In 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote. To Francis Pearman Roth, “Freddie,” born a year earlier on the Elkhorn Ranch of Littleton, it likely never mattered. She would do what she was going to do, social constraints be damned.

As a teenager, Freddie had an interest in everything imaginable, cars included. Her father saw this and lent her enough money to buy a broken-down Ford Model T. To drive it required her to do an extensive overhaul of the engine. No surprise, she pulled it off! Not only that, Freddie was once featured in the Empire Magazine supplement of The Denver Post for repairing her carburetor by the roadside when the car died with a load of passengers onboard.

In high school, Freddie became the first girl to take shop class instead of home economics. At graduation in 1937, she was recognized as the best female athlete in her school. Freddie was an accomplished bowler.

Freddie met the love of her life, John Felix Roth, at a dance in 1938. They raised four children while Freddie was a carpenter, plumber, fuel truck driver, ditch digger, baseball coach, firewoman, farmer, electrician and home builder in the Deckers/South Platte area. In 1954, Freddie won the National Pancake Flipping Contest hosted at Disneyland (pictured above).

Freddie was a school bus driver for 32 years and was awarded “Denver Public Schools Bus Driver of the Year” in 1972.

Pitching horseshoes was another forte practiced well into Freddie’s 60s. Her championship performance landed her a place in the Horseshoe Pitching Hall of Fame. Back at home, she coached 11- and 12-year-old Little League teams and brought them to championships.

Frankly, Freddie was always on fire. In fact, when the Castlewood Fire Protection District was first organized, she was among 11 females who served as firewomen fighting fires while their husbands worked their day jobs. The state of Colorado dedicated an award for Freddie called “The Frances M. Roth Memorial Award,” presented annually to a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician. Freddie was the first recipient of this award in 2003.

Freddie’s senior years found her peacefully fishing on the South Platte River, often in the Nighthawk area. As anglers go, she was the absolute finest, known up and down river. So much so that when renowned sportscaster Curt Gowdy fished the area, aware of her reputation, he took every tip she offered and they collaborated on a television documentary on fly fishing. Prominent in her scrapbook is a card on which Gowdy autographed his sentiments: “To my kind of girl.”

In 1972, Freddie also helped lead the fight against the Denver Water Board’s (DWB) Two Forks Dam project. A massive water storage and dam project, it was ultimately shot down by the EPA. It was an official of the DWB who really riled Freddie, calling one of the cabins she built on the South Platte “a fishing shack.”

Freddie passed away in 2011 leaving four children, nine grandchildren (who called her Granny Frannie) and her legacy as a renaissance woman. She even wrote in her own obituary, “One thing that people really like about me is that I have an answer for everything.”

 

By Joe Gschwendtner; courtesy photos