1968 was a year of turmoil in America. The Tet offensive in Vietnam turned the tide of popular opinion against the war there. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy made us wonder what kind of country we were. On a personal level however, 1968 was a very good year for me.
It was the first full year of my marriage, which was the best thing that had happened to me up till then. I was still a college student, five years after I should have graduated had I been normal, but I finally felt like I was in control of that. The first part of the year my wife and I lived in a basement apartment on “The Hill” in Boulder. Our landlady’s son Charlie had been a patient at the State Hospital in Pueblo for several years. I heard him say once that he’d had something like 40 electroshock treatments and 20 insulin comas. He had a kind of schizophrenia in which he sometimes heard things. He described it as like having twenty different radio stations playing at the same time and being unable to tune in on any one. He sometimes smelled strong odors in inappropriate places, like new-cut hay in downtown Boulder. He was once sitting on the sofa in our apartment next to a guy who was spouting some long-winded theory. “Don,” Charlie said, “change places with me. I’ve quit hearing things in the ear next to you.” Charlie’s mother was crazier than he was. I should have found a better place for my wife the first time Mrs. Wilson came down while we were out and washed our dishes.
Though I’d used up my eligibility, I worked part time for the CU Athletic Department. One of my jobs was preparing the football field for games and taking flags down afterwards. I could have seen every game free, but seldom did. I also did the football players’ laundry after they moved into the then new halftime building. They got to throw their sweaty practice clothes on the floor and their towels. Other student athletes thought it was demeaning to pick up after them. The boss paid me double time. The washing machine was a marvel. It was a tall, stacked machine and one could stuff as much into it as possible and it would still wash well. When it was spinning it shook the area even though it was securely bolted into the concrete floor. The clothes came out almost dry. Because of that job I had a key to the building. I sometime used the sauna, probably the first I ever saw. One evening a campus policeman came in and found me. My wife and I had been in the sauna, she still was, and when I told him about it, he tried not to smile and let me off with a warning.
The highlight of the year was when Judy and I got summer jobs in a “Resort Hotel” in Telluride. Judy was a waitress, I a bartender though I’d never mixed a drink before. 1968 was the summer that Telluride was trying to get positioned to take advantage of the coming new ski area. The new “owners” (they really had a lease with an option to buy) were trying to restore the long neglected hotel, but they lacked sufficient money or drive to do much, so the parts they were trying to refinish looked more torn up than rustic. There was some kind or rope tow skiing for locals, but the only reliable tourists had been a few University of New Mexico professors who came in the summer and rented a vacant house for a month or two. Before that summer, most of the landlords had agreed that no house would be rented for less than $100 a month. There weren’t many professors that summer.
The locals were good enough. There were only about 400 citizens, some of whom were miners at the Idarado. Several of those lived and ate in the hotel as we did. There was a woman who came into the bar most mornings for a drink or two and talked about her husband Albert who was out finding “another gold mine” for her. I thought she was delusional but harmless. Much later, I found that there really was an Albert, and he had fourteen working claims. Eino Pekkarine was a Finn bachelor who had a store directly across from the hotel with living quarters upstairs. He seldom came into the bar, but regularly moaned loudly enough to be heard above the noise in there. Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion has since made that moaning more understandable.
The back bar was a magnificent thing, brought in before William Jennings Bryan made his “Cross of Gold” speech in front of the hotel in 1892. The dining room once had booths that had thick curtains with a buzzer system to call for service so that a gentleman could dine in complete privacy with his lady. His lady was seldom his wife. The curtained booths had been sold a few years earlier to Knott’s Berry Farm in California.
The dining menu was impressive and included things that would have been almost impossible, like Dungeness Crab, except for the fact that they were really fancy TV dinners. There was a wine list that I’ve been told was equally impressive. The wine cellar was directly under the bar. One lifted a trap door in the floor and descended steep steps to a dirt floor which helped give the wine the proper dust covering. There were occasionally tourists who came in, and no doubt swayed by the upscale food and wine menus, ordered drinks I had never heard of like Sidecars, Singapore Slings, Grasshoppers. Luckily there was a Boston Bar Guide. That’s when I learned that I would probably never be a drinker. I always mixed a little extra of the exotic drinks and sampled them. I liked the ones made with ice cream, but not nearly as well as the ice cream alone.
Luckily for me most drink orders were simple, rum and coke, whiskey and seven, beer. We didn’t have beer on tap so that was simple; I just opened the bottle. Most of the miners who came in every evening after work were quiet drinkers. There was Double Drunk, however. I don’t think he was a miner. He was certainly a drinker. He’d come in seeming to be on the verge of passing out but after five or six drinks seemed almost sober, but meaner. I once tried to cause him to pass out by serving him doubles when he ordered singles. It didn’t work, and when closing time came, he cursed a great deal, but walked out without weaving. I later shuddered to think that I might have killed him.
For a week or two a surveyor was in town, laying out the town’s new sewage treatment plant. I talked to him for awhile and agreed to work as a rodman for him during the day on the strength of a summer surveying class I’d taken at the School of Mines eight years previously. Of course I had to arrange for the other bartender to work days so I could be working outside when it was light. When he figured out what I was doing, he raised hell until he got a few days of survey work in too.
There was one movie theater in town and they changed movies about twice a week. I think Judy and I saw nearly every movie shown that summer, but I can’t remember a single title.
Another very nice thing about Telluride was the natural setting. The town is set in a U-shaped valley with high mountain ridges on three sides. For some reason I never got oriented as to north and south. I can see from the map that road into town comes from the west and the main street runs mostly east to the head of the valley. The New Sheridan Hotel must be on the north side of the street and Eino’s store the south but somehow the far side of the street was in shadow until about 11 am in the summer while we basked in early light. The other side may be like Fairbanks, Alaska as far as sun goes in winter.
There is one way in and only one way out of Telluride unless you go in mine tunnels all the way through and come out on the Red Mountain side, or go on Jeep roads over Black Bear or Imogene Passes. At the head of the valley Bridal Veil Falls plunges hundreds of feet, farther than Niagara, to a pool below. Ingram Creek which feeds it is only a couple of feet wide and maybe a foot deep when it is running high. Both the pool and the stream are beautiful.
I had a 1956 Ford pickup which I had bought from Tom Perkins dad that we used only when we wanted to explore. The road to upper Ingram Creek was supposed to be a jeep road but the old pickup made it fairly easily. Once when friends came to visit we took them above the head of the falls. On a sharp, very rocky turn the truck stopped. I got out and noticed that the left wheel was pointing left and the right, right. We looked underneath and saw that a steering arm made out of a 1” iron or steel rod was bent like a bow. Ken and I pushed it as straight as we could. I backed to where I could turn around and drove gingerly back to town. I took the arm off later and took it to a local blacksmith who straightened it with a hammer an anvil. I put it back on and drove the truck for eight or nine more years.
Jeff Arnold
January 22, 2008 at 10:54 pm |
My memories of my personal life in 1968 are thin, and that is because our twins were born 6 months earlier. We lived in our first house, a small three-bedroom in west Denver. Jackie had quit her job as a nurse at Denver General in order to take care of the babies. I have a check register I kept from that time and the bank account was down close to zero before every payday. Jackie had a hard time with the twins and I have to admit that I didn’t mind at all leaving the house to go to work. Most of the year was a blur of crying babies and little sleep.
In June I was detailed to the Colorado Springs office to help out there for a couple of weeks. Jackie and I decided to stay with my parents in Pueblo. It gave Jackie a little break. I commuted to Colorado Springs each morning. It was then that Bobby Kennedy was shot. On the morning of June 6, I listened to the radio and learned that he had died. I was so distraught that I just got up and left and didn’t remember the drive at all. When I arrived at the office, it was business as usual. No one even acknowledged the news of his death. That was my introduction of the conservative politics of Colorado Springs. Since Bobby was a liberal they had nothing good to say about him, and since it was not good form to speak ill of the dead, the simply ignored the death.
Jeff, I really enjoyed your remembrances of that year, especially of Telluride before it was “discovered.” I would have loved to seen it like that but didn’t travel there until the 1980’s, and by then although the area was still beautiful, the town was on the way to being wrecked by growth. We have taken some gorgeous hikes there, some of the prettiest country in all of Colorado. You have titled this 1968 Part 1. Don’t wait too long to give us Part 2.
January 25, 2008 at 9:47 pm |
With extreme interest I read your recent blog. Telluride is a special place in my life. What an experience you must have had being there in the earlier years. My experiences started in 60/61, due to the Pueblo conection in Telluride. My employer First National Bank Pueblo sent me to Telluride to check on our interests there. FNB was a pioneer in Mobilehome Finance, we had several Mobile homes financed to both Idarado and individual miners. I never spent the night in Telluride, I went back to Montrose.
On one occasion I was visting a miner who was client of FNB, You had to see this to believe it. He was a retired California Highway Patrolman.
His retirement was due to injuries on the job. His location was I believe opposite to U shape bowl and on a stream. He had several swings and trapezz(? spelling) appartus. This was for live Monkeys, which were a sight to see.
My next experience was a ski trip with my daughter and future son-in-law in 1980. They both were working in New York City. He had never been west. We rented a condo called Riverside for $550 a week. we skied, not a lot of people, and slow lifts, but the best was to Apex that topprd out at 13,000. When we checked out were offered the condo for $85,000.
Flash forward to 1998, we rented the same condo with my daughter and 2 grandchildren for one week at $550 a night. Jets were landing out on the mesa, Oprah was in town and no restruant had an entree for less than $25.00. Checking out they offered us the condo for $850,00.
Many, many stories about Telluride, but how lucky you were to be there when you were. I enjoyed my time there.
I plan to respond to 1968, which was a very special year for me and my family.
Ray McCreight
Clearwater, Fl
June 20, 2008 at 5:59 pm |
I thought Jerry was going to start off his response saying his memories of 1968 were thin because anyone who was there can’t remember it.
My own memories of the summer of 1968 are that it started out sleepy and hot in Pueblo, which wasn’t unusual. Since then I’ve come to better appreciate sleepy, but back then as a teen-ager, that didn’t cut it.
For part of the summer, my parents had me take the driver’s education class, offered only at Central High that time of year. That was a good idea, which I still appreciate. By 1968, weird characters had begun to infuse even into Pueblo. I remember one, a male SCSC college student who wandered around the new Belmont campus, long blond hair, gold wire-rimmed glasses with a guitar strung across his back, and always barefoot. Quite a stand-out in that time and place. There was an “underground” coffee house in what was then the “triangle block” on Union Street, that played Big Brother and the Holding Company records and other rock music of the era.
Always big on education, my parents said I could go to Boulder and live partly on my own if I went to summer school. I took American history at Boulder High. My parents came up periodically for the extension classes they were taking at the University. By 1968, the “Summer of Love” that had happened the previous summer in San Francisco blossomed full force in Boulder. There were “crash pads” and “happenings” at the park on the Hill every night, where people would sit in circles, play musical instruments, talk about whatever came into their minds and otherwise “raise their consciousness.” Occasionally, local countercultural personalities such as “Larry the Teacher” and “John the Baptist” would hold forth. Larry was always identifiable by the old army blanket he always wore.
By late afternoon, there was always a crowd outside the Charcoal Chef restaurant on the Hill, making connections of all sorts, ranging from places to stay, hitching rides, events, romance, to exchanging clothing and various other substances. There was a record store across the street that was always jam-packed with students and others snapping up recent releases, and selling old rock concert posters for a dollar each (I still have two, now framed, from Canned Heat and Doors concerts at the Family Dog in Denver). Upstairs in the same building was the Madame Butterfly head shop and Brillig Works books.
In downtown Boulder, there was the Endor, the local equivalent of the Avalon or Fillmore Ballroom, and the SDS chapter at the Unversity had set up a free store, where one rainy night I got a jacket to ward off the chill.
A countercultural group affiliated with a man named Don Kelso took up residence on Sugarloaf Mountain outside town, providing a nearby “base of operations.” With regular travel between Kelso’s group (remnants of which later became the “STP Family”) and town, Boulder’s downtown park became a major gathering place for countercultural youth from around the country. Impromptu music, conversation, and other spontaneous activity occurred all day long. SDSers regularly circulated through the park with fliers about where to get needed services, updating the crowd on the Vietnam War, and other news. Sort of like an ongoing. mini, pre-Woodstock.
Alarmed by all this, Boulder’s civic elite had the health department put up signs in the park and along Boulder Creek warning of unsanitary conditions and sent out the police to discourage, harass, and otherwise run off the “undesirable” population influx.
By the end of the summer, this manifestation of youthful exuberance and hopefulness had largely run its course. Such outpourings tend to have a momentum of their own and are difficult to sustain. Official harassment combined with the onset of fall weather were contributory factors in ending Boulder’s “Summer of Love.”
Some countercultural activities did become institutionalized, and a few, like the free school, lasted for years. At least one that can trace its roots to this period, Boulder’s Eco-Cycle recycling program, became fully integrated into mainstream society. Some of the major campus protest at the University of Colorado and anti-war upheavals happened later, in 1969 through 1972.
Although in travel distance, Pueblo was only a two and a half hour drive from Boulder, in the Summer of 1968 it was light-years away. It was an eye-opening experience on many levels. When I returned to high school that fall and resumed many of the same old patterns, it was with new insights and a deeper appreciation of what was the same and familiar and entirely different horizons.