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City Park (entry for 1/22/2025) Many towns have a feature called ‘City Park,’ but for me there’s only one place that deserves the name. It’s City Park in Denver. There are many parks in Denver, and I have already written about one—Cheesman Park, of the nightmare material. (You can click HERE if you missed it.) But Cheesman Park is only 80 acres, while City Park is 330, so there’s no comparison in that regard. (Plus I have never had a nightmare situated in the larger space.) I was too young to remember my first visit to City Park, but as soon as my memory developed engough storage space, I began collecting memories of the place. Most of our visits were in the late spring and early summer, plus occasionally in the fall. So why am I writing about it now, in the middle of winter? Because I miss it more now than at any other time of year! What made the Park so special? Many things. The Denver Zoo, with its famous blind polar bear (sadly now passed on). The Pavillion and Fountain, with its ...
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  ‘ Field’ Trip (entry for 1/15/2025) This event happened in the early spring, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, so am going to go ahead and post this now, while it’s fresh in my head. My first year in Grand Junction was strange in some ways. The Adventist School there was a lot bigger than the one in Montrose had been (10 grades instead of 8, and two hundred students instead of 30), and, more importantly, at least to this story, there were a few boys who seemed to think they were in charge of everything, instead of the teachers. (My tiny eighth grade teacher in Montrose, Mr. Hoyt, about five foot one and around 90 pounds, would have tolerated that for less than five seconds, and they would have ended up kneeling and kissing his toes. He was just that kind of guy. He could praise you with a glance, and kill you with a look. The teachers in Grand Junction were no match for him.) One day in March of 1954, with the snow mostly gone but still some frost on clear mornings, t...
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Money (entry for 1/8/25) When I was a teenager, around 14 or so, there was a television advertising jingle I used to love, though some people hated it. (To get the full effect of the jingle, you need to be aware that there was then, and is now, a chain of grocery stores called Safeway.) A rather rotund middle-aged cartoon man is counting a veritable snowstorm of dollar bills and letting them fly through his fingers like confetti. “Money,’ he sings. “Money’s my hobby! My wife’s out saving money now at our Safeway store!” The ad is long gone, but it evidently worked, because the stores are still going strong. I think one reason I liked the ad so much is that I had learned to count money myself, at a very young age. When I was about four, my maternal grandma, Emma, and her oldest surviving daughter, Eda (subject of an earlier post which you can get to HERE ), in addition to being, respectively, the church organist and church pianist for the Denver Central SDA Church (now a batch of medica...
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On the Eighth Day of . . . (entry for 1/1/2025) I never believed in Santa. I was told from year one that he was imaginary, and I never doubted it was true. For one thing there was one of them on every street corner, and no two alike, so how could he possibly be real! I felt sorry for kids who did believe, because they were so obviously backward in their ways. Along with Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph with his Nose So Bright, and all the other famous non-religious seasonal characters, Santa was sort of a joke. Sure, I went and sat on his lap and had my picture taken. And then we went to the next Department Store and did it all over again, with a different Santa. And then another. Etc. It was fun, and the lights were pretty, and the music was nice to listen to, and that was all that mattered. We sang all the carols, both the religious and the non-religious ones, and mixed them up with each other sometimes. It was a nice time of year, and the cold was invigorating, and we played in the snow....
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Denver Christmases (entry for 12/25/2024) Wherever we were at Christmas Time in Colorado during my child and teenage years, we always ended up in Denver on or near Christmas Day. And especially Christmas night. (Not ‘Eve.’ Night. The 25 th  itself.) We would drive from wherever we were staying that day to the City Center, and park, however far the parking spot was from where we were going. And no matter the weather. Because there was something we had to see. (There’s a modern photo of it at the head of this post.) Denver is one of the few cities I know of that is not  in  a county. It  is  the county. The City and County of Denver is one single governmental body and it does double duty, as its name implies. (I believe the same situation applies in San Francisco, California, and those are the only two examples I have ever heard of.) The government building of the combined body is called the City and County Building (for some strange reason!) and it is located at ...
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Hurray for Ouray (entry for 12/18/2024) When we lived in Montrose, from 1949 to 1953, we spent a lot of time in the town of Ouray, 36 miles and about 45 minutes to the south. (A photo of the downtown area is at the head of this post.) We didn’t spend a lot of time in the town itself, because there were too many exciting things just  out  of town. The first one of these that we discovered was the naturally heated swimming pool, which the town claimed was the largest such in the world. (Not even close! There’s one in Glenwood Springs, 176 miles to the northeast, that is at least three times as large, and even that one is far smaller than one in the country of Slovenia. But if you’re hidden away in southwest Colorado, you can claim such things and who is going to check up on you?) Our Adventist Church youth group in Montrose went swimming there quite regularly, often on a Sunday when the crowds were small, or even on a Saturday night (they stayed open till 10). Two memorable thin...
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     All the Same . . . (entry for 12/11/2024)  In January, 1959, the prestigious magazine Atlantic Monthly published a story by famed actor and author Peter Ustinov called ‘The Man Who Took it Easy.’ It was the third of a series of short stories and novellas commissioned by the magazine’s editor in chief, Edward A. Weeks, and written out in longhand by the actor/playwright.  (A photo of Ustinov is at the head of this post.) The plot involves the roller coaster career of a Hungarian violinist and composer who hates the Russian composer Stravinsky, because the latter is more successful than he is, with no discernible reason for the difference, so far as the story’s ‘hero’ can tell. The last line of the tale, when the protagonist has hit bottom, is: “All the same, . . . curse Stravinsky.” I was an English major at PUC at the time, and our major professor, J. Paul Stauffer, made the Ustinov stories required reading for one of the classes I was in. So, rather than f...
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