Sunday Morning Scene: Denver Catholic Register, December 1919.

October 10, 1919. The Air Race

The 1919 Air Derby was the big news, already displacing the Red Sox's victory over what would become to be known as the Black Sox in the 1919 World Series.

The race in Wyoming, however, was marred by the news that a pilot had gone down near Elk Mountain, or more accurately sought of Elk Mountain over Oberg Pass.

The aviators were actually flying near Coad Peak, but the result was just as deadly.

Death would also be visiting a 16 year old in the state. . sentenced for murder.

And Casper was getting into the aviation world as well with plans to become the aviation center of the state.

It would in fact achieve that goal, but not for some years.  Cheyenne, in fact, would become that first, and then lose that position given its close proximity, in air miles, to Denver.

Naval base, Hampton Roads, Virginia.  October 10, 1919.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Alma Temple, Denver Colorado

Churches of the West: Alma Temple, Denver Colorado:

Alma Temple, Denver Colorado

I know absolutely nothing whatsoever about this structure, or about the the institution that apparently owns it.  It belongs, apparently, to a Protestant group that maintains a radio station in addition to some sort of services.  The structure has an obvious Greek Revival style and was built in 1923.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: First Baptist Church, Denver Colorado

Churches of the West: First Baptist Church, Denver Colorado:

First Baptist Church, Denver Colorado

This New England style church is located in the Capitol Hill district of Denver. I don't know much about it otherwise, but it is right across the street from the Capitol Building.

Updated photograph from a different angle, as I happened to be going by it at a later date than that, five years ago, when I first photographed it.

The Enigma of Western Writers.

This post is on Western writers.

By which I mean writers from the West who write about the West.  By the "West", I mean the West of the Mississippi United States in general, and the various regions of the West as well. 

I don't mean writers like Annie Proulx, who move into an area, write something that they set in the area, and then are celebrated by reviewers outside of the area who are completely ignorant on the area in the first place.  Or even ones like Sam Western.

Nothing was western about the originator of Western writing, Owen Wister, who was an East Coaster through and through.

I'm not saying, well not saying completely, that a person has to be born in one area to write knowledgeably about it. There are certainly examples to the contrary.  Cormac McCarthy has notably written about the west of Texas and in the Southern Gothic style, but he's from Rhode Island originally.  Owen Wister, who is sometimes credited with inventing the Western novel (and at the time he wrote The Virginian he was writing about the recent past) was very much an Easterner.  His friend Theodore Roosevelt wrote beautifully about the West of his day, but he was a new Yorker.  Frederic Remington, the legendary illustrator and painter, is not only famous for his Western paintings and illustrations, which dramatically capture an era, but he was a writer as well, writing on the same topics that he depicted in his paintings.   Edward Abbey was from Pennsylvania and didn't experience the West until he was 18 years old.  Thomas Berger who wrote the only really great novel about Indians, Little Big Man, lived on the East Coast his entire life.

President Theodore Roosevelt, who was also a prolific reader and writer.

But I am saying that there's something different about writing on a culture that you are part of and about a region you are from.  I'd even go on to say that its really difficult to do that without being born in an area. Some writers can pull that off, but they are few.  So if you were born and raised in New England, or Zimbabwe, two actual examples for recent "Western writers", you can probably credibly pull off novels about the shipping news, or not going to the dogs tonight, but your regional novels aren't going to appear authentic to anyone from the region at all, because they are not.

Indeed, could Go Kill A Mockingbird have been written by anyone but a Southerner?  What about anything that Flannery O'Connor wrote. . . would they have been just as impactful if written by a Vermonter?   Would Doctor Zhivago have been what it was if it was written by a New Yorker?  Could Musashi have been written by anyone other than Ejii Yoshikawa?

I doubt it.

Boris Pasternak, who was born in Imperial Russia in 1890 and who died in the Soviet Union in 1960.  His famous work is the novel about the Russian doctor Zhivago, who would have been born right about the same time and and have experienced many of the same things.  Hardly anybody would maintain that a non Russian, let alone a non Russian who hadn't experienced these things, could have written a novel like Doctor Zhivago.

So I'm talking about writers who have spent their youth, even if not perhaps born here, in the real West.  Writers growing up, like Norman Maclean, in Montana, or writers growing up in Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, New Mexico, and so forth.  And writers, I will credit, from Texas.  Having said all of that, I'd currently exclude writers, for the most part, who may be from any of those regions but whose lives have been spent in the really big cities of the region, like Denver, Dallas or Houston. Big cities are their own thing, and that thing isn't the West.  Modern Denver, and indeed increasingly much of the Front Ranger for hundreds of miles around it, are no more The West than Newark is.  So too with Las Vegas, Phoenix, or any of the giant Texas cities.

Anyhow, some observations.

Western writers, as I've defined them, clearly have a deep, deep, love for the region.  If you read, for example, Norman Maclean's work, he clearly loved Montana.  Indeed, no other writer described the Rocky Mountain West as accurately and deeply as Maclean.  Nobody.

Mari Sandoz clearly loved Nebraska and the plains.  So did Willa Cather.

And what's so notable about that is that they all left the region they loved.

In the film A River Runs Through It and in the novella, Norman Maclean has his brother express the view that he, the brother, will "never leave Montana".  Indeed, Maclean has Paul, his brother, express the view that those who moved from Montana to the West Coast suffered from moral defects, a view a lot of Westerners do in fact have.  But both Paul Maclean and Norman Maclean, in real life, moved to Chicago. At the time that he wrote his works, late in life, Norman Maclean had spent more years in Chicago than in Montana.  He died in Chicago in 1990 at age 87 (his wife, Jessie, had a much shorter life, dying due to respiratory aliments in 1968 at age 63).

Mari Sandoz was born in Nebraska in 1896. She moved to Denver, which at that time remained a Western city, in 1940, at which time she was 44  years old, but then moved to New York City in 1943, where she remained until her death at age 69 in 1966.

Wila Cather, was born in 1873 and her family moved to Nebraska in 1883.  She was steeped in the West from her youth, but she moved to Pittsburgh in 1896, at which time she was an up and coming writer.  She moved to New York in 1905, which is where she remained for the rest of her life.

What's going on here?  It seems that "Western" writers don't achieve success at that unless they've moved to somewhere distinctly non Western.

Maybe some of that has to do with what Garrison Keillor, who is a Western writer (Minnesota and North Dakota are part of the West the way I've defined them) noted about the region in general.  Our number one export is our children.  While we often don't credit it, and we frequently argue about it, the West has both a small population and a good educational system.  We work hard here to educate our youth, but we really don't have anywhere for them to go, as a rule.  That's been noted by outsiders, such as non Westerner, Sam Western (who is in  the non Westerner import class of writer), but they rarely seem to grasp the nature of it.  The West remains the West, where it has, because of natural features which translate into economic ones.  This means that while we really appreciate the need for solid educations, it also means that we educate generation after generation of Westerners who have no place to go with their educations. So they go elsewhere.

That seems to me to be the story for Maclean and Cather.  Norman Maclean obtained a degree in English from Dartmouth in 1924. What use would that have been in the Montana of 1924, or for that matter in the Montana of 2019?  It'd be limited, at best.  He clearly retained his affection for Montana and spoke of himself, from his actual home in Chicago, as a Montanan in his writings.  He married a woman from Montana in 1931, showing the extent to which he retained actual roots there. But he lived and died in Chicago.

The situation for Cather was likely even more pronounced.  An educated woman in the West in the 1890s, her career options were necessarily  highly limited.  Indeed, they were limited in the Western world in general. She never married, something very unusual for her era, and focused on her writing career, but that would fairly obviously be a lot easier to do from New York than from Nebraska.

Sandoz doesn't quite fit this mold, but maybe she provides another example.  Sandoz was a difficult character from her youth on but first found herself published while living in Nebraska, having relocated to Lincoln from the Sand Hills. She's struggled up to that point to establish herself as a writer, but when she did, it was with two novels both of which met with gigantic disapproval in Nebraska.  So she moved to Denver, and then on to New York.

And perhaps Michael Punke gives us another example.  Punke is the author of The Revenant.  Punke was born in Torrington Wyoming.  He's a practicing lawyer, as well as an author (and therefore obviously a much more disciplined person than myself), but he has worked nearly exclusively outside of the West, both inside of and outside of government.

And maybe Punke's example brings home that this phenomenon is widespread with Westerners in general.  At what point you cease to be a Westerner by leaving a region can be debated.  I think it that does happen, and am one of the many who disregard lamentations published in the letters to the editor section of the newspapers that start off with "I read the article about so and so last week, and while I left Wyoming forty years ago. . . .". 

But it's clear that people who were largely raised in a region conceive of themselves, quite often, as remaining part of it their entire lives.  Which I suppose makes sense.  Wendell Berry has lamented that modern American life means that people don't become "of" a place, but maybe they do more than we might imagine (which is another reason that novelist from Zimbabwe or Vermont don't become regional authors by moving here).  Beyond that, however, what we see with writers may be nothing more than what we see with legions of Westerners.

For a long time, at least for rural Westerners, which is a definition that would fit many in the West, growing up and getting an education has meant either narrowing the scope of your education or leaving.  I.e., if you are educated as a lawyer, doctor, veterinarian, school teacher, accountant, or engineer, you can find work here.  But if you have a PhD in English, you probably better be looking elsewhere.

Indeed, even with these other professions, as time marches on, this is becoming more and more true.  In 1990, at the time I graduated from the University of Wyoming's law school, it was already the case that maybe 1/3d of the class was headed to Colorado.  In some recent years over half the class has, as changes in the nature of practice have made that necessary.  Indeed, with the passage of the UBE, there's really no longer a reason for a Wyoming law school at all, and its only a matter of time until the legislature realizes that.

For some this is compounded with the American ethos of money meaning everything.  There are areas of various professions you can find work in the state, to be sure, but it won't pay the same lucrative amount that it might elsewhere.  So people move for the money.  Interestingly, they often find themselves in personal conflict after that, and are often among those writing to the editor with letters such as; "I'm distressed to read that such and so is going in near my beloved home town of Little Big Horn. . . I want it to be just like it was when I left in 1959 and I'm planning to return soon from the hideous dump of Los Angeles where I've been piling up cash since the early 1960s . . ." 

So, maybe it's the nature of the regional economy, and perhaps the national economy at that.  Writers gravitate to where the writers are, and the writers, by and large, are in the big cities.

Not all of them of course, but a lot of them.

Maybe.

Maybe something else is also at work, and perhaps that's most notable in what we noted above about Mari Sandoz. She didn't leave Nebraska for more futile publishing grounds.  She left Nebraska as she was taking a lot of heat after getting published.  Indeed, her second novel was censored in the state.

So maybe its the classic example of a person not really being too welcome on their own home ground in some instances.

In fairness, Sandoz's writing was always very critical of various things, and indeed quite frankly her histories, for which she remains famous, aren't terribly accurate in various ways.  At least her histories haven't born the test of time except, perhaps, for Old Jules, the book her extraordinarily difficult father asked her to write about him after his passing.  But still, maybe the West doesn't welcome its own writers much?

Or maybe it does.  Novelist Jim Harrison, who was from Michigan, which is pretty rural in some locations and the near west to a degree, lived in Arizona and Montana after leaving Michigan.  Garrison Keillor, mentioned above, flirted with New York after already being well known, but returned to Minnesota.  Patrick McManus, the humor writer, lived in the West his entire life.  Current crime writer C. J. Box, whose protagonist is a Wyoming Game Warden, is from Wyoming.  Tim Sandlin, whom I've never read, was born in Oklahoma but lives in Jackson.

Indeed, if Oklahoma is sort of like Texas in some ways, it's worth noting that Texas has had a lot of native authors who have continued to live in Texas, Larry McMurtry notable among them.  McMurtry grew up on a ranch outside of Archer, Texas, a town so far north in Texas its nearly in Oklahoma.

So added to that, maybe these long distance travels aren't as far as they seem. . . in some instances.  In my grandfather's era Chicago was the hub of the western cattle industry and Denver just a very large city on the plains.  Chicago's role in that went away, but the point is that economists and politicians who are baffled by the fact that the West doesn't spawn very many large cities are potentially missing the point that it has. . . its just that everything is more spread out here.  So Chicago, a Midwestern city, may have more of a link to the West of an earlier era than we might suppose.  Denver serves that purpose for much of the Northern Plains now and, I dare say, Calgary does as well at a certain point.

Indeed, those cities filled that roles, or fill them, as they were, or are, centers of industry for regions.  And while we don't like to think of writing as an industry, it's a type of one, so perhaps some relocation makes sense.  Indeed, it might even now, in spite of the electronic age, which seems to be pulling the working population towards the city centers like a black hole draws in light.

Anyhow, something to ponder.

Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver, Colorado.

I recently posted on Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church on our companion blog, Churches of the West.  That post is here:

Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver ...: This is Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver Colorado. Many people, when they hear the word "Catholic", imm...

The entire entry is below, followed by my commentary.

To add what I posted in the entry linked in, as is sometimes the case with Catholic churches, I not only took a photograph, as it was Sunday, I attended there.

I won't say that I attended "Mass", as the Eastern Rite doesn't use that word.  It uses the term Divine Liturgy instead.

Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver Colorado

This is Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver Colorado.

Many people, when they hear the word "Catholic", immediately have what, in the English speaking world, are frequently referred to as "Roman Catholics" in mind.  In fact, however, "Roman" Catholics are Latin Rite Catholics whose churches use the Roman Rite.  Roman Catholics make up the overwhelming majority of Catholics, and indeed the majority of Catholics, on earth.

They aren't the only Catholics however.   The Roman Rite itself is just one of several Latin, or Western, Rites.  There are also several Eastern Rites, of which the Byzantine Rite is one.

The Byzantine Catholic Church, which is also called the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church, uses the same liturgical rite as the Greek Orthodox Church and shares the same calendar.  It dates back to the conversion of the Rusyn people in the Carpathians to Christianity in the 9th Century.  That work, done by St. Cyril and St. Methodius brought to the Rusyn people the form of worship in the Eastern Rite.  They Rusyn church initially followed the Orthodox Churches following  the schism of 1054, but in 1645 the Ruthenian Church started to return to communion with Rome, resulting in the Rutenian Byzantine Catholic Church, which is normally called the Byzantine Catholic Church in the United States.

Immigration from Eastern Europe brought the Church into the United States. Originally a strongly ethnic church, in recent decades it has become multi ethnic and its strongly traditional character has caused it to obtain new members from both very conservative Latin Rite Catholics as well as very conservative former Protestants.  Indeed, while this church is very small, it has been growing and now has a Byzantine Catholic outreach to Ft. Collins, Colorado, where it holds services in Roman Catholic Churches.

We pick up from there.

When people hear the world "Catholic", they tend to think of what they sometime call "Roman Catholics".  The term "Roman" Catholic is itself a post Reformation English term, which the English tagged on to the Church in their effort to justify the position that the Church of England had a theological basis for separating from the Church.  Serious conservative members of the Anglican Communion still take that position and I suppose that Episcopal clergymen are schooled in it in some fashion, although it appears to be the case presently that the Episcopal Church is ordaining at least some members of their clergy who attend seminaries in a remote fashion, which is very much the opposite of how the Catholic Church does that.*  Anyhow, there aren't really "Roman" Catholics, although in the English speaking world Latin Rite Catholics have themselves adopted the term and don't regard it as a pejorative, as it originally was.

I heard some statistics on it the other day and I won't get them precise, but they were interesting in what they conveyed.  The largest single religion in the world, and in spite of what some modern statisticians might suggest almost all humans are members of a religion, is Christianity.  Christianity is in fact growing in most of the world and only in the rich Western World is there really a more lackadaisical approach to faith.  Even in parts of the globe where Christianity has historically had a difficult time penetrating this is the case.  About 30%, for example, of Koreans are Christians.  While numbers are very hard to come by, good anecdotal evidence suggest that post 9/11 conversions to Christianity in the Middle East rank in in the millions in an area in which open conversion is illegal.  Conversion by Muslims immigrating to some regions of Europe have been so high that they've filled the pews in Churches in some regions that were formally only used by locals.  Both France and Germany, in some areas, have seen large conversions of that type.

Of Christians on Earth, the largest denomination by far, if we want to put it in those terms, are Catholics. Catholics dwarf all other denominations, something that's hard to grasp in the U.S. as the U.S. was and is a Protestant country.  Indeed, of interest there, the U.S. and areas strongly influenced by the US are really the only regions of the world were certain types of Protestantism that refuses to acknowledge that the Catholic Church dates back to Christ in an uninterrupted fashion, although both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches both have uninterrupted Apostolic Succession and can note the same.  That statement surprisingly amounts to fighting words for some Protestant denominations in the English speaking world but in an era in which resources are so easily obtainable it cannot really reasonably be debated by anyone any longer and indeed most of the larger original Protestant churches don't debate that and never have.  The Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is part, for example fully acknowledges that as do all branches of Lutheranism.  Some other branches of the old Protestant world have claimed apostolic succession, thereby recognizing its importance and the Catholic history on it, and others have gone so far as to occasionally find bishops in the Orthodox or Old Catholic faiths who are willing to do ordinations in an effort to clear up any question regarding it, which again acknowledges the position.  The original "protest" wasn't over that, which was always fully acknowledged.  People who insist on debating it are debating a non point, as its indisputable and if a contrary position is a person's only theological point, it's a lost one.

The point on that isn't to start such a debate, but to note something else.  Most Catholics are in the Latin Rite, which actually is several rites, and of these most are in the Roman Rite.  Hardly any Catholic has ever been in a Catholic Church that celebrates another rite.  Something like 80% of the Christians on Earth are Roman Rite Christians and if we include the the Protestants who are familiar with that style of worship, and many do, its even higher.

The percentage of Christians who are Eastern Rite is really small.  If we include both the Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics its still only around 10% or less of all Christians. 

But it's growing.

Okay, we've discussed the Great Schism here before and we're not going to go into that, but as we've previously noted, the Eastern Rites of the Church date back to prior to the schism and all Eastern Rite churches use the same forms of worship.  Lost to a lot of people, that means that there are plenty of Catholics, although a small minority of Catholics over all, who worship in the Eastern Rite.

But there are getting to be more.

The Byzantine Catholic Church is more fully referred to as the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church.  There's also a Greek Byzantine Catholic Church. The two use the same liturgy and their services would be very similar, but the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church is extremely small and has a different history.

The Ruthenians were one of several Eastern Rite churches that followed Constantinople when the Great Schism occurred.  Indeed most, but not all, of the Eastern Rite did that, reflecting the Eastern Rite's strong association with Constantinople.  Ironically, perhaps, the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church reflected the fact that not everyone in the Eastern Rite in Greece did, and that in fact there remained churches that continued to accept the Bishop of Rome as the head of the church rather than the "first among equals", as the Orthodox have stated it.  The Ruthenian Church, however, did wholly follow Constantinople at first but, in the 17th Century, came back into communion with Rome, something that a variety of Eastern Rite churches have (not all Eastern Rite churches, it should be noted, followed Constantinople even at the onset).  The Church had a presence in the United States since the second half of the 19th Century as Eastern European immigrants brought it over from Eastern Europe. At first it frankly unfortunately had a rocky relationship with the larger Latin Rite, which was in fact attributable the the Latin Rite's view at the time that in a country where Catholics were a minority it was better if everyone who was Catholic was Latin Rite. That view has long since passed however and today the Catholic Church not only encourages the Eastern Rites in the U.S. but discourages anything that would stand to erode them.

Now they're not only not eroding, they're growing.

This is an interesting phenomenon in and part its due to the collapse of conservative doctrine in the old Protestant churches. As conservatives in those churches have found themselves unable to accept the adoption of positions that run counter to what Christians have held for eons, they've looked out at other churches that retain the traditional holdings and nothing is more traditional than the Eastern Rite, be that in the Orthodox or the Catholic spheres.  

Indeed it's the Orthodox who have primarily benefited from this development, and they're aware of it. As we posted here some time ago, the new Orthodox church in Cheyenne holds itself out as an "Orthodox Christian" church, not a "Greek Orthodox" church, which it is.  In fact, as this evolution occurs, those cultural monikers matter less than they did.  The Greek Orthodox in the U.S. hold Divine Liturgy in English.  So does the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church.

And like the Orthodox, the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church is also expanding, and in part for the same reason just noted above.  It's not really hard to find at the present time converts in a Byzantine Catholic Church.  In our recent trip we met a very devout parishioner who self declared as a convert.

In addition, however, to Protestants entering the Byzantine Catholic Church, it's clear that Latin Rite Catholics are as well.  And some of this is for the same reason, while some of it is not.

Conservative Roman Catholics who have grown weary of the reforms of the 1970s which seem to hang on in some parishes have, in some instances, gone over to Eastern Rite Catholic churches where the big reforms never took hold.  About the only thing really notable in terms of reforms in Eastern Rite Catholic Churches is that the services are in English, not the original languages.  This is true, however, of the Eastern Rite in general.  Additionally, Eastern Rite Catholics are really serious Catholics, their knowledge boosted by their minority status.  The service we attended was shockingly serious, with the Priest addressing, in what started off as a children's liturgy, the Problem of Evil.  And he addressed it in a remarkably effective fashion.

In recent years there's been a struggle, mostly in the large Latin Rite, over reforms and direction.  It's pretty clear to nearly every observer that those who would take the Church even further in the "spirit" of the 1970s have a losing argument and that this will have a negative effect.  It's also clear, from the slow return to things that predates those developments, that the opposite has a strong positive attraction to many of the Faithful.

In this context, there's lessons to be learned from the Eastern Rite.  It's growing, and its attractive to an element of those in the Latin Rite.  It has conservative, but married, Priests.  This is not to say that the Latin Rite needs to become Eastern, but it shouldn't ignore the positive examples that the Eastern branch is giving.**

_________________________________________________________________________________

*Indeed, one of the reforms of the Counter Reformation was the introduction of the seminary system in the Catholic Church, as the Church concluded that the Reformation had been caused in part by badly educated clergymen.  That system has existed for the past 500 years and recently its been enhanced in the original direction.  It was common, up until the last couple of decades, to allow very young men, indeed not really young men so much as boys, into seminaries but reflecting social evolution this is no longer true.  Seminarians now are at the college age, at least.

**That example isn't as well received by everyone, I'd note.  In this case, of us four, my son and I were hugely impressed for a variety of reasons.  My wife and daughter were not.  In that latter example, they frankly found it just too foreign.

In speaking with a colleague who was a cradle Catholic, who fell away from Christianity in college, who re found it in the form of Evangelical Protestantism late in college, and then came back to the Catholic Church as a lawyer, he'd experienced the same thing in a different fashion.  Noting what I noted above, he studied the early history of the church and found that it was in fact, as is clearly demonstrable, "Catholic and Apostolic" and therefore briefly went into the Greek Orthodox church which can legitimately claim to be Apostolic (with the Orthodox and the Catholic church separated by a schism, something that's severe, but not as severe as the gulf between them and Protestant churches).  Anyhow, his wife had been raised in a Protestant church, as was mine, and she was likewise shocked by how foreign the Eastern Rite is.  In contrast, the Antiochian Orthodox Church in Gillette, Wyoming is made up completely of converts from an Evangelical Protestant church that converted after engaging in a study of the early church.  

Today In Wyoming's History: June 29, 1969. The End of the Experience.

Today In Wyoming's History: June 29: 1969 - The Jimi Hendrix Experience played their last concert on the last day of the Denver Pop Festival.  After this, Hendrix would play with The Band of Gypsies, whom he felt more kinship with, being composed of personal musical fellows with a similar blues background. 

The Rise and Fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, of Denver.

Capitol Hill District of Denver, circa 1898.  A careful observer of this photograph might be tempted to think this is the Capitol building, but it isn't.  It faces the wrong direction and must have been a courthouse or a city building.  Indeed, I suspect this photograph was taken from the capitol looking west.

Recently I put up a photo of a business of a morally dubious nature in downtown Denver on one of our companion blogs, that being:  Painted Bricks: La Boheme, Denver Colorado.

This caused me to recall earlier visits to Denver, and the up and down nature of its downtown.

The edge of the Capitol Hill District of Denver in 2018.  This view doesn't face the same way as the 1898 photo above.

Personal recollection figures on this blog from time to time, even though its main focus is on something else.  In the recollection context, it it occurs to me now that I have a personal connection with Denver that stretches back at least forty years, maybe a bit longer.  Longer than that of most of the people, I'd guess, who live there.  If I add a familial familiarity to it, which of course is less reliable, it would stretch back beyond the late 1920s.

Indeed, while I don't say much about it here, I have a familial connection with Colorado that goes back to the 1860s, much longer than many of the European American folks there. A great grandfather on my father's side moved from Ohio to Leadville to be a miner in the second half of the 19th Century, although he rapidly changed his occupation to shopkeeper in that high altitude town.*  So our family's association with Colorado is, well, nearly as old as the state of Colorado.

Colorado State Capitol during the period of time in which its dome was under reconstruction.

In fact, my father was born in Colorado, something I rarely mention.  All of his siblings except for his youngest brother, as well has my father, were born in Denver.  His parents moved to Scotsbluff Nebraska when he was seven, and usually if asked my father would just say he was from Scotsbluff, even though he left Scotsbluff for Casper when he was in his early to mid teens.** That means his association with Denver was nearly as strong as it was with Scotsbluff, although I don't know if the first few years of your life really count that way as you really don't recall much about them personally.

Be that as it may my father didn't talk that much about his childhood in Denver.  In fact, some of the more interesting details of that period in my father's family's history I know from other family members.  For instance, I know that my father started school when he was four years old as the parish priest felt he was ready for it, and he attended a Catholic grade school in Denver.  When they moved to Scotsbluff he was enrolled in the public school there, so he didn't grow up going to Catholic schools.***  His younger brother had the opposite experience, FWIW, attending the Catholic grade school here when the family moved from Scotsbluff, where he'd been born.

Be that as it may, he identified more with Nebraska and when Denver was discussed, when I was a kid, it often entailed relatives who continued living there after our family had left, some of whom still did when I was growing up.  The Bergers in particular were their aunt and uncle who lived there all the way into my high school years, outliving my grandparents by decades.  All of my father's family were extremely fond of them, although I can recall meeting them only once, when they came up here for some reason.

That reflects, I guess, my father's view of Denver, or maybe of travel.  My father didn't like travelling at all and he never went to Denver without a reason.  That reason came when I was in grade school, probably around 5th or 6th grade, which is coincident with my first trip to Denver.

When I was about that age. . . I'm no longer precisely sure of when it was, I developed asthma.  It arrived pretty suddenly. At that time, there were no allergist in our area at all, and the only recourse was to go to Denver, which we did.

To go to Denver to be tested for medical reasons isn't a good introduction to the town, but at the same time I recall looking forward to it for childish reasons.  I knew, of course, that it was a big city.  I also knew that a friend of mine had models that his father, who was a cartographer, brought home when he went to Denver for work.

Going to Denver for work is interesting in and of itself and I've been to Denver hundreds of times for work. But at the time, that seemed very exotic and strange, maybe even a little sad, in and of itself.  But that did introduce me to the concept that Denver had a store that sold really neat models.  While we were there, we went there.

That store was across the street from the Denver Dry Goods store, a huge department store whose building still exists, just off of 16th Street, in downtown Denver, but which is now an apartment building.  For some reason, when my father spoke to his siblings about Denver, the Denver Dry Goods stores was frequently mentioned.  It must have been a place they held in regard from the time in which they lived there.

The model store that was across the street from Denver Dry Goods also sold Avalon Hill games, the first time I'd ever seen them.  We didn't buy one, I know, as I didn't know what they really were, and of course back in those days you couldn't really look such things up anywhere.  A few years later, just a short view, I'd stumble into those games, which I really like even though there's nobody to play them with anymore.  I guess that first trip was my first introduction to them, in a way.

I can also recall that we stayed, on that occasion, in a hotel that was just off of downtown Denver. The building is still there and I still recognize it when I drive past it.  Just down from it was a Big Boy restaurant that we didn't eat in, but which for a long time thereafter was a landmark that I'd recognize. We had to go to National Jewish, the great Denver hospital that focuses on respiratory diseases.  The net result was the disturbing finding that I was allergic to a lot of animals, and some plants.  I'll not go into that other than to note, as is common with asthma, it abated in later years, then came back to some degree, and has abated again, although not before I had to go through three separate rounds of shots over three different periods of time; the first in the 1970s of which we're speaking, the second in the 1990s after I graduated from law school, and the third just recently as a prophylactic measure as we got a dog.****

Anyhow, that Denver of the 1970s was, by my recollection, much like Salt Lake City is now.  It was a big city, but it was a big business like city.  It didn't have the carnival atmosphere that it has now.  It was glass and steel with shops and the like that was unlike anything in Wyoming, but it was also cold and sterile and meant business.

The business that it meant was the oil business at that time, and the 1970s was the era of rampant oil activity in the region.  I didn't know it then, but I'd come to know that Denver had become a major oil hub at least as early as the 1950s.

My mother enters the picture there, actually as in 1957 or so she'd come down to Colorado from Alberta as my aunt Marguerite was getting married.  The family had gone into hard times during the Great Depression and they never really emerged from it.  Starting at age 16 my mother had gone to work and that work took her to Alberta, where she at first worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad and then worked as an oil and gas secretary.  In 57 or so, however, my aunt had become engaged to a Quebecois engineer who had moved to Colorado to study.  The family circumstances being strained, the decision, nearly an order, was to send one member of the family to Colorado for the wedding and that person was my mother.  In order to do this, she had to quit her job in Alberta.

By her recollection, her employer and co workers in Alberta begged her not to go, and warned her that if she stayed to work in the U.S. which was easy to do, she'd be "worked to death".  Indeed, American oil companies that I've worked with make the reverse complaint about their Canadian colleges, claiming that they basically won't work. That does give testimony to the "American Work Ethic", and whatever it entails, for good or ill.  At any rate, she didn't heed their warnings and quit her job figuring that after the Colorado wedding she could find work in Denver, which was booming due to the oil business.

As it happened, and for whatever reason, the industry in Denver wasn't hiring, but prospective employers uniformly pointed her north towards our city, which is where she ended up and where she found employment, as an oil and gas secretary, right away.  All that leads into another story which I'll forgo now, and maybe just forgo.  But what it shows, in part, is that Denver was an oil town.

It was still an oil town in the 1970s.  And in fact at that time oil companies that were headquartered in Casper Wyoming were pulling out in favor of Denver.  Casper had been a major regional oil hub and the newspaper, as late as the 1970s, declared it to be "the Oil Capital of the Rockies".  It was losing its oil office workers by the late 1970s.  Then the crash of the 1980s came.

When that came it hit Casper hard, and it was devastating to Denver.

It was that Denver that I next became familiar with.

As a University of Wyoming student in the mid 1980s, I started visiting Denver for the first time in over half a decade.  A good friend of mine was highly familiar with Denver and knew his way around.  While going to Denver myself for any reason wouldn't have occurred to me, it was second nature to him, and our group of outdoorsy friends was ironically introduced to urban Denver, as it had very good outdoors stores.  We used to go down to Denver from time to time to hit the sporting goods stores and the outdoors stores, such as REI (then in a different location) or Eastern Mountain Sports, which was downtown.

In that same time frame, I also would go down from Laramie to Denver on the occasional day trip with a girlfriend of the time. As she was outdoorsy (we were all geology students) we'd go to the same sort of places, but she also had a strong interest in music which I did (and do) as well.  So the list of places we'd go to was expanded to include music stores, including ones that sold records.  One of those places still exists, Wax Trax, which has changed hardly at all.  A really neat one, however in a residential neighborhood off of downtown I couldn't possibly find today, assuming it exists.

Wax Trax in Denver, which has weathered the ages.

At some point in this time frame I also discovered the Tattered Cover bookstore, but I"m not sure who introduced it to me.  I suspect it was the girl I was dating, but I'm not sure.  Oddly enough my father knew of the store at that time, even though it was founded in 1971, well after he had left the city as a boy, so I have no idea how he was aware of it.

The Denver of that era seemed busy to us, but its downtown had taken a pounding.  Many buildings were closed at first, but by the mid 80s a new downtown was developing after 16th Street was closed to vehicle traffic.  A new retail district began to pop up.  Still, lower downtown Denver was a wreck dominated by the massive Gates Rubber Company building, which was completely abandoned.  Nobody dared walk in that era unadvisedly.  Five Points, the area just off downtown, was legendary for being rough and had a reputation for that which dates back into the 1930s.  While we tried to avoid it, occasionally you'd hit its edges coming and out of town past a traffic island park that was always covered with drunk people at any hour of the day.  Off of downtown, as you approached the Capital Hill District, you encountered neighborhoods that were highly decayed.  The large episcopal cathedral dominated the area near Wax Trax and was in such rough shape, with boarded up windows, that I assumed when first encountering it that it had been abandoned.

St. John in the Wilderness Episcopal Cathedral in Denver.

Indeed, at that time, if you went to 16th Street you didn't stray much off of it.  Only a block away the town had a much different character.  Down by the Gates building it was a hobo jungle and completely dissolute.  Nobody in their right mind went there at all.

After 1986 I didn't go to Denver again for years.  We all graduated from UW and went off to work or unemployment.  I went on to the latter, as did most of the geology students I knew at the time.  The last time I was in Denver of that era was in 1986 itself, when I went down once by myself.  I wasn't in Denver again until the spring of 1990, when I was a law student.  On that single occasion I went down with a friend and was really left with no particularly noteworthy memories of the trip except for seeing a bagpipe player on the street who was playing Garryowen.  More than anything else the trip on that time left me with that sad feeling of old memories not really being capable of recapture.  The fun part of going to the town with my undergraduate geology friends was really gone, and the fact that I was there with a law school friend didn't make up for it.  Had I thought on it more, that trip, symbolizing an evolution of various sorts, would have probably made me pretty blue about the experience.

It was after I started practing law that I started going to Denver a lot.  And it was after the construction of Coors Field that the town began to change massively.

Coors Field.

You wouldn't think that the construction of a baseball field would change a city, but Coors Field did.  

Coors Field was opened in 1995 and was constructed where Gates Rubber had been. The classic baseball stadium brought new life to lower downtown Denver and absolutely everything about it began to change thereafter.  The nearly wrecked area of lower downtown started to rapidly evolve into a hip, cool and youthful area.  It's still evolving in that direction twenty five years later, the change being both complete and ongoing.  By the 2000s it was highly evident, and the areas around 16th Street that had been scary were swept up in it.

That's what brings me to La Boheme.

La Boheme, Denver Colorado.

This is a photograph of the mural on the side of La Boheme in Denver, which euphemistically calls itself a "gentleman's cabaret". By that it means, no doubt, something on the order of "strip club".

La Boheme, which means the female Bohemian in French, is located in what was once a pretty rough downtown Denver neighborhood which went through gentrification after Coors Field was constructed. The transformation in this area was remarkable and its still ongoing, Colorado's legalization of marijuana had reintroduced a feeling of decay into downtown once again.  At any rate, in spite of many old buildings being bought and converted into new upscale uses, and in spite of being located across the street from the downtown Embassy Suites, a nice Denver business hotel, La Boheme keeps on keeping on.

I can't recall this mural being there until just recently, so it's presumably a new addition.  Perhaps keeping in mind where it is, it's not shockingly skanky and is actually fairly well done.  It's placement resulted in a minor debate with my travel companions on whether it depicts Marilyn Monroe, Jenny McCarthy, or none of the above.  The first two choices would in some ways emphasize the tragic nature of the establishments purpose.  Anyhow, it's fairly well done except that the figures left hand, which isn't really visible in this photo, is quite meaty, making for an odd appearance.

I couldn't recall if it was La Boheme or not, and now in recollection, I realize it it wasn't. But in the 2000s I had an occasion to go to Denver for work and in so doing I parked downtown to walk to 16th Street.  Construction was ongoing just as it is now, as old dilapidated buildings yielded to new construction.  At any rate, I was walking towards downtown on a path that took me past a bar that was a strip joint.  This was probably around 11:00 a.m. or so.  As I did that, a girl came out of the club who was obviously employed as one of the "dancers".

She wasn't good looking, in the way that movies like to imagine girls so employed to look.  Indeed, she was skinny and extremely pale in the way that people who never see the light of day are pale.  Her occupation was betrayed by her dress, which was only suitable for one of two professions, both of which are a species of prostitution.  She barreled out of the door on her way to somewhere else, probably after having picked up her wages for selling her appearance the night prior, and perhaps having just finished up from whatever wreck of an evening it had been.

The old dilapidated Denver boldly defiant in the face of the new, cool Denver.

Well wherever that place was, it's gone now, I'm sure.  But La Boheme, the last of the really old seedy Denver, keeps on keeping on, out of place, and out of time.

Which doesn't mean that Denver has become a mythical bright shining city on a hill.

Indeed, quite contrary to that, Denver gives really good evidence of the human inclination to destroy everything through our worst instincts.  Denver is why we can't have nice things.

Union Station as viewed from the Oxford Hotel.  One of the really nice features of the revival of downtown Denver has been the introduction of an extensive light rail network which terminates at Union Station.

Denver's downtown was changing in character by the late 1990s in any event, and while it was getting increasingly vibrant, it was also getting increasingly grungy.  And then marijuana came.

As Denver's fortunes boomed based on a new, and largely consumer basis in a new economy, it drew in tens of thousands of people from elsewhere in the country, many from California.  "Californication" became a slam on the process but Colorado simply became overwhelmed, transforming the state.  It's a lesson for those who always have a growth is good mindset, as much of the old Colorado was killed in the process.  And as part of that process, a new California outlook came to the state's politics, which ironically went from the pro grown political right to the progressive liberal left.  With that came the push to legalize marijuana.

And legalize it Colorado did.

Marijuana has ruined Denver.

That statement might be too harsh, of course, but only a little.  With the legalization of marijuana all the predicted social problems that would never come about, it's backers claimed, have.  Law enforcement problems of all sorts have dramatically increased, for example. And the number of street people living on Denver's streets, which in recent years have generally been relatively warm in the winter, are now epic.

Street people were always a feature of downtown Denver, but the numbers and character have really changed.  In the 1980s these sad souls were concentrated in lower downtown and Five Points  Now they're just everywhere in the downtown area. And they aren't the same people.  In the 80s, they were sad victims of poverty and alcohol.  Now they tend to be the young who surrendered their lives to dope.

The social lesson there, and the legal one, is self evident, but being ignored.  Money talks and people are making money off of the drug, the human toll doesn't matter.  Denver is a good argument for making marijuana illegal, not the opposite.

And with the decline, the rise in self indulgent  artificial trend of the moment has captured Denver as well.  Denver's not only become wealthier, but an element of artificialness has crept in as well, the way that suddenly wealthy societies built on a false and temporary wealth are.  Think the Roaring Twenties.

Will it stay that way?  Hard to say. But watching Denver over a long period of time, and having noted its rise and fall of fortunes, it's not safe to say.  The one thing that can be said is that its a new Denver, and its not necessarily a better one.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*This isn't a thread on Leadville.  I'll have to put one up someday.  But I will note here is that my grandfather and grandmother's location in Leadville put them in that town in its heyday, and in that period of time during which all of its famous residents, such as the Browns and the Tabors, lived there.  There was a apparently a community of relocated Leadville residents, which would have included the Browns, who lived in Denver after Leadville declined and who regularly met.

**He'd already been to one year of high school, maybe two, when he moved to Casper.  I'd thought for a long time that the entire family moved to Casper at that time but in fact my grandfather must have gone back and forth from Scottsbluff to Casper for some time, as it seems that he was already operating the meatpacking plant he purchased in Casper in 1940 or so.  Chances are that economically there was a period when they weren't able to get a second house and whatnot so there may have been a year or two when he was commuting back and forth very frequently.

***My mother, in contrast went to all Catholic schools. Quebec didn't have public schools at the time and all schooling was private.

****A typical condition of those with asthma is not to talk to people about it and most asthmatics, myself included, never speak of the condition to outsiders.  That's because its impossible to describe and involves some very odd experiences when a person is actively afflicted, including the knowledge that you are repeatedly brought to the edge of death and then back out.  Most young asthmatics, I suspect, spend the rest of their lives with the knowledge that life is very fragile and never have the illusion of long life or the expectation of it that other people have.  Simply having had the condition is its own Momento Mori.  I' only note that all here as childhood asthma creates a profound psychological impact on the person who endures it even if you outgrow it, which a large number of people afflicted with it do.

I've outgrown it and mostly had by the time I had graduated from high school.  Indeed when I enlisted in the National Guard I stated that I hadn't been afflicted since age 13, even if I was, or might have been, fudging on that age. Even at that, however, it came back to a degree while I was in law school when I acquired a new allergy that was a real seasonal problem for several years and which caused a second round of shots.  As that went away, which thankfully it did, the Manx cat volunteered to live with us and took up residence in our home in spite of my theoretically being allergic to cats.  For whatever reason, however, he never caused me to have very many problems, although he did cause some, and when he sadly passed my wife campaigned for a dog, which she had always wanted. That caused the third round of shots.

Swing back to Denver, I'm allergic to something there, but only mildly.  I have no idea what its, but for much of the year if I'm simply there I have a slightly runny nose and feel slightly allergic to something.

December 17, 1918. No Booze for Soldiers. No Booze for Coloradans, No Booze for Montanans. Villa ponders attack

Up until at least the Korean War, if not the Vietnam War, a deficit of clothing meant that discharged soldiers often wore their uniforms after a time following their discharge.  That was very much the case after World War One and World War Two.  Here, the Federal Government was concerned about discharged soldiers drinking in uniform.

In the popular imagination, Prohibition was forced on an unwilling nation by a bunch of silly temperance women who didn't realize that America was a drinking nation.  That version of the story is very far from true.

The Cheyenne State Leader was reporting that Montana would go dry on December 30.  1918 was to be Montana's last "wet" year.  Villa, the paper also reported, was up to no good.

In reality, Prohibition was a hugely popular movement and was gaining ground in the states prior to it become Federal law.  By this date in 1918, Colorado had gone "bone dry" and Montana was about to.

Not all was bleak. One of the Casper papers was reporting that American soldiers still preferred American girls.  Those American soldiers would be bringing home quite a few French brides and even a few Russian ones.  Of course, the report here did contain some bad news for American women.  Some of the soldiers were reporting pretty favorably on les femmes Francais.

So Prohibition was really arriving in the individual states prior to the Volstead Act making it the law of the land and prior to any Constitutional amendment requiring it.  When Prohibition was repealed, it meant that each state that had laws on the books had to revisit those laws if it wanted to likewise repeal Prohibition in their state, which serves as a lesson in rushing to amend laws to comport with what seems to be a national development.  That allowed those states a breather to adapt to the new situation, which in the case of Wyoming it very much took, phasing drinking back in over a period of years.

The other Casper paper noted that "Arrests Halt Delivery of Denver Booze".   What an irony if compared to the Denver of today.

Well, on the not so boozy, presumably, high seas:

1918  The USS Cheyenne, formerly the USS Wyoming, but renamed due the later battleship being assigned that name, assigned to Division I, American Patrol Division. 

The Cheyenne, is to my eye, an exceedingly odd looking vessel.  It was a "monitor", a class of ship that recalled Civil War heritage, given the use of of "monitors" in that war. The more modern class of monitor was designed to pack a big bunch and present a low profile, thereby making it a potent naval weapon that was designed to be hard to hit.  By World War One, it was principally used as a rather odd submarine tender and was flagship of her flotilla in the Atlantic.

Two Casualties of Belleau Wood, Taking a Closer Look. Part Two. Weeden E. Osborne

Lieutenant, junior grade, Weeden E. Osborne.

Weeden E. Osborne was the first commissioned offer in the history of the U.S. Navy to be killed in ground combat overseas. He was also the first officer of the Navy's Dental Corps to be killed in action.  He was the only Navy Medical Corps officer to die in combat in World War One.

He isn't the exception to the rule in regard to just that.

Weeden is actually fairly difficult to obtain accurate information on, at least if you are trying to do it via the net.  Still, we can learn a little.

He was born on November 13, 1892 in Chicago.  Lake Villa, where he seems to have grown up, as we'll see, is a suburb of Chicago today.

He went to primary school, however, at Allendale Farms.  Allendale School was a school for orphans.  As we'll see, other evidence also suggests that Osborne had lost his parents at an early age.  At any rate, he graduated from that facility and, after completing school he went to work and worked his way through Northwestern in Chicago, graduating dental school in 1915.  That would have made him a dentist at the young age, at least for today, of 23.  And that's a pretty impressive record for somebody who had an apparent rough start in life.

What exactly he did thereafter is a little unclear, but at least a paper with connections to Allendale Farm (but which focused on dogs) claims that he relocated to St. Joseph Missouri, where he started his dental practice.  If he did, it seems that by 1917 he had relocated to Denver, Colorado, where he was instructing in the Dental School at Denver University, which was noted about him by the National Dental Association, of which he must have been a member.*  The ADA's journal spoke highly of him but noted that his disposition was "nervous", and also energetic.  It might well have been, given that he had gone from being a resident of a school for orphans to a dentist at rocket speed.  That may well have been while he moved on to being a dental professor in Denver, or perhaps his young age made it difficult for him to gather a practice.

He wasn't at that long before the Great War arrived.

He seems to have entered the service from Denver but gave a Chicago residence as his permanent residence upon entering the service, for which there could be a lot of reasons.  He listed his sister as his nearest relative, and she was also living in Chicago, in some sort of association with Wheaten College, but he didn't give her address on Racine as his.**

He was carried on the Navy's roles as a Dental Surgeon, with an appointment date of May 8, 1917.  He served in Boston and Alabama in that role until March 1918 when he was assigned by the Navy to the Marine Corps.  The Marines are a branch of the Navy, and this was even more true at the time than it is now, and the Marine Corps was provided with all of its medical personnel from the Navy.

He had only been at the front with the Marines for a few days when the Marine unit he was attached to went into action at Belleau Wood.  While there, he exposed himself to German fire again and again as he went into the field to help bring in wounded Marines.  He was helping to carry wounded Cpt. Donald F. Duncan when shell fire killed both Osborne and Duncan.

The Recruit Dental Station at the Navy's Great Lakes training facility, which is in his native home of Chicago, is named after him.  And the Marine Corps has remembered him and another dental corps member in the name of an award that they give to members of that branch annually.

So here too, was this a sad story?  It's certainly not a typical one.  Weeden seems to have been a Chicago orphan who overcame his circumstances to become a dentist at a very young age, while keeping in touch with a sister in Chicago.  He was killed at age 25, just starting out, but seems to have applied the heroism that characterized his life to what he saw on the field of battle.

Marker for Lt. J.G. Weeden E. Osborne at the Belleau Wood Cemetery in France.

*This era saw the real rise of professional organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, and the American Bar Association.  All of these organizations were working to improve the professionalism of their professions, and they all had very wide membership.  The percentages of practitioners who are members of these organizations has declined greatly since then.

**I don't know Chicago at all, but Racine is depicted as the street of residence of the Irish policeman who is killed by the mob in the film The Untouchables.

Countdown on the Great War, November 2, 1918: British and Canadians take Valenciennes, German subs strike again, German sailors make demands, Polish Ukranian War spreads, and the Flu marches on.

Hugh Cairns, Canadian who posthumously won the Victoria Cross, the last VC awarded to a Canadian for action during the Great War.

1. Canadian and British troops capture Valenciennes, France, on the border with Belgium, after heavy fighting. During the fighting the heroism of Canadian Sgt. Hugh Cairns would result in his being awarded the last Victoria Cross of World War One to a Canadian soldier.  His citation reads:

For most conspicuous bravery before Valenciennes on 1st November, 1918, when a machine gun opened on his platoon. Without a moment's hesitation Serjt. Cairns seized a Lewis gun and single-handed, in the face of direct fire, rushed the post, killed the crew of five, and captured the gun. Later, when the line was held up by machine-gun fire, he again rushed forward, killing 12 enemy and capturing 18 and two guns.

Subsequently, when the advance was held up by machine guns and field guns, although wounded, he led a small party to outflank them, killing many, forcing about 50 to surrender, and capturing all the guns. After consolidation he went with a battle patrol to exploit Marly and forced 60 enemy to surrender. Whilst disarming this party he was severely wounded. Nevertheless, he opened fire and inflicted heavy losses. Finally he was rushed by about 20 enemy and collapsed from weakness and loss of blood. Throughout the operation he showed the highest degree of valour, and his leadership greatly contributed to the success of the attack. He died on the 2nd November from wounds.

2.  Allied forces in the Balkans reach Bosnia but halt as cease fire with a crumbling Astro Hungarian Empire is signed.

3.  The war started yesterday between Ukrainians and Poles in the Austro Hungarian territoryof Galicia spread to Przemyśl. The fighting would go on, with occasionally cease fires, with the town going back and forth between the various sides, for ten days until the Poles prevailed and were accordingly able to send supplies to Lvov.  Today the town is on the Polish Ukrainian border.

In 1918 the town had an overwhelming Polish majority population, with the second largest ethnic group being Polish Jews.  Poles, Polish Jews, and Ukrainians all had formed militias to defend their parts of the city before fighting had broken out.

4.  The British cargo ship Murcia was torpedoed by the German submarine UC-74 in the Mediterranean with the loss of one hand.  The Germans scuttled four submarines on the same date.

5.  Miss Hattie Raithel of Denver Colorado, volunteer Red Cross nurse, died of the Spanish Flu in England.

6.  German sailors held an open air meeting in Kiel to air their grievances and to try to gain closure tied to German unions (many of which the working class sailors would have been close to anyhow), the Independent Social Democratic Party adn the Social Democratic Party.  The result was a call for a subsequent larger mass meeting the following day.