Sure, we are.”? I mean even then, are they really going to say that?
Ken Matthews (12:18): No, they’re not going to say that, but BYU for years was pretty lily-white in their athletic programs. I’m a little younger than Jon, not much. Year or so. And I went to the University of Oklahoma, which was the first college in the Midwest to integrate their football team. Not while I was there.
That was a guy named Prentice Gaunt way back in the ’50s. And we used to say that BYU decided to integrate their football team when they needed running backs and they needed some speed. And they just didn’t have a lot out there.
Adam Williams (13:02): That’s probably how a lot of universities did it, right? Was based on-
Jon Pray: Athletic ability.
Adam Williams (13:06): Right. We see somebody with ability. We’re going to make an excuse or an exception to our racist policies and let it in.
Ken Matthews (13:13): Yeah. And they wanted to win football games. They wanted to win basketball games. And of course I think that was accompanied by some sort of official proclamation from the church that they were going to start ministering to different populations.
They’ve for years recruited among the Polynesian communities in terms of ministering to them and if you look at their football teams, they’ve got some massive Tongan boys out there playing now. So it’s completely integrated now, but I don’t know what that means in terms of the church’s involvement or anything like that or if it changes any of the policies that they had before then. I’m not Latter-day Saint, so I don’t know.
Jon Pray (14:08): Yeah. Well, I think ultimately they had a revelation that they should probably allow people of color into the priesthood. And I’m not sure that resolved all of the racial issues but was a step in the right direction. And like you, I’m not a student of it anymore, but it was interesting. Boy, it was a nice campus in a nice setting. And this big black guy, Rayford Tillis was his name.
I could tell you some Rayford stories too, but I won’t. He was probably six foot six, was maybe a backup on the basketball team as I recall. And boy, the people just clustered around him like he was a rockstar and he’d be taking questions and answering questions. It was a fascinating ritual to watch. But yeah, that was campus radio. Not to wander too far afield, but there were some of those highlights.
Adam Williams (15:13): Ken, you have some athletic background. I understand that you played rugby.
Ken Matthews (15:17): Yeah, I started playing rugby at 18. I was at a community college near an Army base, Fort Sill, Oklahoma. And they had an exchange officer, a major named Mike Girdlestone, and he was from their West Point. Fort Sill was a field artillery school for the United States Army, so they got a lot of foreign students there too. And Mike was there and he was a rugby player and he wanted to play rugby, so he started a rugby team.
I had played basketball in high school and that summer I was a lifeguard at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, which was a great job. And there was a player there from either Montana or Montana State who had played and he goes, “Hey, they’re starting this rugby team. Let’s go out.” And so we went out and that’s how I started.
Adam Williams (16:15): When you were playing rugby, are we saying on … What official team? What’s the capacity when they were starting a team?
Ken Matthews (16:22): It was called the Fort Sill Gunners. It was anybody that enlisted or officers who wanted to show up and there’s a number of civilians went out and played with them.
Adam Williams (16:32): To be clear, were you a civilian or were you saying you were in the Army as well?
Ken Matthews (16:35): No, I was a civilian. I was going to a local community college and Cameron University’s the name of it. And I made the first team. I’d seen rugby one time on Wide World of Sports.
Adam Williams (16:52): Okay.
Ken Matthews (16:52): You remember those?
Adam Williams (16:54): Yeah, yeah.
Ken Matthews (16:54): You get little clips of games and I said, “Wow. That’s a cool looking sport. I’d like to play it.” And basketball actually was a pretty good entree to it. We always played sandlot football, so you’re tackling without pads, and so I was used to doing that. And in basketball you learn to attack space. In rugby, you learn to attack space.
Adam Williams (17:16): I never thought about it that way. I also was a basketball player and I touched rugby very thinly once when I was in the Army, coincidentally. I was in San Angelo, Texas at the time and it was a casual recreational thing and I went there just a handful of times. I wasn’t in town very long. I was only there about six months. And I’ve never played rugby since, but I got to learn some of the basics of the rules at the time. And we’re talking maybe close to 25 years ago. You went on and I think have more of a relationship or more of a passion or something for it.
Ken Matthews (17:49): Yeah, I did. I went through college. I then transferred to University of Oklahoma. They didn’t have a rugby team, so I went back and still played for Fort Sill occasionally. And then I got in the Army and was assigned … I was a lieutenant in the Army at Fort Carson and Colorado Springs had a team, so I played three years there. And then I went back to law school at the University of Oklahoma, did three year and played there on the club side there at OU. And then came back to Colorado Springs, played there, went to Denver, played for the Denver Barbarians who were a really big club.
Adam Williams (18:29): What does that mean to be a club team for Denver? Were there multiple teams within Denver or did you travel?
Ken Matthews (18:36): There were multiple teams within Denver. Probably five or six at one point in time. And then all the colleges had them. So you just played whoever you wanted to play. It wasn’t structured when I was playing. When I was at University of Oklahoma, there were three, four teams in the state. There was University of Oklahoma, OSU. Oklahoma City had a club side. Tulsa had a club side. Fort Sill had it. So there were five. And we would go down to Texas and play quite a bit. Or we’d go to Kansas, we’d go to Arkansas. We went to Monterey, played in the Monterey tournament one year. We traveled a lot.
Adam Williams (19:23): In California?
Ken Matthews (19:24): Yeah. It was played on Pebble Beach.
Adam Williams (19:27): Yeah. Wow. I was there too. And that also was with the Army. I feel like we have some interweaving sorts of ideas here. We could go down any one of these rabbit holes, but I’m curious more, I guess, for the rugby thing with obviously you’ve put a number of years into this, it’s a commitment to these clubs. What is it that really stokes a fire for you about it?
Ken Matthews (19:46): Well, I liked the competition and I liked the comradery. There was one thing about rugby players, they play hard and they party hard. That’s part of it. Mine was more focused on the playing. I really enjoyed the competition. I played a position that was … I played scrum half, which is the guy that puts the ball in the scrum when it comes out. You either pass it, run it, or kick it.
So it’s a very active position. You’re commanding the forwards, the guys in the scrum. You’re telling them what to do. And I liked that. I think by the time I was a practicing attorney, it was a very good way for me to blow off steam in a stressful profession like that. And then I coached. I coached, I refereed after I quit playing and administrated clubs.
I administrated the Denver Barbarians who were in the super league at that time. So were the 16 teams around the country that played a … They flew to California all the time, so you were administrating how do we get 27 people to … Where’s the money coming from?
Adam Williams (21:11): And all the logistics of flights and food and lodging and all the things and–
Ken Matthews (21:15): Vans and hotels and all that.
Adam Williams (21:19): The typical person that you encounter, do they have any idea about rugby do you feel like at this point? Is it one of those sort of subculture sport type things?
Ken Matthews (21:28): Well, it definitely has been most of my life. There’s a professional league in the US now called Major League Soccer. I mean, sorry, Major League Rugby. And it’s all over the country and it’s well financed. It’s still not the level of European rugby or South Africa or New Zealand or Australia or Fiji. Those countries.
But it’s I think the first time the US has had a opportunity to be able to develop players at a higher level. They’re getting paid, so they train every day. They’re coached well. And the World Cup, not the next one, but the following one, men’s World Cup is in the United States.
Adam Williams (22:19): Where?
Ken Matthews (22:21): Well, it’s going to be all over the country because it’s going to have 24 teams from all over the world, and they’ll be headquartered in different places. I’m sure California will be one. I’m sure something on the East Coast, probably something around Chicago or the Midwest.
Adam Williams (22:39): Try to maximize exposure or accessibility for people.
Ken Matthews (22:42): Yeah. But it will be a huge tourist thing. People from all over the world will come. I’ve been to two World Cups.
Adam Williams (22:50): Where?
Ken Matthews (22:51): I went to the World Cup that was hosted by Wales in 1999, but it was actually held in Ireland, Wales, England, and France. And I saw matches only in England and Wales. And then I went to the last World Cup, which was 2013, which was hosted by France, and I saw only one match in Nice, France between Scotland and Tonga.
Adam Williams (23:15): Okay. Jon, what’s your take on rugby?
Jon Pray: I now know more about it than I did before I met Ken.
Ken Matthews: Whether he wanted to or not.
Adam Williams (23:28): You guys have known each other several years, right? From working together at radio and socially.
Ken Matthews: Close to 10 years, I’d say.
Jon Pray: Seven, eight, maybe. Yeah. Since I moved out here. We got started the same day doing a program on housing. Not to change the subject, but that’s a pivot.
Adam Williams: No. Yeah, no, let’s roll with wherever it goes.
Jon Pray (23:50): And Ken had his written out proposal about the type of show he wanted to produce, and I walked in off the street capable of doing that sort of thing, so I said, yeah, I’d like to work with him and the rest is history. We talk to a lot of really interesting people who I still meet on the street as I do many of your guests, and I greet them like I know them, and I’ve always been just kind of the guy on the other side of the board.
Adam Williams: Do they recognize you?
Jon Pray: Yeah, sometimes.
Ken Matthews (24:28): If they were repeat people, I’m sure they recognize Jon. It would be somebody that maybe just came in once or twice. Once probably. But Jon’s a memorable guy.
Adam Williams (24:40): Yeah, yeah. Well, very personable. You’re always the first to greet him and go through things. I mean, jokes and whatnot, some laughs.
Ken Matthews (24:48): That’s my job.
Adam Williams (24:49): Sociability.
Ken Matthews (24:51): Jon’s always been … He’s got the radio voice. I mean, you just listen to him. It’s more than he’s ever been heard on my show, but he’s really good on the radio but he’s chosen in this case with me and with you to be behind the scenes and utilize those skills.
Jon Pray (25:09): Well, my other option would have been to do a shift here as a DJ, and that’s still an option I suspect. But I did that for so long in college and as a pro that I just don’t have the excitement about it anymore. And the musical selection I would turn to is my stuff from the ’60s and ’70s, and this station doesn’t have enough DJs playing stuff from the ’60s and ’70s. If you can get away with a day without Led Zeppelin, it’s a rare day at KHEN.
Adam Williams (25:49): What’d you say? This was a college radio station for senior citizens?
Jon Pray (25:52): For senior citizens. Exactly.
Adam Williams (25:53): So you’re all playing from pretty similar era.
Jon Pray (25:56): Yep. There is a theory that the music taste you have currently is determined between the ages of 14 and 21 or 22 or something like that, so the notion of me ever getting into Flock of Seagulls or … There were some notable exceptions to that, but I can talk to my kid who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, entirely different musical tastes. Not bad stuff, just entirely different.
Adam Williams (26:31): I almost didn’t get out of the truck to come in here because Guns ‘N Roses “November Rain” was on the radio and I didn’t want to stop listening and it’s a long song.
Ken Matthews (26:40): You listen to it on some streaming service. Get your fill of it.
Jon Pray (26:45): So I’m not interested in hearing that as much as I do or playing that as much as it gets played around here. I’m trying to expand into new stuff, and it’s hard to do. Tough to find somebody you like. I mean, I’m going to see a Talking Heads cover band here over the weekend.
Ken Matthews (27:05): Out of Texas.
Jon Pray (27:07): Is that out of Texas?
Ken Matthews (27:08): Yeah, they’re out of Texas. That seems to be a huge disconnect for me. Talking Heads Cover band out of Texas.
Adam Williams (27:15): When you went pro, Jon, are you saying that it was with the news side of things? Was it music as a DJ? Did you maybe have a run of both somewhere in there?
Jon Pray (27:23): Yeah. I went to Denver to read news at KOA, a 50,000 watt voice of the West Radio station. And my first day reading news there, and it wasn’t I was even writing it, it was people would just hand me copy and I always had a knack for reading out loud and recognizing odd words and being able to pronounce them.
But about 30 seconds before I was supposed to go live my first time, the guy who was my boss stuck his head in and said, “Don’t worry about it. You’re potential listening audience is only about 40 million people.” Because it went all the way from Canada to Mexico in those days. And I did not as a, I think 19-year-old, need to hear that.
So I read news for a couple of summers and then went back to school and went to work for a local radio station up there being both news and DJ guy. And had some adventures there as well. I mean, plane crashes, auto crashes, death and destruction. It’s a much different news environment than campus radio. The college news is different. So got out of that.
Adam Williams (28:37): Did you ever watch “WKRP in Cincinnati”?
Jon Pray (28:39): Oh, you bet. Yeah. Actually, there was a guy at KCSU FM who wrote that show. Tom Chehak. Retired five or six years ago. But I think the turkey drop episode was his. And could have theoretically been based on some small part about life in the campus station, which was different in the ’60s and ’70s. If you think Mick was off his game, many a day there would be stoned DJs.
Adam Williams (29:18): He was probably not the only one in the room who was.
Jon Pray (29:19): Yeah, maybe so. Maybe so. Yeah.
Adam Williams (29:22): I won’t ask you specifically, even though I’m sure the statute of limitations has passed, hasn’t it Ken?
Ken Matthews (29:27): Oh, yeah.
Jon Pray (29:29): No, I was quite sober that day.
Adam Williams (29:31): Jon, I want to ask you, since you guys know each other so well, and this is going to be turned around the other direction, what is something in Ken’s story, something interesting about him that I won’t know and that you can out on him right now that … I guess you can see how risky you want to be with that in the friendship, but I figure you can help me know something about Ken and Ken, it’ll go vice versa here with Jon. Just something compelling about each other.
Jon Pray (29:56): He is surprisingly sensitive for being such a burly ex rugby player.
Ken Matthews (30:06): Not burly anymore.
Jon Pray (30:07): Well, used to be. You used to be burlier.
Adam Williams (30:11): Does the mentality of burly ever leave if you’ve been a rough and tumble rugby player?
Ken Matthews (30:16): Well, I wasn’t big enough to be like that. I had to be a skillful quick player, even at 195 pounds.
Jon Pray (30:25): But there’s a certain aggressiveness of it too.
Ken Matthews (30:28): Yeah, you had to be very aggressive about it. Yeah.
Jon Pray (30:30): But I mean, even to this day, you’d probably punch somebody in the face after an argument.
Ken Matthews (30:35): No, not me. I would not do that.
Jon Pray (30:38): I could be confusing you with someone else.
Ken Matthews (30:40): I’d hurt my hand.
Jon Pray (30:41): Who could that be?
Ken Matthews (30:43): I would not do that. I have better conflict resolution skills now than I did when I was younger.
Jon Pray (30:51): And you’re still involved with conflict resolution?
Ken Matthews (30:54): No. I was the chair of Full Circle Restorative Justice, which is an organization here in this county for many years, but I left that.
Adam Williams: And we’ve talked with Eric Lee, who’s now director of that.
Ken Matthews (31:06): He’s an amazing … That’s the biggest success of, I think, while I was chair, is finding Eric. He found us really, and we just had to have the sense to go, “Wow. This guy’s something.”
Jon Pray: He’s a keeper.
Ken Matthews (31:22): Oh yeah.
Adam Williams (31:23): He’s got an incredible story, incredible resume.
Ken Matthews (31:26): I’ve listened to his interview by you.
Jon Pray (31:28): Smart guy.
Adam Williams: Yeah. Okay. On the podcast. And I think maybe it sounds kind of serendipitous that you both found each other then.
Ken Matthews (31:37): Yeah. I mean, he reached out. He found us in a roundabout way, and we had another really good candidate too and Eric was just something and is something.
Adam Williams (31:55): His story on it is that it took two or three times for people pointing out this possibility and opportunity here to him for him to feel like there’s something clicking and calling him to it.
Ken Matthews (32:10): Yeah. I think his daughter was prodding him, and he had started in doing some restorative practices work in Denver, and then had a sister-in-law up here. And so they liked this area, and I think that those two things combined was kind of a no-brainer for him in terms of where he wanted to go next in his life.
Adam Williams (32:34): I think it’s so interesting when things come together in just such a perfect match.
Ken Matthews: Yeah, it’s very serendipitous sometimes. I know that word sounds kind of flippant, but I don’t mean it that way.
Adam Williams: I actually already used it for this. I mean, yeah, I said it a moment ago. I see it that way.
Ken Matthews: Oh, sorry. I didn’t hear.
Adam Williams (32:49): No, no, no, no. We’re on the same page.
Ken Matthews: I’m a copycat.
Adam Williams (32:57): We’re on the same page.
Jon Pray: Kismet. It would be more kismet in your case.
Ken Matthews: Would it?
Jon Pray: Yeah.
Ken Matthews (33:02): I don’t know that word.
Jon Pray: That’s serendipity.
Adam Williams (33:04): I was creating the space for it to be okay that you said it.
Ken Matthews: Okay.
Adam Williams: Because you said it could be flippant. I’m like, well, then I guess we both are because I think it’s a good word. Jon-
Jon Pray (33:17): So Ken, I was going to finish the story, is an avid gardener. And I came from an agrarian background, but can’t keep up with this guy. Of course he’s got land, but he’s also got a greenhouse that’s full of succulents.
Ken Matthews (33:35): Succulents and cactus. Hundreds of them.
Jon Pray (33:38): Is that a phase you’re going through?
Ken Matthews (33:40): I don’t think so. If it is, I think it’s probably the last phase.
Jon Pray (33:46): It’s a new lifestyle. Well, I’ve been through gardening phases, mostly driven by my father. And whatever he was into at the moment, I would receive bulbs as birthday presents by and large. And he would buy iris bulbs, and I don’t know if you’re into iris, but if you get into iris-
Ken Matthews (34:06): Oh, very nice.
Adam Williams (34:07): I don’t know anything about it.
Jon Pray (34:08): Very expensive. And he would send me just these remarkable bulbs.
Ken Matthews (34:13): This when you were in Wisconsin?
Jon Pray (34:14): Yeah.
Ken Matthews (34:15): Yeah, it was a good environment for them too.
Jon Pray (34:17): They’d multiply and you’d have to divide them and share them with friends. And then he got into day lilies.
Adam Williams (34:23): Where was he?
Jon Pray (34:24): He was in Colorado.
Adam Williams (34:26): Is that where you were from?
Jon Pray (34:28): Denver. Yeah, grew up in Denver. He was originally a Kansas farm boy having survived the Dust Bowl essentially. So when he moved to the city and got a city job, boy, he had a big garden. We would get to turn it over every spring, my brother and I, and didn’t look forward to it.
Ken Matthews (34:53): Using a turning fork fork.
Jon Pray (34:55): Fork. And then once wasn’t enough, he’d say, “Why don’t you go double ditch that thing?” Anyway, so Ken’s quite the gardener. If you were to see his property, it’s spectacular.
Ken Matthews (35:11): Thank you, Jon.
Jon Pray (35:12): I can hear you blush over there, but it shows.
Ken Matthews (35:16): Well, it’s so interesting, our backgrounds of our parents. My father was raised on a farm. He was born in a farmhouse in December of 1918.
Adam Williams (35:29): Was that in Oklahoma?
Ken Matthews (35:30): In Oklahoma. Right outside of Clinton, Oklahoma, which was on Route 66. And grew up on a rented farm. His father paid a percentage of his crop, so he was a sharecropper basically. And he did other businesses and whatnot. So he was born the year that World War I ended. He lived through the Dust Bowl, the depression.
Jon Pray (36:01): The flu.
Ken Matthews (36:02): Well, the flu was right there when he was born in 1918. Then he served in World War II and then went to college and worked for the Soil Conservation Corps. The organization that FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, formed in order to address the issues that were caused by the Dust Bowl and prevent those in the future. So my father worked with farmers on soil conservation with his agronomy degree from Oklahoma State, which at that time was Oklahoma A&M.
Jon Pray (36:42): A&M. Sure.
Adam Williams (36:43): Have you read Jonathan Raban’s book, Bad Land that is … It’s nonfiction and it relates to the Dust Bowl and that experience.
Ken Matthews (36:51): No. There’s another one that I’ve been wanting to read too. It’s from … I can’t remember the guy’s name. He’s worked for the New York Times. He’s written several books that I like, and it’s supposed to be … I think it’s called Dust Bowl or something like that. I mean, it was total land speculation and capitalizing on some times when there was heavy rain and you could grow wheat out there.
And so they plowed up this native prairie to grow wheat and then the rain stopped and there was nothing to hold the soil. And my father and mother also lived in that area. Her father was a farmer, but not as dedicated. This farm was non mechanized. They used mules and horses. Now think about the added labor that’s involved with that. And then to make money, my grandfather had four or five cows and they had Matthews Dairy.
He’d get up and milk cows, put them in the bottles, put them in a Model T and deliver them around. And they lived a pretty good life during the depression and the Dust Bowl because they could make so much off of their land to survive. And my dad says, “Oh, we went every Saturday, had a hamburger and went to a movie.” Whole family.
Jon Pray (38:15): High times. Yeah. Now, is this all happening at the same time he is a soil conservation agent?
Ken Matthews (38:22): This is before.
Jon Pray (38:23): Okay. So prior to.
Ken Matthews (38:24): Yeah, this is all him growing up. And then I thought it was interesting that he then went into that profession after living through it and seeing the effects of it. Maybe that’s what caused it. I don’t know.
Adam Williams (38:41): Right. Let’s do the turnabout here and Ken, something about Jon here. What is something I wouldn’t know, but due to your friendship, you’ve had a chance to come to appreciate about him?
Ken Matthews (38:52): Well, Jon likes whiskey.
Adam Williams (38:56): I do too. For me, that’s the problem.
Ken Matthews (38:59): I do too. There’s three of us.
Jon Pray (38:59): Don’t we all.
Ken Matthews (39:02): He likes to taste different ones. I don’t think this is something that people would not know about Jon is Jon’s interested in a lot of things. He has the intellectual capacity to go beyond the surface of things. I’m kind of more of I kind of like entertainment and I like the tops of things.
I mean, I like getting down in with people and having real conversations, but I’m not interested in how this computer works or how to fix it and Jon can do all sorts of things like that. He can figure things like that out. Maybe people would know that. And that’s a lot of things. Not just computers. It’s just things that-
Jon Pray (39:54): Thank God for YouTube.
Ken Matthews (39:56): Yeah.
Jon Pray (39:56): There’s a video.
Ken Matthews (39:57): I mean, he can fix cars. Stuff that I’ve never even wanted to do, had any interest in and he’s just good at a lot of things. A lot of things.
Adam Williams (40:11): I could use some help at my house right now on some projects. You want to come up and do them for me?
Jon Pray (40:16): Talk to him.
Adam Williams (40:17): Not even just help me. Do them for me.
Jon Pray (40:18): I’m in recovery.
Adam Williams (40:21): You probably have seen this too, Ken, with the years of doing the housing report with him, but the guests that come in when we record together, Jon and I for Looking Upstream, they come from all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of stories. And now that you mentioned it, I’ve seen that that’s true myself, that Jon can speak to people from any given story or background or historical reference point or whatever they’re bringing up and that is interesting and a broad knowledge.
Ken Matthews (40:49): I think Jon, and I’m the same way, we like people. We like knowing about people. We like hearing people’s stories. We like telling our own stories.
Jon Pray (41:00): Just looking for somebody to listen to us.
Ken Matthews (41:05): But you can go about any place in town and the two of us can strike up a conversation.
Jon Pray (41:12): I think you are better at that than I am. Ken and I have spent a little time at a local watering hole, which shall remain nameless, but-
Ken Matthews (41:22): Oh, they’re a sponsor.
Jon Pray (41:23): Their initials are woods. And someone will walk in the door and they’ll just look like they’re not from here. They’ll have a big belt buckle or they’ll have a cowboy hat or they’re wearing a dress.
Adam Williams (41:41): Same person?
Ken Matthews (41:45): I would want to know that person if it were the same person.
Adam Williams (41:48): Absolutely. They’ve got stories.
Ken Matthews (41:50): I want to know their deal.
Jon Pray (41:52): Ken would turn to them and say, “Where are you from?” And away they’d go and you go, “Well, I guess I’ll talk to his wife because he’s been pulled into it.” And that’s just kind of a native curiosity thing I suspect. I mean, you’re trying to be friendly, but at the same time you’re trying to figure somebody out. And they’re always from Texas or Oklahoma if he’s lucky.
Adam Williams (42:20): Well, I think Texas plates and Missouri plates, I’m going to venture, are the two most common out of state visitors we have here. So you’ve got a good chance.
Ken Matthews (42:31): I don’t know about Missouri, but Texas is up there. There’s quite a few-
Jon Pray (42:35): Quote a few Oklahomans.
Ken Matthews (42:36): Oklahomans. But just like the difference between the two size of the two states, the population of the two states, way, way more Texas plates around here. Visitors.
Jon Pray (42:48): Sure.
Adam Williams (42:48): So speaking of curiosity and an interest in digging out things and talking with people, I want to ask about housing too, because it’s obviously a big issue, a very important one around here and in many places. And the two of you came together, you started Chaffee Housing Report that’s several years in existence. Ken, what can you share maybe … I know this is a really broad question, but from the standpoint of the housing crisis and our need for affordability in this particular community?
Ken Matthews (43:27): Just put it succinctly as I can. Housing is the one issue that has the most impact on the health of people. If they don’t have secure housing, there’s no way they’re going to be physically or mentally healthy. And then that rolls downstream. There’s studies that have shown that children who move, even if they’re in stable families, the more times they move, the less successful they’re going to be in school because they have this housing insecurity issue that is an overlay.
(44:05): I mean, even though their parents tell them they’re going to be fine, it’s just a move, that disruption in a child’s life is significant. And I mean, it’s not unusual that in this county that the Office of Housing and the Office of Health have collaborated because that collaboration is a natural collaboration.
It’s a collaboration that’s been … I’d say it probably started … How it got started in Colorado was Colorado Health Foundation made that connection and really published it and put out money for counties to apply for and get that money and use it to collaborate on addressing both health and housing at the same time. And Chaffee County was lucky to have Becky Gray and Andrea Carlstrom who went for that and got that money and have done a lot of education. Well, you’re part of that education.
Adam Williams (45:13): Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Chaffee County Public Health and Chaffee Housing Authority are who support the show, Looking Upstream. And that’s how we came to meet was because of that.
So that transition of sorts from the Chaffee Housing Report, which the two of you have done, to now Jon and I with We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream, which the way you described it as a social determinant of health and perhaps the most significant one, I don’t know if that’s backed by the statistics and things so I’m saying it in a soft way, but it’s obviously a very important one.
Ken Matthews (45:47): I think it is probably backed.
Adam Williams (45:49): I think it probably is, but I do not want to-
Ken Matthews (45:50): I think I’m saying that because Andrea Carlstrom said it in the interview.
Adam Williams (45:53): Which means I should also probably know it, but I was soft pedaling that for my own grace period there. Gray space. And you mentioned before things flow downstream. That’s where the name of this podcast comes from, Looking Upstream is we’re trying to get ahead of these issues and speak to some of these social determinants of health.
Let me ask you about the housing report and your interest in housing from, I guess the place I normally ask, which is the human and personal connection to it. What motivated you and that curiosity to care about these housing issues and in the way that a retired lawyer, a rugby player and coach and all this sort of stuff … Your background wasn’t as I understand it anyway … Unless you were in law related to real estate, it wasn’t involved in this.
Ken Matthews (46:41): I wasn’t. Well, it came from my wife and I came here on our honeymoon. It was a second marriage for me. And we had never been to Salida. We came to Salida and we bought a lot that weekend. We just saw possibility. And this is in 2006. And there were boarded up stores on F Street. And so then we decided we’d build a house here and we would retire here. And then we did that. And then we started seeing that in some ways we were kind of part of the problem.
We were bringing an element to Salida that was different than was ingrained in this society. We’re newcomers and we had sufficient resources to do what we wanted to do and there were people who did not have that. It was very apparent that when we build our “dream house”, that dream house took resources that could have been building something else. And started meeting people that worked at bars and restaurants and just all walks of life that it was apparent to me that housing was an issue.
(48:12): And then I got on the board of the Chaffee Housing Trust, which builds affordable housing and saw how difficult that was to do, and got involved in an organization called the Housing Policy Advisory Committee and within the first couple of years I was here and that was trying to make an impact on housing because the housing needs assessment had come out and said the same thing that one five years ago had said, and nothing had been done in those five years.
And Housing Policy Advisory Committee was ad hoc to citizens forming it and grabbing county commissioners, pulling them in and city officials pulling them in and said, “Well, we need to do something about this.” And so it’s the first time I had ever had this close connection with the community. Denver, I just worked there, had a clutch of friends, had activities that I was involved in. But Denver kind of runs itself, but this community needed help.
Adam Williams (49:23): I’m wondering what the difference is between you being aware of these issues and recognizing I kind of have a role. I can play a different role. I can be active in helping to, I don’t know, educate, to bring people together to talk about the issues, to understand what the issues are. What’s the difference between somebody like you recognizing that and somebody else who might be a retiree who has resources coming in, being a second homeowner, being whatever form they take, but kind of staying above the fray, so to speak?
Ken Matthews (49:55): Well, I’ve always been somebody that’s been in the fray. Either sports or I was a trial lawyer and maybe it’s a little bit of ego. I think I can make a difference. There’s something about where I’ve been in my life and what’s happened in my life that I think I can make things happen or at least be part of making things happen. And it’s a way bigger job than any one person’s ever going to do, so you’re just a part of a team. And it just was so clear to me that it was really in the long run, whether this community survives or fails and having adequate housing for people.
Adam Williams (50:40): Jon, I want to bring you in to this as well because, again, you were part of the Housing Report and it still is a show that you do just with a little less frequency. Is that right, Ken?
Ken Matthews (50:50): We haven’t done it hardly at all. It’s just still up on a podcast. I think we got burned out on it. We did it for six or seven years, and my job was to find the people to interview and allay their fears. You know how that is as an interviewer. People are afraid to do it. Some people are good at it, some people aren’t good at it, and you got to make them feel comfortable.
Actually do the research on what their piece of the pie was and come up with questions and send them out to them so they’d be comfortable. And it just started getting to be so hard to find those people and I’d gotten involved in some other things. I had some health issues and I needed to back off. And I have occasionally done some, but very seldom anymore. And I wouldn’t say the show had run its course. It’s endless issues, but-
Jon Pray (50:51): I think probably we had run our course.
Ken Matthews (50:51): Yeah.
Jon Pray (52:01): I found myself frustrated with the just ponderous slowness of any results. And then I found myself frustrated with how many people were prepared to quietly organize in opposition to any good idea that might be brought forward regarding housing.
Adam Williams (52:26): Was housing a topic that you had a particular interest in prior to the opportunity to work with Ken for this show or is that something that has developed along the several years because you’re sitting in the room listening to these people who are the experts, are the leaders, are the idea people talking about it in front of you for years?
Jon Pray (52:48): Well, I think it developed with guests and with the relationship with Ken. But you were bringing in some county movers and shakers with Phil Wiser, the DA on. There were people of influence in the chair.
Adam Williams (53:07): The attorney general. Phil Wiser.
Jon Pray (53:10): Yeah, that’s the guy. And these were smart, well-spoken people, but there were also people … I remember one of the last ones we did, we brought in a naysayer and he and a developer, if they’d been in the same room rather than the same Zoom call, it probably would’ve come to fisticuffs. And you became aware of how passionate the opposition to these projects was. I mean, they’d pull a referendum out of their hat.
Ken Matthews (53:48): And it’s easy to do. You don’t need take very many-
Jon Pray (53:51): 250 signatures. Ken Matthews (53:52): Is that what it is? Yeah. You get 250 signatures to protest chocolate ice cream.
Jon Pray (53:58): It’s on the ballot. Yep. So that was discouraging, I think, and they continued, correct me if I’m wrong, to try to get the county master plan together.
Ken Matthews (54:10): Yeah. All that’s been going. I’ve kind of lost track of it, but it’s been going for years.
Jon Pray (54:16): Land use plans.
Ken Matthews (54:18): Land use plans and master plan. Those may be done now in the county. I couldn’t tell you.
Jon Pray (54:23): I don’t think so. I think I heard Keith Baker talking the other day about how the land use plan was getting there, but not there yet.
Adam Williams (54:31): The Chaffee County Commissioner.
Ken Matthews (54:33): Yeah.
Adam Williams (54:34): When is Keith’s term up?
Ken Matthews (54:36): November.
Adam Williams (54:37): With the November election and then does that happen right away?
Ken Matthews (54:40): No. It, I think, goes until … He would be on until the last meeting in that year, and then the new electees would come on in January, I think.
Adam Williams (54:53): Okay. I want to ask one last question here with the time we have, and that is Ken, you were on the new documentary, A Home in Paradise, which was directed and produced by Julie Speer Jackson, who also recently was on this podcast. Well, one, what was the experience like for you to be in front of the camera, to be somebody who was sought out presumably as one of these voices, a leading voice on this subject in the area?
Ken Matthews (55:22): Well, it’s in some ways a highlight of my life to be recognized as somebody that is worth listening to. And as far as being involved in it, it was easy. It didn’t take much time. One of the clips was from a public meeting. I didn’t know they were going to be doing that. They just walked up they aisle as I was suggesting that the city should go a different way with the South Ark neighborhood. And it was fun. It felt like a culmination in some ways of the work that I’ve been doing to educate myself on it and be able to express things in a certain way.
Adam Williams (56:17): Yeah, I could see that. And I think it’s also … It’s a lasting legacy sort of piece in a way that if you’re ready for this, maybe is that cherry on top of all the radio efforts and other efforts that you’ve put in.
Ken Matthews (56:32): Yeah, maybe so. I was just happy to see it being done and honored to be part of it.
Adam Williams (56:39): It’s a pretty incredible investment and belief in that possibility as … I mean, again, it was Andrea at Chaffee County Public Health and some others on the team that are investing in this idea and saying this is worth doing. And I think it’s an amazing piece that speaks to really important topics, and I was grateful to be part of it just a little bit as the narrator as well.
Ken Matthews (57:04): And it’s a quality product.
Adam Williams (57:07): It is. It is.
Ken Matthews (57:08): It’s going to be on some public TV stations, I’m sure, throughout the country.
Adam Williams (57:15): Jon, any final thoughts?
Jon Pray (57:18): You’re out of time.
Adam Williams (57:19): Thanks for being here, guys.
Ken Matthews (57:22): Thank you.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (57:31): Thanks for listening to the We Are Chaffee Looking Upstream podcast. If our conversation here today sparks curiosity for you, you can learn more in this episode’s show notes at wearechaffee.org.
If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email us at info@wearechaffee.org.
We invite you to rate and review the We Are Chaffee Looking Upstream podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever platform you use with that functionality. We also invite you to tell others about the Looking Upstream podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation.
(58:07): Once again, I’m Adam Williams, host, producer, and photographer. Jon Pray is engineer and producer. Thank you to KHEN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado, to Heather Gorby for graphic and web design, to Andrea Carlstrom, director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment, and to Lisa Martin, community advocacy coordinator for the We Are Chaffee storytelling initiative.
The We Are Chaffee Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with the Chaffee County Department of Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and it’s supported by the Colorado Public Health and Environment Office of Health Disparities.
You can learn more about the Looking Upstream podcast and related storytelling initiatives at wearechaffee.org and on Instagram and Facebook at We Are Chaffee. Lastly, until the next episode, as we say here at We Are Chaffee, “share stories, make change.”
[Outro music, horns and guitar instrumental]
