From the Memoirs: Settling in Denver
Excerpt from the yet to be published Memoirs of Bill Calkins
Looking back, it was inevitable that I would land in Denver and stay for over 30 years and counting. When my parents retired up the road in Ft. Collins, my Colorado roots were certified.
From my early childhood in the Nebraska Panhandle, Denver was the ultimate big city. After we got cable in the early 70s, we were able to watch all of the Denver stations on our 10 inch black and white TV. Mind you, this was before cable meant CNN and MTV. Only basically rural areas had cable so they could get the basic three networks, and PBS. My mother would turn on Walter Cronkite for national news, every day without fail. My favorite show in 1968 was Blinky the Clown who entertained me every morning on channel 2. I can still hear old Blinky singing, “Happy birf-a-day dear chil-a-dren, happy birf-day to you!”*
Footnote*: I also watched the local Denver version of Romper Room. I don’t remember anything about it except for Romper Stompers, one of the many Romper toys they sold. The were like foot sized buckets you’d stand on, holding straps to secure them to the bottom of your feet. And you’d walk around the house, well, stomping. We didn’t have iPads or other technology back then, except for the 10 inch black and white TV, so we were easily entertained.
From my early childhood in the Nebraska Panhandle, Denver was the ultimate big city.
Without cable, the TV situation in Scottsbluff was pretty limited. There were two local stations: KSTF (CBS affiliate) featuring Jerry Dishong reading the news in a wrinkled shirt, and KDUH (carried both ABC and NBC, which meant you got a little of both and not enough of either), had a tagline that proclaimed, “Serving Hay Springs, Scottsbluff, and Alliance.” Maybe Jerry was on KDUH. In any case my sister and I reveled in referring to that station as K-duh. But because we had cable, most of what we watched came from Denver, including Denver local news. I could sing the 9News theme song (“It’s all right here on Channel 9.”) in all it’s many versions, for years. I certainly knew more about what was going on in Colorado than I did my home state of Nebraska.
Because of TV from Denver and the family weekends we spent in the Mile High City, Denver naturally became the center of the universe as far as I was concerned. We regularly visited malls to buy school clothes (Cinderella City was our favorite), saw touring Broadway shows at the Auditorium Theater (now the Ellie Caulkins — I know, the name is spelled wrong), and ate at exotic restaurants like the Magic Pan in Larimer Square (which I only learned in adulthood was a chain). We also marveled at realistic dioramas and dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History Museum (now renamed, for no good reason, the Museum of Nature and Science), and just generally exposed ourselves to “culture” not available in the Panhandle. “Culture” in Denver included an Italian restaurant where the waiters and waitresses sang opera as they served.
Much as my parents valued taking us to Denver for new experiences, it was still “a big scary city.” In the 1970s, approaching from the north on I-25, it was at 104th Avenue, the Northglenn exit, where the freeway widened and traffic picked up. That was where my mother turned off the radio and demanded absolute quiet so that my father could concentrate in the rapid, unruly traffic. The car ride from Northglenn to the Holiday Inn on Colorado Boulevard, where we usually stayed, was always the most silent part of the trip.
I always thrilled, quietly, at the traffic and the urban vitality it represented. When the downtown skyline came into sight, It felt like home. I knew I belonged in Denver, the big city. My goal in life was to live in an apartment in Denver with my male companion. I am happy to inform my childhood self that I achieved that dream, and then some.
The airport was in Denver. Anywhere we flew, we had to go to Denver first. Scottsbluff had a two-gate airport (only one was ever used) offering two daily round-trip flights to Denver. Those flights were very expensive so most of the time we drove three or four hours to catch a plane at Stapleton Airport. This is still the situation for western Nebraskans today, except instead of Stapleton, which became a successful residential neighborhood,* they have to drive an extra 30 miles to Denver International Airport.
*Footnote: When Black Lives Matter woke the community in 2020, we remembered that Mayor Benjamin Stapleton, who served five terms from the 1920s to the 1940s and and for whom the airport was named, was a prominent member of the the ku klux klan which thrived in Denver 100 years ago. He was a big fat racist. So the Stapleton neighborhood changed its name to the more benign, Central Park.
Denver set the standard for big cities for the rest of my life. Whether visiting San Francisco, Boston, London, or Omaha*, I measured everything against Denver. Boston was bigger but older than Denver. London smelled worse than Denver.** New York City, in a league of its own, just plain sucked. In any given city, Denver’s skyscrapers might have been taller or smaller or had more or fewer lanes on the major freeways.*** In almost all cases, Denver had the worst drivers, except for Boston and maybe London.
Footnote*: Omaha was another big city that loomed over my youth, along with Lincoln.
Footnote **: In the 1970s, Denver’s infamous brown cloud belied truly the worst air pollution in the US — even worse than Los Angeles.
Footnote ***: In college, my friend John and I measured the size, and therefore the importance, of a city by how many lanes were on the freeway. Denver and Minneapolis, his favorite city, were always neck in neck.
While in 2022 I live only four miles away, I rarely go downtown* except for the occasional show at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts or to to see prominent people, like Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, and Stacy Abrams hawk their new books to a packed house at the Paramount Theatre.
Footnote *: Ok, St. Andrew’s Episcopal, where we go to church, is downtown, but we usually just go to the church, and then go home.
Although the Mile High City has changed a lot in half a century, and continues to do so, I walk down the center of the 16th Street mall in this new century, and spot the old skyscrapers , like what used to be Western National Bank, the W now missing from the very top, reliving the childhood thrill of being in the center of the universe. Today, those old buildings that remain, are dwarfed and hidden by even taller, more impressive buidings. But when I’m on the sidewalk looking up, I still see Western National Bank and remember.
