LYONS — The men who saved Cheron Boland’s life as the raging St. Vrain River did its best to drown her last September were unwittingly completing the task her husband had begun just a few hours earlier.
Gerald “Gerry” Boland, a 31-year teacher and coach in Lyons schools, had gone back up the canyon west of town to look for his wife of 54 years, after the couple had evacuated their house separately in the early-morning hours of Sept. 12, 2013.
Boland, 80, would perish when a wall of water carried him and his truck down the canyon. His body wouldn’t be found for another week. His wife, who had headed back to the home to look for her husband and gotten stuck in her car, now faced her own life and death moment.
“The water was cold, the water was rising — she called 911,” daughter Amy Hoh said Sunday at a first anniversary ceremony for her father outside Lyons Elementary School, where he taught for a quarter of a century.
That’s when four men driving a front-end loader barreled through the rushing water and finagled Cheron Boland from her disabled vehicle and onto the machine’s scoop to safety.
“There’s no way she could have stepped out of that car and survived,” Hoh said through tears. “They finished the job that my dad started that morning.”
Hoh was joined at the microphone by two of the rescuers — Lyons fireman Evan Patronik and town maintenance employee Rusty Ribble — as the 100 or so people who came to watch Boland be honored with a stone bench and have the school’s bus lane named for him wiped away tears of their own.
Cindy LaFollette, a former sixth-grade student of Boland and whose parents and aunt also had him as a teacher, said 70 percent of what she learned in life came from Boland.
“He was part of my life every day and I didn’t realize until now,” she said. “He was either my teacher or coach.”
Mary Sires, who as an administrator with the St. Vrain Valley School District hired Cheron Boland as an English-as-a-second-language instructor in the late 1980s, remembered Gerry Boland swinging by her house with a truckload of firewood he had just cut in the hills above town. He charged her $100 for the load and never increased the price for the next 20 years.
“I told him, ‘Gerry, what about inflation?’ ” she said.
Boland was born in Kansas and attended Loveland High School. He joined the Army and graduated from Colorado State College, now University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, in 1959. He met Cheron Boland at Colorado State, and they married in 1960 and had three children.
He was one of nine people to die in the Colorado floods of a year ago — far and away the state’s costliest natural disaster.
Cheron Boland didn’t speak Sunday but listened intently as friends and former students lauded her late husband and relayed personal stories about him.
George Finnell, who was a sixth-grade student of Boland in the 1970s and is now a teacher himself, talked about his former mentor’s prowess on the football field.
“That man could throw a bullet that would drill right through your chest,” he said.
Finnell wrote a song in Boland’s memory called “The Night the River Rose,” which he performed on acoustic guitar under a bright sun and against a light breeze Sunday — conditions that in no way resembled the furious weather that took Gerry Boland’s life a year ago.
John Aguilar: 303-954-1695, jaguilar@denverpost.com or twitter.com/abuvthefold
