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The Pueblo Chieftain Online <br />Page 3 of 4 <br />"I started to say I wouldn't bet on it," Wiley said. "But I guess I am betting on it. <br />My whole investment is in farming, and it all depends on water coming down that <br />ditch like it has for 140 years." <br />Lee Simpson <br />For Lee Simpson and his son David, the family business isn't farming, but water. <br />Lee was a founder and first manager of the St. Charles Mesa Water District, and <br />Dave moved into that office when his dad retired. <br />The water district holds almost 10 percent of the shares in the Bessemer Ditch, <br />and relies on the ditch to carry its water supply from March to November. When <br />the ditch is shut down for the winter storage period, the district's water is diverted <br />from the Arkansas River near Runyon Field. <br />Lee Simpson said his steelworker dad moved the family to the Mesa in 1937, when <br />Lee was in grade school. Most people in the area had cisterns for their homes, <br />buying drinking water that was hauled in; and some had good wells, he said. And <br />some people rigged up systems of cisterns and filters that enabled them to drink <br />water from their ditch shares. <br />When the water district was formed in 1964, "we bought water from a guy who <br />had a well just about 600 feet from the district office on South Road, so our water <br />was pretty much like the water we were used to from the cisterns," Simpson said. <br />As the district acquired Bessemer Ditch shares, it ran the water through a sand <br />filter and into the ground to recharge wells. <br />"That water turned into my life's work," said Simpson, who is a longtime board <br />member of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District and a board <br />http : / /www.chieftain.com/print.php ?article= /metro /1123480800/5 8/9/2005 <br />