SIDE STREETS: Maybe Bonnyville ought to be called 'Bobsieville' in honor of lifelong resident

Bobsie Pachak has seen it all. She just didn’t realize how much she’d seen until a neighbor and friend, Joyce Dearing, put it all in a book as a gift for her 90th birthday today.

Using old newspaper clippings, Dearing created a history of their Bonnyville neighborhood, which was annexed into Colorado Springs in 1948 and built over the next few years by developer John Bonforte.

Pachak became one of Bonnyville’s first residents when she and her husband, Walter, paid $9,385 for a three-bedroom, one-bath, 1,000-square-foot house on North Wahsatch Avenue. She has lived there ever since, watching 61 years of Colorado Springs history from her tidy little home that backed up to the Santa Fe Railroad tracks — today a hiking/biking trail.

Pachak has seen the Springs transformed from a small resort and military town into a booming city. It never fazed her.

“Growth of the city doesn’t bother me,” she said. “You have your own neighborhood. That’s what matters.”

Dearing’s history book gift tells how developer Bonforte warred with the City Council over his 325-home subdivision on the “north end” of Colorado Springs. And the story of Bonnyville’s difficult birth echoes in the clashes today between developers, the city and neighbors.

Page after page tell of debates over city demands for land to be set aside for a park, feuding over the route and size of a major thoroughfare, demands for schools, bus routes, voting locations and more.

There are even stories about the creation of a neighborhood association, the Bonnyville Improvement Association.

Pachak lived it all, but she doesn’t remember much — not because her memory is slipping. Far from it.

She vividly recalls moving into her house in July 1948, the exact amount paid and other details of her long life. All the milestones relate to the lives of her husband and six children.

And that’s why she was oblivious to much of what appeared in the papers.

“I was too busy raising children,” she said with a hearty laugh. “Walt was in the Army and I had six kids. I didn’t have time for all that stuff.”

She doesn’t even recall a dramatic 1949 robbery that left a city bus driver broke and shoeless in front of her house. It’s in the book.

She does recalls how she became a neighborhood activist decades ago, fighting a proposed expansion by Safeway at the Bon Shopping Center a few doors down. She feared it would generate too much truck traffic in the neighborhood.

The store expanded, but not as much as planned. And Walt, by then a carpenter, ended up building it.

As feared, heavy traffic followed. In fact, her car has been hit seven times while parked in front of her home.

But she takes it in stride.

“Now I’m glad Safeway is so close,” she said with another laugh, recognizing the irony. “It’s convenient.”

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See Bobsie Pachak on my blog at
 gazette.com/blogs/sidestreets