2 - Houses - Colorado

The Early 1960s

This was the first of two times my parents moved so that I had to change schools in the middle of a grade -- never a fun experience. We only lived in Denver for about six months, the second half of the 2nd grade for me, so I don’t remember much about Denver, or my school, or any of the other students. That was it for Denver.

Boulder

Moving to Boulder turned out to be an act of consummate Greatest Generation/Baby Boomer cliché (my father had been a platoon sergeant with the U.S. Army fighting mostly in the Philippines during WW2). Not only were we, a nuclear family of three plus dog, building a spanking new split-level house...

Me in front of our house in (I'm guessing) the winter.

...in a spanking new subdivision on the outskirts of Boulder, but my mother would get to be a stay at home mom (until she got fed up and got a job as a secretary at the University of Colorado).

A few words on nomenclature for those not native to the U.S.: Most states have two public universities or university systems -- the “U” or University and “State” or State University. California has entire systems of each hence UCLA and "Cal" (or UC Berkeley) are part of the University of California system while Cal State Monterey Bay and San Francisco State University are part of the State system. The “State” universities usually started off as agricultural or teaching colleges and have less status than the “University.” Arizona State University (ASU) still had an agriculture college when I attended there and used steer manure to fertilize the lawns so that the entire campus reeked at least once a year. The University of Colorado should be UC, but is instead always referred to as CU -- I have no idea why (I just looked online and no one else knows either).

For me, the best thing about moving to Boulder was that I essentially lived on a construction site for a year or more as the subdivision filled in. Our house was one of the first on the “court” to be finished. (The street looped around and rejoined the bigger street it ran off of behind us. The virtue of a court was that only people actually living on the one block really had any reason to drive there which reduced traffic.) When we moved in, the yard was still full of construction rubble.  

The best way to put in a lawn is to buy sod, unroll it, tamp it down, and water it. The cheaper way, our way, was to cover the debris with a layer of trucked in topsoil and then seed, roll, and water it. This produced patchy grass and a flourishing variety of weeds that it was my job to pull. After a year or two of re-seeding and fertilizing, we had a lawn that needed constant watering, weeding, and mowing and still looked mediocre at best.

In the back yard a cement walkway led from the kitchen door to our little concrete incinerator where we burned anything that would burn plus a few additional items.

I even got to watch the paving of our streets and sidewalks. Asphalt remains one of my favorite smells along with creosote.

After they filled in our court, they built across the street and then added an additional court or two beyond us. Instead of having just a patch of dirt under the bushes, like in Louisville, I now had entire lots to turn into toy scale towns and open pit mines and highway systems. Unfortunately, as soon as anything got built my toy tanks would attack and I would have to start over again -- I was Brahma and Shiva all rolled into one.

All this construction meant an endless supply of dirt and scrap building materials for us kids to play with. We assembled little shacks with furniture to hide away in -- sort of like a hobo incampment. We crawled through the drainage culverts under the toll-road across the street and explored the farm area beyond, which was full of snakes and baby birds and crayfish that needed to come home with us. As in Louisville, my parents usually had no idea where I was.

There were several things I loved about this house. There is something very appealing about the split-level arrangement. The living and dining rooms along with the kitchen were at the middle level with half a flight of steps up to the bedrooms and full bath, and another half flight of steps down to the extra room and half bath and garage. The difference, psychologically, between a full flight of steps and a half flight is immense. Our dachshund could sit at the top of the stairs, about eye level to someone standing in the living room, look at us with disgust if it was past his bedtime, and bark to call us to bed. My parents didn’t run the furnace at night so it got quite cold during the winter. Herrmann, having very short fur, needed to sleep between my parents under the covers to stay warm during the winter and we frequently had to pick him up and carry him back to the house when his little legs froze in the snow while doing his business in the back yard. (There was also a crawl space under the living room with access from the extra room below. Crawl spaces are insidious spaces, handy for storing things you rarely need, but guaranteed to damage either your back or your head. As the shortest person in the household I was often sent into the crawlspace to retrieve items.)

If you’ve seen A Blast From The Past then you know what our kitchen looked like. We had the same electric range and oven -- actually two ovens on top and four burners that pulled out from below the ovens.

It’s actually a nice design as the oven is up where you can see in easily, and the burners can be hidden away when not in use.

I also had two favorite places in and around the house. During the day my favorite place to hang out was on a grassy slope on the north side where no one could see me -- this was after the neighborhood had filled in. I would lay out there for hours “thinking” in my grey hoody with both hands in my pouch pocket. The other place was under the bathroom sink on cold mornings. The sink counter was in a corner with a pole supporting the left front corner. The furnace blew directly into this space which my mother had closed off with a curtain. There was just enough room for me to curl up on a fluffy bath rug with the dog. It was blissfully warm.

Design and decor 2

My old antiqued furniture didn’t really cut it in my new bedroom, so I got all new furniture to go with the all new house. There was the trundle bed and a fairly normal desk, both with lightly stained and varnished wood, but my favorite pieces were the four drawer chest of drawers and long, low bookcase that we bought unfinished and stained and varnished ourselves. The bookcase had two lower sections that proved to be a perfect fit for my encyclopedias. I remember the catalog we picked these pieces from and all the other lovely, clean lined pieces that I hoped I would be able to add later -- but we never did.

Much later in Arizona I added a very mid-century modern bookcase that consisted of extruded aluminum poles extended against carpeted floor and pop corned ceiling and connected by varnished mahogany shelves. One shelf was angled to display magazines and such. When we moved out of that house we left it behind partially because it required 8 foot ceilings, but mostly because it just belonged in that house. Around the same time I replaced the curtains with a bespoke blind and added a large pillow for sitting on the floor (with candles made by either me or my sort-of-girlfriend).

Today the long low bookcase sits under my front windows and continues to hold my old encyclopedias. I still have the big pillow from my high school sitting-on-the-floor-with-candles days, and I have a combination desk/bookcase made of oak that belonged to my great grandfather. The shelves are on the left behind a glass door while the fold down desk, with lots of cubbies behind, is on the right above three shallow drawers. My great grandfather’s walking stick (featuring Chinese characters) has found a home hanging on the side in this apartment on the edge of San Francisco's Chinatown.

Almost flying

After the neighborhood filled in and was fully populated and landscaped, we boys would roam in packs playing war (my weapon of choice was a pretty realistic looking Browning Automatic Rifle or BAR). Another favorite activity was jumping off roofs. 

We started at points where the house wall was partially earth sheltered, as we would say today, and worked up to the full height of a house. There was no special equipment involved except for a lush lawn (not ours) mown fairly long. We would just jump, land, and roll. And, to spoil my own story, no one ever got hurt.

I think this may have been right around the time we were retrofitting seat-belts to our cars but we still NEVER even thought to wear helmets when we rode our bikes, skied, or rode horses. Perhaps we were indestructible.

School

My school, Martin Park Elementary, was much newer than my Louisville school and it was expanded while I was going there (which meant that we got to apply the first generation of spit wads to the ceilings).

It  was only nine-ish blocks away so I rode my bike unless it was too windy or too icy and then I walked. Walking could take longer than you might expect because, in winter, the ice or slush by the curb was just too tempting to leave alone. In the morning there would be delicate ice over the puddles that HAD to be shattered. In the afternoon the melting snow would be trapped behind ice dams that had to be either built up or smashed. One day a bunch of us got together and built a dam that flooded much of our street until the dads started arriving home and had to drive through the dam.

Third grade was life changing for me because this is when I finally got interested in reading. My teacher could have retired right then and rested on her laurels as I’ve scarcely stopped reading ever since.

While we stayed in the same classroom all day, we had two teachers. We were required to study Spanish so at some point in the day the Spanish teacher would roll her little cart into our room and attempt to instruct us in another language while our regular teacher got a break. It is hard enough for a third through sixth grade teacher to control a classroom when he or she is there all day and knows us and can make our lives miserable if he chooses. The transient Spanish teacher had no chance in hell. The first one had a nervous break down. The second one was as tough as a Conquistador and survived, though without much success in teaching us Spanish. Most of the Spanish I know comes from place names and taqueria menus.

I was here in Boulder when the yo-yo craze swept the nation. The hula hoop fad swept America while I was in Louisville and the trampoline fad followed but the yo-yo fad was the one that affected me the most. I still have two yo-yos I acquired at this time and back then I had even more.

The Duncan company sent yo-yo demonstration teams all over the country and we had to have the latest models. I don’t recall how long the craze lasted but I think it was probably the most successfully engineered cultural phenomena ever. (A quick online searche reveals that the Duncan company started promoting yo-yos back in the 1930s and the surge that I experienced in the early 1960s lead to the company’s bankruptcy as the promotional costs exceeded the increased sales.)

I was also in class at Martin Park when we heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. I seem to recall we didn’t have a TV but listened to the radio until the report that he was dead, then we were sent home. I distinctly recall thinking of horrible things that should be done to whoever was responsible. I don’t know that I’d ever pondered torture before.

I suppose schools usually teach state history during those 3rd-6th grade years because I certainly didn’t learn much about Kentucky, California, or Arizona history in my other schools. I still have a special fondness for the state of Colorado. And I don’t know if it is just my eye or that I was in school there during this crucial period, but I still think the Colorado flag is prettier than any other.

Curiously, they seem to have changed the name of the school to Creekside since the death of JonBenet Ramsey (the murdered, child beauty pageant queen) who also went there many years later.

CU

My mother worked as a secretary in the Romance Languages Department at CU. This meant we were often entertaining young instructors visiting the U.S. for the first time. We would take them on car trips to places like Rocky Mountain National Park and Estes Park, both wonderful places to visit.

You would think that someone teaching a Romance language to Americans would be well versed on the different word order in these languages but at least one excitable Italian instructor was forever losing her “key cars.”

After Colorado we moved to California where my mother worked at UCLA. While I might bitch that I was teased with CU and UCLA but ended up going to ASU because that’s where my mother was working when I graduated high school, the truth is that I spent much of my youth on college campuses using the libraries, sitting in on lectures, hanging out with grad students and professors. At UCLA I even got a personal tour of the teaching reactor. It really isn’t surprising that even as an undergraduate I ended up associating with professors and deans as much as with fellow students. But that’s not what I remember most about CU. The things that made the biggest impression were the black, tufted eared squirrels...

...that cavorted around my mother’s building in a particularly charming part of the campus.

The other thing I loved was this funky irrigation system they had to water the lawns. Water ran in channels by the walkways where it could be diverted by little metal plate dams into the adjoining lawn area. It was like the kind of thing I would do with ice in our streets but with cement and on a huge scale.

Fast Food

You might be surprised to hear that we never ate at chain fast food places at this time. Back in Louisville we frequented White Castle, but I don’t recall any of the national chains in Boulder. There was a decent local burger place not far from us where we went frequently, and for those special burger occasions we would go to a place called Harvey’s on Colfax in Denver. They put this amazing sauce on their burgers.

Skiing

About a block past the local burger place was Red Owl, the local super market. Besides the usual items, they sold encyclopedias a volume at a time. I still have these volumes and they are a little time capsule of outdated information -- a charming view into the past. Red Owl also had a lottery or raffle for a trip to a new ski resort opening near Winter Park which I won. I’m not sure how good a deal this was since we had to buy ski clothes, rent equipment, and pay for lodging, but we did get to ski free the first time. All we had to do was learn how to ski.

I did a little research a couple years ago and that new resort, Idyllwild, closed long ago. Last I heard they were trying to develop condos on the property which had been vacant for decades. But back then it was a wonderland. There was only one chair lift and not that many runs but it was cheap and not overly crowded. To be on the top of the hill in the early morning with hardly anyone around and the light just hitting the peaks on the far side of the valley was magical.

And the best part was staying at Beavers Lodge, which actually still exists.

Me in front of Beavers Lodge.

It was this homey, all wood structure with roaring fires and mulled cider. The kind of place kids could run around in stocking feet.

Outside was a meadow buried in snow. We passed through one summer and were surprised to see there was a sizable lake out back we had never imagined.

In our family the ski of choice (we rented) was still made of wood.

Shooting

When I turned 12 I got my first gun -- a bolt action, single shot, 22 caliber rifle. Getting the gun meant agreeing to take the NRA Hunter Safety class which I did. 

Over a series of classes, including a final class where we actually got to shoot a variety of weapons, we learned the basics of using a firearm safely without accidentally shooting either yourself or someone else. To this day, whenever I read about an accidental shooting I can usually identify what they (or the gun owner) did wrong and think to myself that it wouldn’t have happened if only they had been better educated (ignoring that I nearly shot myself in the foot once when under the influence of being 15).

I continued to use this rifle for target practice and in fact still own it since it is almost impossible to get rid of as the only person who would want it would be a kid getting his first gun who also had fairly strict parents. Every few years I get it out of the closet and give it a good cleaning and oiling. It’s still in beautiful shape.

I’ve only shot at something alive once and that was near Prescott in Arizona when I was in high school. We had a shotgun and were shooting at birds, random birds. When it was my turn I took a shot and then was so appalled by the thought that I might actually have hit this bird that I wouldn’t shoot anymore. I believe I was a vegetarian within a year of this event.

The summer of 1964 we packed up the car again and headed for California -- I was so upset about leaving Colorado that I refused to speak to my parents for much of the trip. (See also: Boy Scouts, On the Road - Family, Pets. Next: 3 - Houses - SoCal).