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Pat Kruse

Pat Kruse took this selfie recently. The 91-year-old is a 1947 graduate of Cheyenne Mountain High School and raised 10 children who also attended Cheyenne Mountain schools.

By Breeanna Jent

breeanna.jent@ pikespeaknewspapers.com

When Pat Kruse recalls her formative years growing up in Colorado Springs in the 1930s and ‘40s, she does so fondly.

“It was great,” said the 91-year-old Kruse.

Born in Colorado Springs at what is now Penrose Hospital just five months ahead of the Great Depression, Kruse started school in Wisconsin while her father sought work. Eventually the family settled back in Colorado Springs, and Kruse began second grade in the Cheyenne Mountain School District, graduating with her class of 29 students from Cheyenne Mountain High School in 1947.

But despite the economic hardships of those years, Kruse and her three siblings grew up happily.

“We didn’t know we were poor,” Kruse said. “It was a constant fun time mostly.”

She remembers playing football at the park with her younger brother, walking from the 900 block of Cheyenne Boulevard where her family lived to Manitou Springs, picking up sweets at the penny candy shops, and going to parties, dances, puppet shows and singalongs. In high school, Kruse spent three years on the square dance team.

Kruse attended Western State College of Colorado (now Western Colorado University) in Gunnison on a full-ride scholarship and met her husband, Dick Kruse, a sailor, at a Sadie Hawkins dance. She asked him to dance, he said yes, and as the saying goes, the rest is history. The Kruses were married nearly 70 years before Dick’s death in March 2017.

The couple raised 10 children in Colorado, all of whom attended District 12 schools (as would their children). Pat worked for nine years in the school cafeterias. Dick worked for many years with the Free Press, which in the 1970s was sold three times and renamed the Colorado Springs Sun. But the family was left with “nothing,” Kruse said, when the Sun was sold for $30 million in 1986 to Freedom Newspapers and ran its last edition on Feb. 27, 1986.

Looking for work and at the encouragement of one of their children living there, Dick and Pat moved to the Oregon coast and found jobs as keepers for a lighthouse keeper’s home. They spent 29 years in coastal Oregon.

Pat Kruse moved back to southwestern Colorado Springs two years ago, after Dick’s passing. In her free time, she walks and does yoga and archery.

“I spent my 90th birthday shooting balloons,” Kruse laughed.

She offers this bit of life advice: “The biggest thing you can do (in life) is try. Even though it’s tough — most people don’t know how hard it is to grow up in the Great Depression, or to have had a father who was shot down over France in World War I — try to keep a positive attitude.

“The world is different today, but that doesn’t mean ‘bad’ different. However, listen to elderly people. They know what actually went on.”