There's a rusty clock on a bookcase in Webb Heron's home. The face is weathered, old with time.

Like Heron, it still keeps going.

Heron, soon to be 95, took a little time Wednesday to share some highlights of his life.

"I was 70. Then I was 80. Then - bang - I'm 95," he said.

In his prime, Heron and his late brother, Robert, built a slew of ski lifts in the West. Not bad for a guy who never skied.

He was born in Valier, Mont., where his father, an engineer, was working on an irrigation project.

His dad's career took the family to Chama, N.M.

During World War I, Heron's father bought a printing company from a Denver business and moved the equipment to Chama, where he founded a newspaper.

"Before he was an engineer, my dad was a printer," Heron said.

He taught the printing trade to Heron and his younger brother. Together, they published the weekly Chama News.

During the school year, Heron attended high school in Cañon City, living with his grandparents. He then went to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where the family was living. He joined the National Guard, riding horses in the cavalry.

After he graduated with an engineering degree, Heron went to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He traveled around to various reservations in the West.

At the White River Reservation in Arizona, he met Agnes Catherine Keating, a nurse out of Chicago.

Next thing you know, he persuaded her to join him on a two-seater swing so they could talk. They began dating. She stayed on the reservation working while he traveled to others. So they wrote letters to keep in touch.

In 1939, they married and went to Mexico City for a honeymoon.

They had five children, four of whom survive.

During World War II, Heron left the BIA and went to work for private industry. He was at an airplane modification plant in Birmingham, Ala., getting the bugs out of planes right off the assembly lines. He edged farther West, working at a munitions plant in Kansas by war's end.

After the war, he settled in Denver.

"I was headed for Arizona," he said. "My brother already had an engineering firm in Denver. So I joined him."

Their first ski-lift job was in New Mexico in 1945, quickly followed by a couple of jobs in Aspen and Arapahoe Basin.

"One of his original lifts is in a museum," said daughter Patsy Schmitz, of Denver.

They built tramlines to haul coal and cable cars to ferry people up and down hillsides.

In 1970, Heron retired and took up golf, settling down to life on his Adams County farm. He moved back to Denver after his wife died in 2001.

He has had a lot of time to look back on a lot of time. It all looks good. And he expects the future to be just as good.

"I expect more of the same," he said.

massarog@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5271

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