Donald Smith

Ancestors

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Biography

I was born in Milwaukee, WI in 1946 and moved to Denver 6 mo. later. Both my parents are from the Berthoud area and they couldn’t wait to get back to Colorado. Of all 6 members of the family, only my sister and I are NOT Colorado natives.

I was schooled in Denver and Littleton. I was kicked out of my 12th year of high school and had 2 options from my folks. Get back in school or enlist full time in the Service so I enlisted full time in the Navy at 17-1/2 (I had joined the Naval Air Reserves at 17).

I went to boot camp in San Diego and Radioman School (there I learned basic electronics). I joined my ship, the U.S.S. Iwo Jima (LPH-2) in San Diego in the spring of 1965 and within a couple months, was steaming to Vietnam.

I was a Radioman, sending and receiving messages via HF radios and teletype machines. The Iwo Jima carried helicopters and several times after I had already left the ship, it picked up astronauts in the Pacific, including the Apollo 13 crew.

I served 2 tours of duty in Vietnam. My tours amounted to going around in circles, several miles off the coast. Once I stepped foot on land for a beach party and got my 3 cans of beer all at once. By the time you got to the third can, it was hot.

I was discharged from the Navy a couple days before I turned 21. I had an aunt and uncle plus some friends in California (plus personnel issues back in Colorado) so I took up residency in Orange County. I also lived in Azusa, which is just east of Pasadena, and Mission Viejo, just north of San Juan Capistrano, before moving to Nebraska, then on to Kansas and in 1984, returned to Colorado, to Pueblo.

In Nebraska, doing land leveling was bothering my back so I went to tech school in Hastings, NE, Central Technical Community College CTCC and studied Electronics.

I have worked as a paper boy for the Rocky Mountain News, a sweeper boy in 2 different Denver schools, a bus boy at the restaurant a couple blocks from Littleton High School (it had phones at each booth to order with) and shelf stocker at the G.E.M. store in South Broadway. I assembled metal desks in a factory, was a dispatcher for Orange County Communications and the operator of a rock-sand-and gravel plant. I’ve done land leveling, bench tested new radios at an avionics factory (King Radio), worked at the steel mill in Pueblo and part time dispatcher for a volunteer fire department in Pueblo West, CO. I have worked for 3 different railroads for a combined total of 30 years and retired from them. I started with the Santa Fe, Rio Grande, Burlington Northern and when the BN merge with the Santa Fe, it was the BNSF. For the Railroads, I was an electronics technician, repairing and installing telecommunication equipment.

My hobbies include genealogy, dirt bike riding, hunting, golf, Ham Radio, flying (if I could afford it) and computers. A couple of accomplishments I am most proud of are earning a Private Pilots license, several FCC licenses and climbing Longs Peak at age 50 (my mother did it as a young girl).

I have volunteered for the Div. of Wildlife, Sertoma, Wings Museum EOF at Centennial Airport and joined the Civil Air Patrol to get back into flying. I lasted 4 years before I had to quit do to the bone headed leaders of the Colorado Wing. I did meet a bunch of great pilots through CAP and get together with some once a week. CAP is an affiliate of the US Air Force and sometimes its leaders let the power go to their heads.

I have a son but was not married to his mother, my 1st wife, she had 3 kids, I adopted one of them. My 2nd wife, she had 1 kid and my 3rd wife, no kids, has her hands full with me.

My personal web page has a great amount of family information. http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~don46/genealogy/index.htm

also, my Smith side is at: https://www.tribalpages.com/tribe/browse?userid=donsmithancestry&view=9&ver=10 and my Welty side is at: https://www.tribalpages.com/tribe/browse?userid=donsmithwelty&view=0&pid=47&randi=722555748&showlinks=0

I have been doing research for over 40 years. Most of the information I have going back to the late 1800's is pretty accurate. Most before that comes from the internet and is not always verified by me. The information is there to use. I don't believe a lot of the information before the 1900's is accurate because of lack of record keeping, miss spelling by census takers or just plain poor penmanship. Also, errors in entering data happens all the time. Even books on a family history differ from other publications so go figure.

Take the 4 or 5 most popular genealogy web sites and you can find all kinds of differences on a person. Who they married, which kids are theirs, dates of b. and d. or m. etc. But, before the internet, getting information was next to nil or took forever.

I click and copy a lot of data from the web and try to verify it but......

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by Don Smith at registration.