This week in 1918, tragedy struck as prominent farmer Jacob Furter committed suicide at his Lakewood home. Furter went to bed as usual, but at 3:30 a.m., his wife and son heard a gunshot “and when the rushed to Furter’s room, they found his lifeless body, his head in a pool of blood, on the floor,” reported “The Colorado Transcript.” He was sixty-two years old and originally from Switzerland, but he had lived in Colorado for 40 years and Jefferson County for 11. His family believed that worry over “two strokes of paralysis” had “made him temporarily deranged,” leading to his unexpected suicide.
Unfortunately, Furter was not the only suicide this week in Colorado. William Green of the Craig colony took his life “by slashing his own throat with a razor,” reported “The Colorado Transcript.” Green was a forty-two year old locomotive engineer from New York, who had been confined to the sanitarium for some time due to tuberculosis.
In happier news, clay miners at the Rubey pits found two veins of coal of “splendid quality” at the western end of Twelfth Street. Workers hoped that a vein worth mining would be discovered. “The Colorado Transcript” said, “The coal in the veins cut last week is hard and clean, and has excellent heating qualities.”
Also this week in Golden, Sigma Nu suffered an embarrassing basketball defeat at the hands of the Golden High School team. The Golden High School page of “The Colorado Transcript” referred to the game as “so fast that the Sigma Nu couldn’t keep up” and “one of the roughest ever seen on the local floor.” Sigma Nu’s strategy was to play roughly to intimidate their younger opponents, but the high school students were not disturbed and won by thirty-nine points.
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