Go across the country and ask someone how to get to their house. During their explanation, you will hear things like, "when you get to the fork in the road, veer to the left" or "follow this road as it curves around to the left". For most people who grew up in Chaffee, we listen but wish every city had been laid out the way our founding fathers had done it, in perfect right angles. Directions to most in the town went like this: "make a left, then the second right, third house on the left". For nearly every house, you only needed to make one or possibly 2 turns to get to the street. That is simply genius. Once you learned your left from your right, you were immediately qualified to be a cab driver in Chaffee, if we ever had taxi service.

I don't know the history of how the city was laid out, I will leave that article to the good folks at the historical society. But it always impressed me that our city map, for the most part was a big piece of graph paper. Every city block was a perfect rectangle, about 1,200 feet long and 300 feet wide. I am amazed we didn't have more engineers and math professors because we learned the X and Y axis and plotting algebraic equations earlier than most communities just by walking to the Dairy Queen. Yoakum was the X axis, 3rd Street the Y axis, and the slope from every corner of the city was 1/3. For all nerds reading this, the equation for going from the High School to the Methodist Church was y=4x + 2 with the y intercept occurring just south of Omer Hodges house. You never need GPS to find your way through Chaffee.

To make navigation even simpler, the North/South streets were numbered after Main. Our address was 418 Davidson. Located between 4th and 5th streets. Genius! To make studying city history even easier, most East/West streets were named for the founders or railroad officials. It even made it easy to remember the streets if you knew that old man Yoakum had this cook named Helen Dame. Don't know any limerics about his gardener and dentist, Davidson Parker. I learned through High School physics with the late, great Charles Goddard, that our North/South streets weren't perfectly North/South. Again, our city layout provided a physics experiment. Turns out they are about 12 degrees off, so if you are heading for the north pole, make an adjustment as you drive past the Meyr farm (through their corn fields) or you will end up seeing Greenland and Norway, but miss Santa's workshop by 12 degrees. I can forgive the founders for the math error, they were lining up streets to parallel train tracks, and they were slightly off center, since it was much easier to build a railroad around the Chaffee Hills than to build a tunnel through Rockview just to keep in line with the North Star.

Not all the city is perfectly square. Circle Park was designed to be shared equally with all 4 quadrants of the city (Pi x R squared x Ľ each), sort of the way Washington DC is shared by Maryland and Virginia, another history lesson provided by our city map! Then came expansion. Heeb and Frates needed to stop so our elementary playground didn't involve vehicle traffic. School street was just a crazy way to maximize property access on the west side of the school. Beyond 5th street, Davidson and Parker kept the lines straight, but because there was a ball park to the south, planners said, let's add a curve to Chaffee and make the streets join on a circular drive, just like all the other cities. While their decision prevented the Nickens, Kiefers and Bradshaws from living on dead end streets and opened up the IGA territory for exploration, our uniqueness was compromised. On the opposite side of town, Davidson and Parker went further east than their other street counterparts. They worked hard to maintain rectangular perfection, but the lay of the land dictated some curvature as they progressed east.

Then, as final expansion of the 4th Ward continued, right angles were tossed aside in the new section of town. Hubbard ran North/South but didn't have cross streets every 300 feet. And it bent in the middle, near the old Moudy residence. Easy street had some bend in it's one block to adjust for Heeb Creek, but then it made a sharp turn into third rather than run straight into South Brook. That made the front yard bigger for the Methodist parsonage but again, the straight and narrow was being chipped away. Easy also violated the "no circle" rules that our founding fathers had when they put in the Grojean circle. Then, Bill Pfefferkorn built his subdivisions. I can't fault him because he also couldn't have through streets because of the elementary school. But Sheridan and Robin Hood had curves and Cul De Sacs! Since there were light poles inside they weren't technically cul de sacs but instead, circles, but we know the French still counted it as a victory. And at what point did Mr. Sheridan or Robin Hood actually participate in the town history? That meant precedence had been set (although Judge Vickery never made a ruling) and the Housing Authority could design their streets however they wanted.

So, as Chaffee expands, more and more new streets will have curves and circles. I just hope that the only time the word veer is used in the city limits, it is by Coach Vickery on a strategy to take advantage of oversized tackles.