Gene Amole Send Email to Gene Amole Gene Amole's Biography

GIs and townsfolk celebrate America's victory over Japan on Sept. 2, 1945, on 16th Street. The end of World War II touched off vigorous growth in Denver's population and economy.

The Milky Way didn't just disappear. We lost it one star at a time. And in a way that symbolizes the price of progress in this 20th century.

As children, we could lie on the moist grass in our backyards at night and wonder at that great path of light splashed across the sky from horizon to horizon. As we sought to identity the Big and Little Dippers and the North Star, we asked our mothers, "What is on the other side of the stars?"

"Just more stars," they would say. But it was more than we could understand, and yet we formed a kinship with the stars. They were there every night as we struggled to accept how they could stay in infinity instead of falling down.

Among our comic-strip heroes were Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Flash explored the center of Earth, but it was only Buck who spirited our imagination to the stars.

It was difficult, though, to be fascinated with the stars when they were blinking into darkness as the lights in the city increased in intensity and heavy particulate pollution clouded them from our view.

We lost the Milky Way, and the only way we could find it again was from mountaintops or from the vast openness of our wind-punctured prairie. We felt sorry for our children that they could not, as we had done, travel in our fantasies to distant planets in our universe.

Some of us can still remember huge draft horses pulling heavy loads of freight on wagons with steel-rimmed wheels. In our memories, we can still hear the sounds of the horses' hooves and the wheels clattering over the macadam bricks around Union Station. And into the city's neighborhoods, horses also pulled wagons through alleys laden with fresh produce from truck farms north of town. Old Italian men would sing out -- "veg-ata-bules, veg-ata-bules" -- to announce their arrival. Women would emerge from back porches to fill their aprons with sweet corn, fresh peas, carrots, tomatoes and Swiss chard. There would be gossip around the wagon, except for the times Mary Marlin and The Life of Helen Trent were on the radio.

We always said about Denver that if there were hard times elsewhere, we didn't have it quite so bad. During the Great Depression, there were no huge factories that closed, putting throngs of men out of work. Sure, we had unemployment, but not on the scale of the big eastern industrial cities.

We were not so sprawled out, so men could walk downtown every day to look for work. The walk back home empty-handed was hard, with little kids waiting at the door and wives trying to find another way to fix cornmeal mush or chipped beef on toast.

The real pain was on the faces of unemployed men -- many veterans of World War I -- who rode into Denver on freight trains in search of hope. They shambled through downtown streets and into the neighborhoods, looking for a few hours of work or maybe a back-door jelly sandwich handout from a compassionate housewife.

Those were hard times for everyone. President Herbert Hoover got the blame, even though it wasn't all his fault. It was time for a new deal.

That's exactly what Franklin D. Roosevelt promised us if we would elect him president, and that's what we got, a New Deal. He told us that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," and we believed him.

It quickly became government-by-alphabet. We had the WPA, the NRA, the PWA, the CCC, all agencies created to put people back to work. It worked, and almost everyone was singing the Democrats' theme song, Happy Days Are Here Again. There was something in Roosevelt's voice in his radio fireside chats that lifted our spirits and gave us hope.

And radio itself became almost an obsession with us. It brought us Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Walter Winchell, The Farm And Home Hour, The Kraft Music Hall, Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Amos and Andy, Lowell Thomas, Club Matinee, One Man's Family, The Inner Sanctum, Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy, Little Orphan Annie, I Love A Mystery and many other programs.

We'd gather the family around our Atwater-Kent, or Philco, or Stromberg-Carlson radio, to let the "theater of the mind" play with our imaginations. Almost overnight, places like New York, Chicago and Hollywood didn't seem so far away. We had glamour, excitement and adventure in our living rooms.

Suddenly, it was Sept. 1, 1939, and some of us stayed up all night to hear Adolf Hitler on short-wave radio start World War II by sending his panzer divisions into the Polish Corridor. It would be two years before we joined the fight, but they were filled with a montage of memories:

Necking at Inspiration Point ... sitting in wet grass to watch The Denver Post opera at Cheesman Park ... polka weddings in Globeville ... Gypsy Rose Lee stripping on the Denham theater stage ... gaudy, bawdy, naughty old Curtis Street ... Five Points jazz in Benny's Basement ... Rockybilt hamburgers for a nickel ... learning the East High hop ... accordion and marimba bands for kids ... the No. 5 streetcar clanging by the May Co., Denver Dry, Joslins, Penney, Gano Downs and Neusteter's on 16th Street ... drinking martinis with shapely secretaries at Shaner's on 17th Street ... sucking up malts at the Pik-A-Rib ... Embracing Hoagy Charmichael's Stardust as "our song" ...

But just when everything seemed to be going so well, it was Dec. 7, 1941, and President Roosevelt declared it "a day that will live in infamy." We were at war with Japan and almost immediately with Germany and Italy.

Old Denver would never be the same. The boys who went off to war had no illusions. They didn't fight to make the world safe for democracy. Their fathers had tried that and failed. No, they went off to fight and die because they were drafted. They fought bravely in the air, on and under the sea, on a burning desert, on tiny specks of islands in the Pacific, in deadly cold weather in the European Theater of Operations, at lonely posts in China, Burma, India and anywhere the enemy could be found. Those of us who fought those battles hated our enemies because they were trying to kill us, and they robbed us of our youth.

At home, folks went to work at the Remington Arms Plant (now the Denver Federal Center) and at other smaller wartime industries that sprang up. There were ration stamps for shoes, food and gasoline.

People raised victory gardens and sent pictures of them to their sons overseas and saved bacon grease, tin cans and scrap metal for the war effort. They prayed and waited nervously for the postman each day. Letter carriers hated to walk by houses, unable to leave a long-awaited V-mail letter. It was very hard for those at home.

But the war meant prosperity for Denver. Hundreds of thousands of GIs trained at Lowry and Buckley air bases, at Fitzsimons Army Hospital and at the Army Ordnance Center. They listened to Reveille with Beverly on KFEL. They liked what they saw here and vowed to return after the war. And did they ever!

Makeshift veterans villages surrounded universities where ex-GIs used their GI Bill of Rights to gain an education they would never have had without the war.

They married and fathered what became known as the Baby Boomer generation. It was almost fashionable to have at least three kids. There was a theory that, without realizing why, these ex-servicemen were trying to replace the men they had killed in the war.

People began to realize that the prominence and the status we had all craved was at last within our reach. We wanted to be recognized and no longer referred to as an "overgrown cow town." Like Marlon Brandon's character in the film On the Waterfront, we wanted "class."

The boom rolled on through the 1940s. Money changed hands fast during the volatile uranium boom. Some big spenders won and lost fortunes in the same day.

Then came the 1950s, rock 'n' roll, television with Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar, Uncle Miltie and Mr. Peepers. McCarthyism triggered widespread paranoia, but by the end of the decade there was a return to sanity.

But sanity was short-lived here and almost everywhere else. Suddenly, it was the 1960s, and those darling little kids who rode tricycles on the front sidewalk turned on us and told us they weren't trusting anyone over 30, and that if we couldn't lead, or follow, we ought to get out of the way.

We didn't take it too well, even though some tried unsuccessfully to regain their youth by wearing polyester leisure suits, Nehru jackets and long hair. But it was the kids' generation. They loved Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Scarborough Fair, Hey Jude, Eleanor Rigby and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. We thought every tire screech in the night was our child getting killed. We loved them so much and didn't want them hurt.

We suffered when we thought our flower children were smoking pot, taking LSD and tempting addiction with other drugs, but most of them came through it all relatively unscathed. They discovered they had a social conscience and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. As wrong as the war was, old World War II dog soldiers couldn't help but side with the Vietnam grunts. Those of us who fought in World War II and Korea were incensed when Americans spat on servicemen in uniform who fought in Vietnam. Battle can bond men across generations.

There were other demonstrations in our town. African-American and Hispanic kids walked out of schools and demanded more ethnically balanced faculties and history courses that didn't overlook their heritage.

Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales was a key figure in the rebellion. Some thoughtful people examined their feelings and concluded that, had they walked the same streets in his shoes, they would have championed the same causes.

The 1970s and 1980s were turbulent years. The uranium boom that went bust was replaced by an energy boom that would bust, leaving office buildings half-empty and homes dirt cheap, some condominiums priced as low as $20,000.

Our young people were leaving Colorado for job opportunities elsewhere. And while trying to cope with this, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Denver Public Schools integrated by forced busing, triggering a white flight to the suburbs that reduced Denver public schools' student population by one-third.

But Denver came roaring back. Eastern industries took a look at our office vacancy statistics, our educated labor pool, our central geographic location, our higher education opportunities, our climate and recreational facilities and decided to relocate here. Meanwhile, Californians were having their problems, and like the Easterners, found Colorado a nicer place to live and do business.

By then we could boast of a first-rate symphony orchestra, a respected opera company and major league football and basketball teams, and a major league baseball team was just around the corner. At last, we had made it to the "big time."

In the final decade of the 20th century. The boom is still booming, but we are finding it difficult to deal with the malignant growth of our population.

It has been hard for us to accept the fact that Denver must continue to grow to offer opportunities to our young. I have been fortunate in the remaining years of my life to be associated at the Denver Rocky Mountain News with a lot of bright, young people.

I regret, as most people my age do, that we were so slow to recognize the legitimate rights of women and racial and ethnic minorities. We are saddened there is an increasing number of streets in our town where it is not safe to walk alone at night. I miss the old Denver where I could park my car on the street downtown and go to a movie. I keep asking myself if we are losing our sense of community.

The congeniality we once enjoyed is slipping away. Like others my age, I am fearful of the gangs that traffic in drugs. There are times, I confess, that I feel as outdated as a prom-night gardenia corsage.

I don't like it that we are being isolated from children. Like other old men, I am hesitant to even talk to a child because a paranoid young mother might accuse me of being a pedophile. Children and old people need each other. I don't like it that some young people drive too fast and follow too closely on our crowded streets.

Having said all that, though, I do understand the concerns of young people. Many have lost faith in their country and in the places where they work. They want to be loyal but believe there are few institutions anymore that deserve their loyalty.

They long for security in their work but must be able to adapt to change almost overnight. This is very difficult for them, something my generation often doesn't understand. With the probability that they will have multiple career changes in their lives, they find planning for the future a nightmare.

These young people have my respect. I wish, though, we could have bequeathed to them a safer society in which to follow their dreams.

Those of us who have lived through most of this 20th century are astonished at what we have seen and experienced. We really have done the best we could to preserve the good life in our town. We have precious memories of our time.

Of course, we have made mistakes, and it is too late now for us to correct them. Our generation survived the Great Depression and the bloodiest war in all history, and I suppose these events have left their scars. Now, it is time for us to leave and permit the young to create their own history. We knew we were old when our kids started wearing bifocals.

The century has been only a split-second in eternity. How swiftly the decades have slipped away. It seems like only yesterday that we could look at the night sky and behold the stars and the Milky Way.

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