Over the years, Puebloan Dennis Maes has seen more than his share of young people paying the price for bad choices. In a perfect world and as another Father’s Day approaches, he said, they might have benefitted from a father like his own, a man who taught him the sometimes delicate balance of love, understanding and, when it was called for, discipline.
Maes is the oldest of eleven children. His parents, Leo and Susie Maes, he said, raised a tight-knit, loving family. He recalls that both were always deeply involved in the lives of their children and made sure the kids were always a part of the things they did, as well.
“I remember my dad,” said Maes. “He played softball and baseball” and always took the kids with him. One of Maes’ vivid childhood memories was “spending the whole day watching him.” In turn, as the family grew, his father did the same, remaining active and involved in the children’s academics and activities.
Maes father was also active with the family’s Walsenburg community, including serving at various times as the small town’s mayor. But somehow, he also found the time to help organize a group of Latino parents, Los Huerfanos. The group raised money to help Latino students with school and extracurricular activities.
Maes is quick to also highlight the role his mother played. “Mom was the one who taught us the humanity side of life and service to others. She always had time for some- body else.” He credits his parents’ selfless involvement for his own commitment to public service.
Raising eleven children took more than a normal amount of energy for Maes’ parents. His father, who learned Morse Code in the Army, worked long hours for the Colorado Southern Railroad as a freight agent. In those days, Morse Code was the only way to communicate between train and station. Knowing the language of ‘dots-and-dashes’, he said, provided the family a livable wage “with good benefits.” The telegraphing skill, Maes jokes, made his father “one of the first texters.”
His mother was a homemaker who managed the nearly dozen kids, six boys and five girls. She did it all with a quiet efficiency, with no days off, including Sundays when it was time for church.
To that end, the family and its Walsenburg parish split the costs to send a young Maes away to an Oklahoma City seminary school. The idea being it just might light the fuse on a vocation in the priesthood. He enjoyed his year at the Oklahoma school, but the idea of becoming a priest never really took off. If his parents were disappointed with their oldest child’s decision to go in another direction, they never showed it, he said.
Despite his father dropping out of high school to join the Army, neither he nor his siblings did the same. In the Maes family, he said, “It was never ‘if’ you go to college, ‘it was ‘when’ you go to college.” Seven of the Maes children earned college degrees with three graduating from law school.
Maes used his law degree well, serving as a public defender and private attorney before taking a seat on the bench and rising to Chief Judge of Colorado’s 10th Judicial District. In his four decades in law, the now retired jurist has seen far too many young people in his courtroom. Their crimes, he admitted, often gave him little choice in sentencing. For others, it wasn’t nearly as simple.
“The easiest thing for a judge is to send someone to prison. The hardest is to change a person’s life,” Maes reflected. “What,” he asks, “are we going to do to make this person a successful member of the community?” One story Maes like to tell involves a young man who fell short of meeting the obligations of his probation.
“This young man was standing with his probationer and I’m reading him the riot act because he hadn’t done a couple of things,” said Maes. When he paused, the probation officer asked to speak. He told the court that while it was true the young man had fallen short in meeting some of his obligations, he had also spent his probation doing a lot of the right things, things that reflected both contrition and responsibility.
Suddenly, a light went on, said Maes. He realized that the young man should not be judged totally in black and white. That is not the way life always works, he said. There was also a gray area that deserved consideration. “I was not thinking about what he was doing right.”
Another case involved a violent crime committed by a young White man against a Latino just for being Latino, a precursor to what is today a hate crime. Maes did not order the man to jail, instead he ordered him to take a Chicano studies course. “My ruling had to have a purpose.” It turned out to be a Solomonesque ruling that worked out for the defendant, the victim and the community.
Maes has two daughters, and he said he has tried to raise them using the same lessons learned from his own parents as well as those gleaned from years on the bench: be fair, be disciplined and never punish out of malice and anger.
His older daughter graduated from CU-Boulder and works in education. His younger daughter is also a CU graduate and works for the state in labor and employment.
“My kids never suffered for anything,” he said. “But they had to earn it by being good citizens and students.” He also reinforced in them a lesson learned from his own father. “I taught them to be involved.”
In retirement, Maes remains committed to community. He’s already served one term on the school board, but he’s begun a quiet campaign to run again in November. “I should be sitting down by Huerfano Creek fishing,” he jokes. But like his own parents, sitting on the sidelines is just not an option.
