Take THAT, Middle School!

This in the late-breaking-news category:

Gove Middle School attendees the world over will be pleased to know that our former prison, uh, or rather, school has been demolished.

Gove Middle School, from ashes to ashes

Built in 1975, across the street from the previous Gove Junior High (a beautiful Italian Renaissance Revival building that was closed, partially demolished, and then finally put to rest in a large conflagration as the new Gove was going up), the new building was meant to be a modern paragon of junior high educational architecture. 

 

Gove Junior High School, the elder. 

Photo: Denver Public Library Western History & Genealogy Division

Ah, 1970s architecture. Unlike the previous Gove, a castle it was not. Fortress was more like it. In fact, that school would have made a wonderful hideout in case of zombie apocalypse. And I should know: I attended the school, and I think about these kinds of things.

Can it even compare? The "new" Gove. 

Photo: Denver Public Library Western History & Genealogy Division

What made the new Gove such a great zombie shelter was precisely what made it a miserable place to attend school: few windows and even fewer doors. The lack of egress to the outdoors created an environment that was entirely interior--airless, soulless, complete with linoleum flooring and neon lighting. I thought the tween years were my most awkward because of the braces, the bad hair, and the growth spurts...but maybe it was just poor lighting?

From the outside the building was not much better: a giant bland beige box sans decorative features, set up on a hill, surrounded by a chain link fence. Throw in some blacktop and trash swirling in a lonely circle around the edges of the building, and you have the picture. How uninviting. Ayn Rand's Howard Roark could not have been prouder of such a building had he conceived it himself.

Gove's main entrance was sequestered at the back of the building, sheltered in a cove that guaranteed the outside world would have no idea the building was inhabited. Gove somehow managed to violate Jane Jacobs's ironclad philosophy of successful urban spaces: that active blocks with lots of bodies moving about (check) encourage community engagement and safety (um, no). Instead, drivers along Colorado Boulevard would not know a soul was in attendance at that school, unless there happened to be a fire drill right as they happened by.

Enhancing my ire for the school years between the ages of 12 and 14, was that I learned little of great import during that time. Recent discussions questioning the usefulness of college, such as this recent NY Times article (Saying No to College), miss the point. I learned much of use in college: much that I might not have gleaned elsewhere, and certainly not in such large overwhelming concentrations. High school as well was a period of personal renaissance.

The period where I learned next-to-nothing was middle school. I learned to balance a checkbook in a math class-- a skill I rarely find recourse to as an adult-- and I learned I have a great love for languages. French and Spanish set me on my way to more of both, as well as forays into Russian, Norwegian, you name it. Wonderful as this knowledge was, I was more likely to have stumbled upon languages of my own accord, than I would have been to pick up an algebra or chemistry book. Interest in the STEM disciplines was lost to me at this time, not to be regained until much, much later in life.

Lest you think I curse our former teachers, I would not be quick to lay harsh blame at their feet. It wasn't entirely the fault of the teachers; no, those ennobled souls tried to drill sense and facts into our hard little heads. Unfortunately, the prison-like aura of the school held true even in class: many of our teachers spent far, far too much time wrangling miscreants, leaving them with less time to educate. Students who were eager to please, who yearned for more than packaged information passed around on a one-size-fits-all tray, were left to fend for themselves outside of class. Thank goodness I was a reader.

So now after having razed the reputation of my demolished school building, I can admit I was curious to see how the new owner of the lot, National Jewish Hospital, planned on revitalizing such a cursed, unfortunate space. After a year of watching demolition and much dirt-shifting and apparent complicated construction, what do we find? A parking lot. And a park, of sorts. Kind of. Okay, barely.

 

Image via NJH.

While I am inherently grateful to National Jewish Hospital for ridding the world of this scourge of architecture/all my deep-seated childhood nightmares, I am also quick to push aside this gratitude. When news of the sale had first circulated, I had images of a shiny new hospital building for pulmonary sufferers--a group very close to my heart, no pun intended--rising from the school ashes. I also dreamt they might borrow from the sweet dreams playbook of all modern city planners: a multi-purpose business/hospital/hotel that would revitalize a dead zone section of Colorado Boulevard. Initial local newspaper coverage seduced us with this possibility. Alas, this is not to be. The hallowed grounds of former Gove Middle School are destined to become...a parking lot.

How mundane.

On second thought, how fitting.

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For another view on Gove, see TQE's amusing blog post. By the way, I totally stole my image of the rubble from his site. Stealing: another "helpful" skill that was thick on the ground in middle school!

Friday Fixtures, Salida Edition

Driving around Denver, one frequently sees old signs for businesses both extant and long-gone. You know the signs of which I speak: often rusted and sometimes swinging crooked from their shingles, and if they have affiliated light bulbs, a number of those are burnt out.

When I was a mere youth, obsessed with the shiny and new as most youths tend to be, these signs seemed confirmation to my teenage self that our hometown was a backwater stuck in the 1960s. I yearned for something new, for a bulldozer to come wipe out those buildings and their associated signs, and give us some Real Progress. Like a new mall, or something.

This is why city planners do not hire teenagers.

After a decade soaking up some quality industrial decay in the likes of Philadelphia, Brooklyn and parts of New Jersey, I have come to love these old signs and the memories of times past they have come to represent.

How wonderful to see signs featuring old telephone exchanges! Hey teenagers, know what those are? But to be fair, how many in my own generation have even heard of a telephone exchange? Learn more here and here (and points to anyone who calls the Hotel Pennsylvania after reading those).

And how quaint and lovely that older folks such as my grandparents do not lose their guideposts from younger days.

The Cady's Sign, 2007

Case in point: there was once a Cady's Hardware Store on F Street in Salida. The store opened in 1947 or early 1948 and was run by its owner, Jack Cady.

My grandparents moved to Salida in 1947 so that Grandpa Ruttum could run his own dairy processing plant and Grandma, despite her most concerted efforts at bringing up nice, civilized children, could raise three little hellions (I've heard the stories, so don't try to deny it, guys!).

Cady's was a store they visited on occasion, and I imagine my grandfather--who came downtown for the news and was friendly with the Cadys--probably stopped by to chat it up at the shop.

Amazingly, while the store closed sometime around 1992, I was still able to snap a photo of the sign in 2007 (although it has since been removed).

Until my grandfather passed away a few years ago, both grandparents would still refer to chance sightings of neighbors, or the opening of a new shop, by their proximity to the shuttered Cady's.

"I ran into Mr. X this afternoon, down in front of Cady's," grandpa would say, circa 1995, or

"Did you see the new bookstore in town? It's across the street from Cady's," he would tell grandma when he stopped home for lunch between rounds of golf and a trip to the local library.

Not having grown up in Salida, I naturally thought Cady's was still open, so was shocked to learn they had closed years before!

So here's a tribute to small town life, my wonderful grandparents, and the preservation of small markers of that which has gone before.

And a big thank you to the librarian at the Salida Public Library, Jeffrey Donlan, for double-checking Cady's dates of operation for me!

Famous Coloradoans: Harold Lloyd

New Yorkers are accustomed to encountering famous actors and authors whilst out and about doing daily errands, and generally the stars are doing the same. One notices someone famous, perhaps in a blur as they pass by, and thinks “Heeyyy...wasn’t that...” then shrugs and continues on one’s way.

New Yorkers are seldom star-struck. We figure the famous are people, just like us, who buy groceries and go to restaurants. Like every other being in the over-crowded city, more than anything else the stars are just in our way.

Clueless as to pop-culture as I am, even I had a few star-sightings over my years in the city. I once saw Kate Hudson walking kids down the street, singing “I Think I Love You” in a  loud, off-key voice. I had an embarrassing interaction with Edmund Morris--embarrassing for me, not for him--that you’ll have to email me to hear more about. A friend nearly ran over Jon Stewart’s children with her bike (in her defense, they were in the bike path!). Another friend occasionally runs into Bono in the bagel shop.

So what does star-sighting have to do with Colorado, you might ask? Unless you are a denizen of Aspen, these sorts of sightings are few and far between out here. One might almost say non-existent.

Well, lest our lovely state get a complex, I’d like to occasionally highlight famous folks who were from, or spent some of their life in, the Centennial State.

One star who certainly would have been recognized in his day, though perhaps not always in ours, is the silent film actor Harold Lloyd.

Harold Lloyd, 1893-1971

Image courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery

You might recall a silent black and white film featuring a man hanging precariously from the hands of a clock, on the side of a building many stories above street level. The film was Safety Last!, and the actor was a resident of Colorado for over a decade.

You can relive that nervous scene here.

Harold Lloyd was born in Nebraska on April 20, 1893, the second son to James D. and Elizabeth Lloyd (his older brother Gaylord would come to work behind the scenes with him in silent film, as well).

His father James would have many jobs in divers professions over the years, but was never terribly successful with any of them. After James uprooted the family a number of times in pursuit of job leads, wife Elizabeth eventually divorced him. Most accounts of Harold’s life indicate that he chose to stay with his father, which is largely true, however the U.S. Census tells a slightly different story.

Beginning in 1900, we see the complete family living in Denver at 64 South Lincoln Avenue. James is listed as a clerk, Elizabeth as a milliner, and both boys are “at-school.” Interestingly to this researcher, the family was listed as living in "Arapahoe County." You may be surprised to learn that Denver was part of Arapahoe County until 1902!

By 1910, however, sixteen year old Harold appears with his mother at his grandmother, Sarah Fraser’s, house in Durango, Colorado. His mother reported she was working in a department store, and interestingly, both his grandmother and uncle are listed as working for the Forest Service!

According to my alma mater, East High School, Lloyd appears to have moved back to Denver after the census (or it is possible he was merely visiting mom at the time it was taken--stranger things have happened). Nevertheless, he was an East High Angel in 1911.

Harold eventually moved out to California with his father, first to San Diego and eventually settling in Los Angeles and beginning a film career. By 1920, we find him living with his father, brother Gaylord and his sister-in-law in Los Angeles. Both brothers are described as a “moving picture actor at the Pathé Company,” and his father "Darsie J." is listed as a secretary for his son.

Over the course of his career, Lloyd acted in approximately 200 films, the bulk of them between 1913 and 1921.

How many Hollywood stars today are so prolific?

Admittedly, a number of these films were shorts, however they came out at the rate of a film every week or so. Lloyd was responsible for the ideas and character creation, acting as the lead role, and even doing his own stunts. That was Lloyd himself hanging from that clock, and he suffered a dislocated shoulder during the filming of it.

Ironically, it was during a 1919 still photo shoot that his career took a hit: holding what he thought was a fake bomb but was actually live, Lloyd lost two fingers, suffered severe burns and nearly lost his sight in one eye when the bomb went off.

After a miraculous recovery, he continued to act while wearing a glove with prosthetic fingers. So in the 1923 Safety Last! shoot Lloyd is hanging from that clock with the use of only 8 fingers! Perhaps this was why his climbing technique looked a little awkward, although I suspect in reality the athletic Lloyd was hamming it up to stir up the nerves of the audience!

Later Lloyd films stretched into two and three film reels, and this, combined with his hiatus due to injury, explains the slower pace of production in the 1920s.

But the slower pace did not mean less entertaining films! In fact, while Lloyd began by creating a variety of characters, then shifted to his Lonesome Luke character (his answer to Chaplin’s Tramp), he finally hit his stride with the character for which he was best known: the awkward, everyday hero wearing a suit, straw boater hat and round glasses.

Lloyd as the "Glass Character." Courtesy of NYPL Digital Gallery

 
Always striving to impress the girl, prove himself and be a hero, the "Glass Character" (often billed as “The Boy”) suffered numerous indignities and comic pratfalls along the way. He was honest, eager, and innovative, and conveyed emotion amazingly well: when he was happy, the audience feels his unadulterated joy. We also cringe with his embarrassments, and root for him to make good in the end.

With such impressive acting, why are modern audiences less familiar with Lloyd? Well, while he grossed more from his films than did Charlie Chaplin, and had more success with his shift into talkies than many of his cohort, Lloyd's refusal to re-release his films during most of his lifetime did hurt his name recognition with later audiences. The more recent renewal of attention to his films can be attributed largely to his granddaughter, who strives today to spark interest in Lloyd's work.

Returning to the Colorado theme, one wonders if Lloyd’s western characters were inspired by his childhood in Nebraska and Colorado. My favorite of his western films--Billy Blazes, Esq.--begins with the statement

“Far out on the silent prairies--the mining town of Peaceful Vale--Nobody has been killed here for almost 20 minutes.”

It also features his rather deft rolling of a cigarette. Video here.

And no list of his western roles would be complete without An Eastern Westerner, in which a New Yorker playboy is sent Out West by his dear old dad to toughen up, pulls off some neat lasso work, and cheats at a game of cards in a saloon. Amusing to this blogger, the film features the line “We’ll run this tenderfoot across the state line.”

This Tenderfoot hopes for some gentler treatment!

Image courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery

For more information on Lloyd’s life, and a list of his films, see the official Harold Lloyd Website.

I gleaned much of my information on his life and work from the following titles:

• Harold Lloyd: Master Comedian--which also features a vast collection of photos of Lloyd in and out of character
• Harold Lloyd: The Man on the Clock 

The Dead Awake

In honor of the holiday just past, the Zombie Crawl on the 16th Street Mall, and the recent tv adaptation of Robert Kirkman's awesome series "The Walking Dead," I have a neat creepy-crawly to share with my reading public (Hi, both of you!).

Cheesman Park, less than half a mile from my humble abode, is a lovely sprawling park that was converted from Prospect Hill Cemetery in the late 1800s.  Trouble is, when they cleared out the gravestones, they "forgot" to take a number of the inhabitants.

A few of them made themselves known this week.

No, there are no Poltergeist reports in the neighborhood, however construction crews putting in sprinkler systems discovered a few of our Western Outlaw predecessors. Read it from the pros here: Four Preserved Skeletons Unearthed.

The crews digging in the park yesterday evening were happy to point the direction in which the skeletons were found, and had a good chuckle about my asking.

For the trivia-inclined, Cheesman was originally Prospect Hill Cemetery, founded in 1859. As the city grew and the mansion-owning muckety-mucks in the area began to object about having tombstones as neighbors, the cemetery was converted to a park (and *most* of the bodies removed). The new park was named "Congress Park" after, well, Congress, who had permitted the conversion of this Federally-owned section of land.

Denver residents will surely find this fascinating, as what we think of as Congress Park (2.0) is just about a mile away. If one thinks about the geography, however, Cheesman and Congress 2.0 are separated only by the Botanic Gardens--different sections of the same original park.

Congress 1.0, aka the cemetery, was renamed "Cheesman" by Mayor Speer in 1907. Speer named the park in honor of Denver Union Water Company baron Walter Cheesman, whose family donated money to build the pavilion (anyone else remember swimming in those fountains as a child?).

And here's part of lovely Cheesman Park today. Can't you just imagine hordes of zombies struggling across that lawn?

Do You Have a License for That?

This past weekend, an old friend gave me a wonderful “welcome home” present: a Colorado license plate from my birth year, 1976.

As anyone tuned into Colorado history will know, 1976 was a big anniversary for the Centennial State. While Denver and the mountainous regions had begun seeing significant settlement by white easterners with the influx of the gold rush in the 1850s, Colorado Territory did not officially become a state until August 1, 1876, 100 years and close to a month after the nation’s Declaration of Independence. So those of us lucky to have been born in Colorful Colorado in ’76 will always be exactly 200 years younger than the country, and 100 younger than our state.

Turning back to the license plates, for most of my lifetime the standard plate was green and white, with the iconic mountains as the backdrop to the license number. To my dismay, on a trip to Cheyenne I once discovered their pet name for slightly irritating tourists from the south (no, it’s not only Texans visiting Colorado who can be annoying; apparently Coloradoans in Wyoming are just as inconsiderate). As a result of the flood of green-and-white plates they see every summer, Wyomingites call us “Greenies,” with just a little bit of scorn in their tone.

In the last decade or so, Colorado has experimented with plate designs and colors, but I had never seen an older plate that was anything other than a Greenie until this Centennial plate, curiously colorful and with the silly 76 on it.

Being of a curious bent, I decided to visit the Western History and Genealogy Division at the Denver Public Library and see if they held any books on Colorado license plates. A quick catalog search and an elevator ride later, a kindly librarian told me that the book I was seeking is “an excellent one,” and guided me to its location.

Did you know that the creation of the license plate wasn’t immediately synonymous with the invention of the automobile? That makes sense when you think about it, but it had never occurred to this researcher that a unified licensing authority would be some time in coming. As a result, early plates were generally brass house numbers tacked onto the car itself, or perhaps onto a leather plaque on the back of the car.

The first license granted in Colorado was given by the Denver Fire and Police Squad in 1894; and the first official records of Denver licenses do not begin until 1906. At that time, drivers were issued a license number and were responsible for arranging about the sign themselves. That sure beats waiting in line at the DMV!

Also curiously, all cars, trucks and motorcycles owned by members of the same household were given the same license number.

As the popularity of the “horseless carriage” grew, so did the need for new license plates. In 1906, 375 numbers were granted, by 1909 the number of vehicles had reached 1,220, and the 5,000th license number was assigned the following year.

As the plate image below indicates, municipalities were generally responsible for granting their own numbers, which created a few problems. 

Pre-1913 municipal plate from Salida, one of the more prolific of license-granting cities

(B & W images of old plates thanks to Colorado License Plates: Facts, Figures and Folklore)

To begin, bigger cities like Colorado Springs would run out of numbers long before a smaller place like Canon City might, resulting in plates growing longer and longer along with their numbers.

There were also just too many styles of plates out on the roads for other drivers (and police!) to keep track.

And driving across a state with no standardized license system was a costly and irritating endeavor: beyond the difficulty of mountain driving before the great passes were blasted out, there was also the need to buy a visitor plate in each town or city where you happened to be driving.

To address these problems, in 1913 the state passed a bill ending municipal registration. There was now one state issuing agency and an official state plate, made of porcelain enamel (!), with the colors changing annually. Drivers were required to get a new plate (as opposed to just a new registration sticker) each year.

In 1917, the plates were black text on a pink background; in 1938, white on turquoise; and in 1949, yellow on black (buzz buzz). So much for green and white!

County codes and city of registration were included on each plate beginning in 1932, resulting in one amusing counterfeit 1934 plate that my reference source located: the county number on this 1934 plate was 66, which would be an impossibility, as Colorado only had 63 counties!

Whether it was a sample plate or for a movie set the book's author was uncertain, but I like to think it was a forgery created by a Prohibition bootlegger who was just a little bit late in getting the news.

Other license plate milestones were the following:

1958: First image, of a downhill skier

1962: White text, green mountains, aka "Greenies"

1963: Mountains on the bottom

In the 1960s, the mountains seem to have had a hard time staying put, as they alternated between the top and the bottom of the plate for a number of years.

1990-present: beginning of designer and special group plates:

To see more current CO plates, see here.

As we see above, in the 90’s the state broke away from only one or two official plates, and drivers out on our roads today see a rainbow of different colors and images. To add to the confusion, the influx of new residents from other parts of the country has meant an explosion of out-of-state plates. On my drive home from the library today, I saw BOTH Alaska and Hawaii, as well as Rhode Island and about 15 other state plates.

Like all historical movements tipping from chaos to control and back again, I sense a uniform plate lurking somewhere in our future!

To learn more about the history of license plates, and to see images of more old Colorado plates, see Colorado License Plates: Facts, Figures and Folklore.

Amber Waves of Grain

Having just driven approximately 1900 miles from Brooklyn across the continent, I feel I am especially qualified to sum up the Great Purpose of this Country: we are working our darndest to make sure we never run out of corn!

Driving I-80, starting in Ohio and continuing all the way to Colorado, we saw fields of corn, corn and more corn. This, combined with the fact that your author cannot read in a moving vehicle without unappealing side-effects, means there was a fair amount of time and inspiration to ponder crops.

One thing I wondered upon was how we can dedicate nearly half of the agricultural space we own to a plant with little nutritional value that mostly just serves to make us fat (see: corn syrup). Of course, as I learned in Kearney, Nebraska—where I was excited to eat at a Real Restaurant instead of having sandwiches or fast food, only to find no corn on the menu—I realized that a fair share of the harvest is feed corn, going to nourish the food product that was in ample existence on the menu: beef. As a failed vegetarian, I guess I can’t quibble on this one.

Free Range Cattle

Corn also played an interesting role in the Cold War: envious of our agricultural successes, Nikita Khrushchev famously was inspired to institute a planting program in the U.S.S.R., which began with his 1955 speech on corn’s success in the American Heartland. Meeting with advisors and sending a delegation to the U.S., he then pushed collective farmers to plant acres upon acres of the stuff.

Unfortunately for the Soviets, corn prefers a climate with warm, humid summers and requires a high level of mechanization to harvest, and thus most of the Russian crops were a flop. So perhaps we should thank American farmers for adding one more drop in the bucket that ended the Cold War.

Returning to my thoughts on my recent road trip, however, every few minutes or so the waving ticklish stalks would give way to a short, dense green crop I can only assume were soybeans.

Soybeans (also note the trees, this will be important in a minute)

On what do I base this assumption? Well, in my childhood, whenever we took family trips across the country my sisters and I would ask my father about what we were seeing in the fields. Undoubtedly exhausted by hours of driving with three squabbling kids in the car, he would blearily peek out the passenger window and announce, “soybeans.”

Now, my father grew up in a small town in the mountains in Colorado, and his agricultural chops are certainly far more advanced than my own, so I’ve learned to take him at his word. Any crops that are NOT corn, are soybeans.

All joking aside, my other observation of the middle of the country is that it appears to be miles and miles of flat or rolling hills of emptiness. Fields with crops, fields with scrub, fields with prairie grass (although, along I-80 these last two are a dying breed). I’ll illustrate with some of the photos I managed to snap from the moving truck:

Prairie grass

Fields and sky

Now, as I stated above, to the untrained eye these fields appear to be empty, but a little history lesson will tell us otherwise. Prior to the 1930s, the states that would become the Dust Bowl (CO, KS, NM, OK and TX) were divided between crop growth by long-term farmers, cattle grazing, and seemingly wasted fields of nothing but prairie grass. At least, that’s how it appeared to the eyes of amateur farmers and land speculators who started muscling in during the wet years of the late 1920s.

The newcomers bought up land, tore out the native grasses and did a rather shoddy job of putting in crops. Beginning in 1930, when a drought hit in conjunction with the beginning of the Great Depression, most of those crops failed and the farms were foreclosed by bankers and the government. Many farmers just walked away from what now actually were empty fields, newly ripe for soil erosion. And thus began the Dust Bowl. All that loose dirt was picked up by gusting winds, and blown all over the middle of the continent. The air was heavy with soil. In fact, in 1935, so much topsoil was blowing about in these dust storms that cities as far as Chicago, Boston and New York had clouds of dust partially blocking out the sun!

Dust storm. Baca County, CO, ca. 1936. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress

The solution to this dust debacle, of course, was largely achieved by one of my favorite heroes of history: the WPA.

The Works Progress Administration, established to help put the masses of unemployed to work, and its kid sister the Civilian Conservation Corps instituted agricultural education and planting programs. They taught farmers about soil-saving methods like contour farming and crop rotation, and assigned work forces to put shoulder to shovel planting belts of trees across the country. The tree belts were to serve as breaks against all the wind and to help hold down the soil, and one can still see remaining trees and their offspring today. I snapped a few photos on my journey (and reference the soybean photo above, as well):

Hay bales, with line of trees in distance

More corn (!), and tree break in the distance

I had always assumed the trees one saw around farming plots were original-growth outcroppings drawn by pockets of water, which is sometimes true, but until recently hadn’t realized many were second-growth plantings dating from the Depression Era. This curious historical fact becomes more transparent when one considers that the trees around fields usually consist of a straight row, one tree wide—a configuration that does not happen in nature. With this new knowledge in hand, it is easy to see the physical remnants of our grandparents’ generation.

As a city girl, I had also always assumed nothing happened in those small agricultural communities that began less than an hour from my own front door. Not knowing the history and the economics of these areas, it’s easy for the passer-through to still assume there’s not much more excitement in aggie parts than the cows getting into the corn. Armed with a little bit of history, however, the world becomes a new place.

For a great read on the Depression Era’s effects in the Dust Bowl states, see The Worst Hard Time; The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.