By Mark Wolf
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

The Beatles, U2 and Joe Caton and the New Dealers all made historic appearances on the stage of Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

You read about the Beatles. Maybe you saw U2's Under a Blood Red Sky video. Joe Caton and the New Dealers? They built the place.

The Great Depression had Colorado in its grip when Caton graduated from Longmont High School in 1934. Not many places were hiring, but the government was.

''There was an opportunity for anybody who wanted to take a physical and apply to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, and several of us joined up,'' Caton recalled. After a stay at a CCC camp near Durango, he wound up in Morrison, where the CCC was turning a scenic park into what would become one of the nation's great concert venues.

At first, he was a bear-keeper, tending to a cub who became the CCC's mascot until the bear outgrew his welcome.

"He had a habit of slipping his collar and going into downtown Morrison, so we had to take him away, and I was out of a job," said Caton, 83, a retired optician.

So he became a stonemason's assistant, working on the stage at Red Rocks for about two years.

"The CCC was a highlight of my life," he said. "The Depression was pretty bad. The CCC taught me a lot about discipline. That you'd better behave and do what you're supposed to. We were paid $35 a month, and $25 of that went to your parents, and you were given $5. That was the way it was."

The way it was in Colorado in the early 1930s was that falling prices for agricultural and mining exports had crippled the state's economy. Colorado population growth trailed the national rate from 1920 to 1930 for the first time since the Civil War.

"The state didn't have a lot of diversity to its economy," said Stephen Leonard, professor of history at Metropolitan State College and the author of Trials and Triumphs: A Colorado Portrait of the Great Depression (University Press of Colorado, $29.95). "It was mining and agriculture, and except for CF&I Steel and Gates Rubber, we weren't a big manufacturing state."

To fight unemployment, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration unveiled an alphabet stew of public works programs. Aside from the CCC, the Civil Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, Public Works Administration and other programs put Depression-idled workers into jobs.

Some of those New Deal projects helped transform Colorado.

More than 9,000 miles of roads were built or improved. The banks of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek in Denver were strengthened with riprap. Runways were extended at Stapleton Airport, Lowry Field was built, Fitzsimons Medical Center expanded and the Big Thompson water project launched.

"Red Rocks was the most visible, but probably the most important over the long run was what happened with water, especially the Big Thompson project," Leonard said. "The other big one was getting Lowry and keeping Fitzsimons open and deciding to build it large."

Colorado got more per-capita federal dollars than any state except Washington. It ranked 10th among the 48 states in actual New Deal dollars spent.

"It's partially because we had so many kinds of things the federal government could spend money on," Leonard said. "We had lots of federal land, and a lot of CCC money came here. It was partially because we had two Democratic senators, Alva Adams and Edward Costigan, and a Democratic governor (Big Ed Johnson). We also had Edward Taylor, a longtime congressman who headed up the House Appropriations Committee. At one time he was the only member of Congress who'd been born before the Civil War. He helped a lot."

Colorado's cause also was helped because the Democratic South, which might have siphoned off considerable federal dollars, was disinclined to social change represented by the New Deal.

"They didn't want federal programs because they would mess up the social situation and raise wages," Leonard said. "There weren't as many mouths at the trough, and the people in Colorado were smart."

By 1941 the WPA reported having undertaken more than 5,000 Colorado projects since 1935 at a federal cost of about $100 million. They built some 400 structures including 63 schools, 124 recreation buildings, 22 offices, 26 sewage disposal plants, 28 dams and more than 30,000 outhouses. They served more than 21 million school lunches and canned more than 5 million quarts of produce.

A CWA project put 119 men and women to work making mattresses in an empty auto plant at West 11th Avenue and Cherokee Street. Loveland renovated its library, Boulder built a $500,000 school. Denver moved its police department to 1245 Champa St.

"Denver Mayor Benjamin Stapleton estimated the present and potential value of WPA projects in his city at $50 million. New parks Bonnie Brae and Garden Center blossomed because of the WPA. So did an additonal nine holes at the Berkeley Park golf course and Monkey Island at the City Park's zoo," Leonard wrote.

Not every federal project was bricks and mortar. The WPA financed music, theater and writing projects, including Colorado: A Guide to the Highest State. A group of undemployed architects and artists created 51 dioramas depicting early Colorado life. The most famous, a model of Denver and Auraria in 1860, is prominently displayed at the Colorado History Museum.

"People look back on the New Deal and look unkindly at the WPA and say they were just make-work projects, but they created infrastructure we're still using," Leonard said. "For example, we have a lot of good history in this state, and part of it was the WPA indexing of the Rocky Mountain News from 1865 to 1885 and that's used for historical research. We're still drawing on that capital."

For Joe Caton, the New Deal's CCC project gave a farmboy a jump start toward a productive life. He stayed with the CCC for two years, then left and became an optician for the Columbian Bifocal Co. in what is now lower downtown.

He returned many times to Red Rocks to watch concerts and shows.

''It was a big thrill,'' he said. ''My wife and I had six kids and now I take my grandkids up there and show them the park I helped build.''

Colorado Milestones, which appears Tuesdays, is part of a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society. Digital and print copies of historical images available at the Colorado Historical Society (303) 866-2305.

On TV: Sunday at 10 p.m.: Colorado History: The legacy of Denver talk show host Alan Berg's life and death.

November 9, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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