Just because you’ve known someone for a couple of decades doesn’t mean you know everything.

Nancy Peterson has been a friend of ours for many years, but her departure from The Summit back home to Vero Beach, Florida, and into retirement, prompted some deeper background questions from Hey, Spike!.

For the past 24 years, Nancy has been a real estate broker, mostly with Don and Pat and son Jeff Angell’s RE/MAX office in Frisco.

As you read this, Nancy is driving her Subaru wagon in a southeasterly direction.

“My life is like a run-on sentence, it has been so full, and right now I am Thelma and Louise in one body,” the Jazzercize workout fan allows. “I made it to Canon City last night, and now getting ready to head out again shortly.”

Before going to Jones Real Estate School in Denver, the blonde, small-ish Nancy was a ski patroller at Breckenridge Ski Resort and Ski Cooper, a “liftee at Copper,” and EMT, worked in construction, been married a couple of times, raised two boys and is a grandmother.

Born in Chicago, Nancy’s family moved to Vero Beach in 1956, where her dad bought a beachfront property and developed the Crystal Sands Motel.

“We built a motel on the beach named the Crystal Sands, lived in it, managed it,” recalls Nancy. “It was paradise: 50×20 pool, beautiful landscaping, canal with boats, fruit trees, it was gorgeous.”

It’s that sand and water of Florida calling her back, she adds. “I am a water baby.”

Located on the Atlantic coast in central Florida, Vero Beach is known as the “Hibiscus City — Where the Tropics Begin.”

The land where the motel was located became very valuable and her parents sold in 1971, and about 15 years later it became the site of a large office building.

Nancy grew up and got married and came west with her then-husband Jim Colley, with whom she had two sons, but that marriage ended later.

Before her long stint in real estate sales, Nancy says, “I was an EMT and worked ambulance and ski patrol at Breck and Ski Cooper, when I lived in Leadville. At the same period of time, I broke into the trades, having worked with my father building the motel.”

Nancy started out as a laborer, then did concrete flatwork, and hung drywall.

The contractors noticed how strong she was, and they hired her as a carpenter. That led to union and non-union work, and she helped build many structures in the county in the early- to mid-‘80s.

“Because I was an EMT, I was hired to be one company’s medic and on the steel crew, building powerline towers between Ute Pass and the north end of Green Mountain Reservoir,” she explains. “They would scoop me up in a helicopter to tend to any accidents. I was pure sinew and calluses.”

Right after that job was completed, she went to Jones Real Estate School in Denver.

Nancy later married local school principal and noted distance runner Frank Mencin. They divorced after 17 years of marriage.

Over the years, Nancy has done considerable volunteer work.

What will she miss about The Summit?

“The wonderful people and abundant good friends,” she notes. “I will miss Nordic skiing so much and the amazing scenery — all year-round it is wonderful.”

Getting back to Vero Beach, will mean being with her only sibling, Susan Jones, three years junior, and her husband David and their son and his family.

But Nancy is not severing all ties with Colorado, because her eldest son, Jason Colley, lives in Broomfield with wife Irina and their children, Margaret, 16, and Jason, 18. Nancy points out that Jason is an Army veteran.

Her youngest son, Isaac, an Air Force veteran, is living in Bangkok, Thailand, while earning his MBA at American University.

Miles F. Porter IV, nicknamed “Spike,” a Coloradan since 1949, is an Army veteran, former hardrock miner, graduate of Adams State College, and a local since 1982. An award-winning investigative reporter, he and wife Mary E. Staby owned newspapers here for 20 years. Email your social info to milesfporteriv@aol.com