Native Sons of the Soil

...That’s the thing people who know the family notice, and which breaks their hearts just a little more, the first time they see Travis and Chad following their father’s death. The resemblance both in style and structure. The same gruff, irascible demeanor, but also, the same soft, kind and smiling eyes. Already, a transformation seems underway. Several times while their mother talks with a visitor, the boys stand quietly at the kitchen window, looking out at one of the fields, discussing what work needs to be done....

By Citizen Correspondent Matt Lubich

Date Posted: 11/26/07

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JOHNSTOWN — You go on. That’s what farm families do. A spring of hard work with dreams of a good harvest shrivels and dies before your eyes beneath the hot summer sun because of no water. Storm clouds boil up over the mountains and come through in a flash of lightning, pounding a deadly drumbeat of hail, wiping out a season’s effort. Commodity prices fall, but you rise with the sun the next morning and go on. That’s what Alan Rieder’s wife, Lori, and sons, Chad and Travis, will do now. Earlier this month, Rieder died suddenly and unexpectedly at age 54, leaving them to carry on the family agricultural legacy. They’ll go on farming.

Last week, Lori, Chad and Travis stood in the kitchen of the family farm house along Weld County Road 50. It was a Monday morning. Friday, they had buried their husband and father.

“Even with all we were dealing with last week preparing for the funeral,” Lori said, “we still had to deal with the cattle and the other work. We’ll keep on keeping on. That’s what he would have wanted.”

And, those who knew Alan will tell you with a sad smile, you did it the way Alan wanted.

Born in the spring of the 1953 planting season, Rieder grew up in a time when farming and agriculture still were the defining forces in Johnstown. That’s not the case today. It wasn’t the case a dozen years ago, when Alan’s and Lori’s sons were getting ready to graduate from Roosevelt High School.

“He wanted both of the boys to do something else,” Lori said. “But I guess there’s something in your blood when your dad’s a farmer.

Alan’s dad was a farmer. He was a farmer. His brother, Larry, who died in 2000, was a farmer. And his sons are farmers.

“I never really thought of doing something else,” Chad, 29, said with a shrug.

“I guess I just like sitting in a tractor with nobody barking in my ear,” Travis, 30, said. “That was before cell phones.”

That’s the thing people who know the family notice, and which breaks their hearts just a little more, the first time they see Travis and Chad following their father’s death. The resemblance both in style and structure. The same gruff, irascible demeanor, but also, the same soft, kind and smiling eyes.

Already, a transformation seems underway.