AMERICA - Steamboat Springs, Colorado

"A Clan and a Colorado Town, Long Thriving as One" by KIRK JOHNSON, New York Times 7/5/2011

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — Frank and Carrie Light and their eight children came here around 1900 to what was just a wide spot of a few hundred people. Then the town’s story and the family’s got intertwined. Now it is hard to tell where one begins and the other leaves off.

Wildfire or flood here in north-central Colorado? One of their great-grandsons is in charge at the county Office of Emergency Management. Going skiing? The Steamboat resort, which is about as famous as the town, was developed in the 1960s by a granddaughter and her husband. Vacation-home shopping? Two other great-grandsons became developers.

And that is not even counting the namesake store itself, F. M. Light & Sons, a Western clothing shop — Frank’s full name was Francis Marion Light — that has held its own on Steamboat’s main drag since 1905. Of the store’s 20 employees, nine carry the family genes.

“I often wonder what he would make of all this, what the town became,” said Bob Struble, 59, the emergency management director, referring to his great-grandfather.

Most places here in the West do not persist like Steamboat, as families get blown hither and yon or luck plays out.

In a region where cities like Denver, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas dominate life — the West is the most urbanized part of the nation, according to the census — small towns have been more likely to boom like firecrackers or fade slowly. Ghost towns dot the prairies and mountainsides.

But in Steamboat Springs, population 12,000, trajectories coincided. The community, dependent on agriculture when the Lights arrived from Ohio, found new legs in tourism. And the Light family, which came here partly for the dry mountain climate, where Mr. Light’s terrible asthma might improve, adapted with the times.

The F. M. Light store survived the Great Depression in the 1930s by going mobile, with family members and employees driving hundreds of miles to reach struggling rural customers. It survived the coming of Wal-Mart in the early 1990s by changing its line of merchandise — eliminating sundries like underwear and socks on which a little shop could never compete on price and moving instead toward higher-end clothing. Boots are a big seller now, filling the shop with the smell of leather.

“He was always thinking ahead, always trying something,” said Mr. Light’s granddaughter, Annabeth Light Lockhart, 89, who wrote a book about the family and the store a few years ago.

Mr. Light’s head for advertising created what is perhaps the family’s most visible legacy.

In the mid-1920s, he and his sons began installing yellow-and-black roadside signs along Route 40, which was then the main interstate route — a Rocky Mountain version of the old Route 66 that runs across the southern tier of states.

The signs echoed the age of Burma Shave and Mail Pouch Tobacco, national companies that pioneered the roadside pitch in the early days of automobile travel.

But while Burma Shave went the way of the museum shelf, about 100 of Mr. Light’s old signs, most of them on the original metal sheets — with the occasional bullet hole and rust to prove it — are still there, some as far as 70 miles from town. They chatter on, in the tone of an advertising age long gone, about the fine goods available to travelers should they decide to mosey into town for a spell.

Del Lockhart, 61, a great-grandson, has been repainting those signs — by hand, with a paintbrush — since the early 1960s. It is a family summer chore, or tradition, now going into its sixth generation.

Jonathan Lockhart, 13, was out on a recent morning with a brother, Dawson, 24, and their father, Del. This is Jonathan’s third summer on sign crew. “I haven’t done a whole sign myself yet,” he said, his fingers black with paint.

Many Light descendants did move away. But many came back, too, which also seems part of the family tradition — or perhaps a testament to the allure of the community, in a mountain-rimmed valley at 7,000 feet.

Del Lockhart and his brother Ty, who now run the store, both received degrees in aerospace engineering and worked around the country before coming home. Ty Lockhart’s daughter, Lindsay Dillenbeck, 30, and her husband, Chris, moved back from Los Angeles last fall after getting their M.B.A.’s.

“Since we started dating, Lindsay told me the plan was to move back to Steamboat,” Mr. Dillenbeck said as he helped stock shelves on a recent morning. “That was very clear.”

Rob Struble, 30, a great-great-grandson, came back to Steamboat after a stint in the Army. He works in construction, which is not so great a business right now, he said.

But in the Light family tradition, he is finding a way to stay in a place he loves.

“Work is work, and you do what you have to do,” he said.

Mr. Struble also married into old local roots. His wife, Niki, is fifth-generation Steamboat stock, descended from a ranch family. They and their two children — Kaitlin, 4, and Sean, 2 — are living in a house that was built by Ms. Struble’s ancestors in 1905, the same year, by coincidence, that Frank Light opened his clothing shop down the road.