Painted Bricks: West of Surrender, Denver Colorado.

Painted Bricks: West of Surrender, Denver Colorado.:   

West of Surrender, Denver Colorado.

 

From a bar and grill, West of Surrender, in downtown Denver.

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Party VIII. Infrastructure Money

 December 23, 2021

Wyoming's Airports to receive $15.1M in Infrastructure Money

The Federal funds can be used for terminals, runways and parking lots and the like.

Of Wyoming airports, Jackson's will get the most, receiving $3.38M.  Natrona County International Airport gets the second-largest amount at $1.34M.  Natrona  County's airport will use the funds for electrical work.

January 4, 2021

More Colorado eateries are closing, with downtown Denver's formerly iconic all night diner Breakfast King closing yesterday.

January 24, 2022

United Airlines has asked for $1,000,000

from the Federal Government in order to keep air travel open on United flights from Cody (Yellowstone Regional Airport) to Denver.

February 3, 2022

A Federal Court has invalidated recent offshore oil and gas leases that came up in a recent sale on the basis that the Government didn't comport with environmental regulations.

It is thought this may spill over to onshore leases as well.

February 4, 2022

An intergovernmental spat has broken out between the USPS and the EPA over USPS replacement vehicles.

The Post Office announced that only 10% of its new vehicle force will be electric, causing the EPA to massively react.  There have been calls for the head of the Post Office to resign.

My prediction is that they'll redo the order, and order electric.

March 3, 2022

In an example of embarrassing bad timing, the nuclear power plant to be constructed in Kemmerer anticipated using Russian sourced nuclear fuel and, at least right now, there's no obvious alternative.

March 7, 2022

Oil topped $130/bbl yesterday briefly due to the Russo Ukrainian War.  It was at $121/bbl at the time this was posted.

Wheat prices are also up for the same reason, with there being little in the way of an American due to the drought that set in last year and which, at least right now, is continuing.

Last Prior Edition:

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Party VII Going Nuclear

Sigh. . .

 oh for the days when you could listen to KOA give the play by play for the Denver Bears. . . 

Denver City Camera (Sponsored by Boesen Law)

March 29, 1941. Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center in Denver and Italian surface fleet defeated.

Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center, in Denver Colorado, or more properly on the edge of it, was photographed from the air on this day in 1941.

Fitzsimmons is now the Anschutz Medical Center in north Denver.  It's not on the edge of town, but it still isn't really that far away, growth of Denver not withstanding.

I was first on these grounds when it was still an Army installation.  I went on it to go to the PX, although the PX I went to (I'm not sure if it was the only one), wasn't one of the better ones I ever visited.  If I recall correctly, I was hoping to pick up a pair of BDU trousers.  I picked up a t-shirt instead.  It may sound odd, but I've long since lost it. As I have t-shirts older than (we're talking the mid 1980s) that's a bit surprising.  I likely outgrew it, circumferentially.  

Two more Italian ships were sunk in the culmination of a several day running battle in the Mediterranean between the Italian and British navies. Once again, the Italians proved themselves to be losing everywhere.   This was the effective end of the Italian surface fleet as a fighting force during the war.

More on that here:  

Today in World War II History—March 29, 1941

The aftermath of Matapan

Day 576 March 29, 1941

German test pilot and unrepentant Nazi Hanna Reitsch may have won the Iron Cross on this day, or it may have been the day prior.  This day would have been her 39th birthday.

Reitsch never did acknowledge the atrocities of the Third Reich and as late as the 1970s she was not only unapologetic but confessed she was still a Nazi.  She none the less lived in Ghana for an extended time post World War Two and show no racism towards Africans at that time.  She seems to have adopted a Holocaust denier position.  She and Werner Von Braun were the parents of her only child, whose parentage was not acknowledged at the time.

On the same day, the first Beechcraft C-45A was complete.

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

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

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.

Weld County, Wyoming? No thanks.

The degree to which boosters completely fail to think out the things that they boost is one of the stories that repeats itself continually throughout history.

The law of unintended consequences.

Weld County, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Weld County, Colorado, is unhappy with the direction the State of Colorado has taken in recent years, with those recent years probably stretching back into the 1990s.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Weld County is a big blocky county in northeastern Colorado which includes Greeley, that city being its county seat.  The county has a lot of oil and gas, being part of the oil and gas province stretching up into Laramie County, Wyoming and down nearly into Denver and it borders Fort Collins.  Oil and gas makes up its bread and butter.

The state flag of Colorado at the time of my grandmother's birth in Leadville, Colorado.

It's unhappy for the following reasons.

Colorado has always had divides between its regions. The east slope of the Rockies doesn't get along very well with the west slope.  The southwestern regions, first settled by New Mexicans, doesn't get along with anyone else (in my view, they may most closely resemble Wyomingites from Wyoming).  And the rural areas don't get along with Denver.

All of which leads you to wonder why Colorado was so hip on boosting the Big Blight, Denver.  

Denver, the Queen City of the Plains, was a giant version of Casper, Wyoming up into the 1980s.  A large city even then, its economy was based on agriculture and petroleum.  My father was born in Denver in 1929 when his father, originally from Dyersville, Iowa, was working there in the office of a meat packing company.  He's later move from there to another meat packing company in Scottsbluff, Nebraska and then own his own in Casper.  The point there is that he was from a heavily agricultural state, Iowa, and worked in the production end of agriculture first in Denver.

The oddly simple minded flag of Colorado from 1911 to 1964.  After 1964 the "C" grew enormously in size, but the flag is basically the same and still oddly simple minded.

The oil crash of the 1980s made downtown Denver like a ghost town.  I can well recall waking around in Denver as a college student.  Lots of businesses where shuttered.  The windows of the Episcopal cathedral had been busted out.  It was bad.

So Colorado rose to the occasion.  It boosted different reason to visit Denver, a lot of those rural entertainment themed.  

And then came dope.

Colorado attracted a lot of west coasters who were fleeing the blight of California to come to Denver to make Denver west coast blighty.  They were politically far to the left of the Coloradoans who had acted to attract them.  They gained in the legislature, legalized weed, and Denver became the stupefied capital of the Rockies.  That solidified political control in the left and in recent years the legislature has been acting like Democratic legislatures due, seeking to regulate oil and gas and restricting all things firearm.

D'uh.

Old building in downtown Greeley.

All of this was predictable.

Now some of the rural counties of Colorado want out of Colorado.  Some years ago there was an effort to take five of them out and form a new state.  Presumably the proposed name of the new state was going to be Delusional, as that was never going to happen.

Now there's a petition in Weld County to have it leave Colorado and join Wyoming.

Weld County Courthouse.

And Governor Gordon, on Fox News, gave it support.

Weld County has a population of 320,000, nearly the same as Wyoming itself.  If it was part of Wyoming, it would control the House completely.

Moreover, Wyoming would now border weedy Denver, which is basically expanding into Weld County, and we couldn't begin to control what that might mean.  Oil and gas might be temporarily safe in Weld County, and there'd be no significant firearms restrictions, but soon the Hippy Dippy Denverites would be electing representatives to the Wyoming House itself.  

Our increased population might mean we'd get another Congressman, but between Weld County, Albany County, Fremont County and Teton County, there's be no guaranty at all that said Congressman would be a Republican.

Railroad station in Greeley.

Wyomingites would hate Weld County.

Truth be known, there's a lot of division in Wyoming already.  Most of the state isn't happy with Teton County most of the time, but is unwilling to do the simple things that would address that, such as a real estate sales importation tax, or high income, income tax.  That'd drive out the jet set, but we're not there yet, and by the time we will be, it'll be too late.  Additionally, the entire state is suspicious of the southeastern farm counties to some degree, which Weld County would be another of, as they keep producing the radical anti public lands legislators.  There is no public land there, we've noticed.

This proposal is, of course, not going anywhere.  Colorado isn't going to let Weld County go and in short order the political forces that are boosting this will be subsumed by the expansion of Denver into Weld County.  But the Governor boosting this secessionist movement is really ill advised.

Indeed, what Wyoming ought to do is sit back and consider the example of Weld County. The state is perpetually boosting "come on in" efforts, even though most Wyomingites have a "stay out" view.  Colorado had that same attitude and people came on in.  Now the areas of Colorado that remain what Colorado was before that want out of the state.

And, hence, a person must be careful what they wish for.

Sunday Morning Scene. Churches of the West: St. Dominic Catholic Church, Old Highlands District, Denver Colorado.

Churches of the West: St. Dominic Catholic Church, Old Highlands Distric...: 

St. Dominic Catholic Church, Old Highlands District, Denver Colorado.

This is St. Dominic Catholic Church in the Old Highlands District of Denver, Colorado.  

This large Gothic style church was the second St. Dominic's in Denver, both of which, fittingly enough, were and are Dominican churches.  The church was originally associated with a school, but the school closed in 1973.  The Church itself was built in 1926, replacing one that had been built in the late 19th Century.

The rectory for the church stands next door and is just a bit older, having been built in 1923.

Sunday Morning Scene. Churches of the West: Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church, Old Highlands Denver Colorado

Churches of the West: Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church, Old Highlands D...: 

Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church, Old Highlands District, Denver Colorado.

This is the Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church in the Old Highlands District of Denver, Colorado.  The church was built in 1890 and at the time it was built, it had no surrounding structures.  The Gothic style church is still a Methodist church today.

"Denver has outgrown us". El Chapultepec closes.

I really wondered how it was hanging on.

I'd never been in there, and I apparently never got a picture of it from the outside for our Painted Bricks blog.  It wasn't very photogenetic anyway.  But when the Mexican restaurant turned jazz club found itself no longer in the seedy Five Points district it had survived in for years, but in the new gentrified up and coming Coors Field area, without moving an inch, it just didn't look quite right.  It's old school "the nightlife ain't the right life, but it's my life" type of genuine atmosphere didn't squire with the hipsterization of where it was.

COVID 19 didn't help things, but the owners were quick to note that it wasn't solely responsible for brining its 87 year existence to an end.

Jazz musicians and blues musicians, they shouldn’t have to time their sets around baseball innings and when the crowds are going to get out and be wild. They should be able to play their music, and the crowd should just be there to enjoy them, The employees and our musicians, our customers, we shouldn’t have to be worried about our safety when it’s time to leave.

Denver’s outgrown us.

So stated one of the owners.

I love Coors Field and baseball, about the only thing about Denver I actually like. But there isn't anything I like about Denver without some degree of reservation.  Like everything else, there really isn't a permanent "old Denver" that was in some state of perfection.  The area that El Chapultepec was in prior to Coors Field was a scary dump which was a bit scary to drive through in the middle of the day.  It wasn't until Coors Field overhauled everything downtown that it changed.

But it was a change that to an end the feeling that the jazz club belonged there.  A jazz club could probably exist somewhere else in Denver, but it wouldn't be genuine in the same fashion that El Chapultepec was.

But that's true of a lot of Denver now.

Indeed, that's true of a lot of the US, but Denver is somehow sort of unique in this way.  The town that my father was born in, four years before El Chapultepec opened, was still around in many ways into the 1980s when I first started to go there on my own. Bits of that, indeed, still are.  But when it pulled out of the oil recession of the 1990s it really started off in another direction even as the oil companies came back.  Prior to that point it was sort of an overgrown cow town in some real ways. Then it started to become a hipster epicenter, followed soon thereafter by a new weedy culture based on pharmacological stupefaction. That's what basically characterizes the town town today.  And the change hasn't overall been a good one.

Not that those who hung out at the jazz club were models of universal clean living.  It was a bar. But the set in seediness in the old Five Points district was of a different sort than the new widespread seediness that characterizes a lot of Denver.  In between was sort of a high point when it looked like the city would overcome its decay without creating a new one, based on Coors Field and what it brought to the downtown.  It did partially succeed but weed took a lot of it away.

Oddities of Cultural and Historical Correctness.

King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, two Spanish monarchs whose regal motto was Tanto monta, Isabel como Fernando, or They amount to the same, Isabella and Ferdinand, symbolizing their equality as monarchs, something further cemented by a prenuptial agreement to that effect. Among the successes of their unification of the Spanish crown and the accompanying unification of most of the Iberian peninsula under a single, Spanish, crown, was the launching of the Spanish Empire through the sponsorship of Christopher Columbus' endeavor.  Did we note that they were Spanish?

Denver has renamed Columbus Park "La Raza Park".

Because, as we know, Christopher Columbus was a racist colonizer.

La Raza, we're informed, is a name that has all positive connotations for Hispanics of all ethnicities.

It translates as "the race".

Now, in using that term, we need to be careful.  Many people if they called themselves "the race" would be using a term that would be, after all, racist.  Particularly if you were using a term associated with a racist colonial endeavor.

Christopher Columbus, as we know, was a racist colonizer.

He was working for the King and Queen of Spain. . . who were Hispanics. . . and whose Spanish conquest created . . . well. . . "the race".

So, Denver, in an effort to be culturally pure has taken away from a park the name of an Italian contractor with the Hispanic crown and renamed the park for the results of his work, in actual terms.

Things get complicated when you seek to be woke.

Archbishop Chaput says what should have been said long ago. Scandal.

I'm certain that most of the readers here do not know who Archbishop Charles J. Chaput is.  For Catholic insiders, however, or for those who follow the Church closely, or for those who listen to Catholic Stuff You Should Know (which should be everybody), he's a familiar name.

The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Denver Colorado.

Archbishop Chaput is a highly respected, brilliant, and very orthodox Catholic cleric who was located for many years in Denver, Colorado.  When he came up on the mandatory retirement age for his office there was hopeful speculation in orthodox Catholic circles that the Pope would keep him in position, as will sometimes be the case.  Instead Pope Francis immediately accepted his retirement which in the eyes of many Catholics who are struggling with their outlook on the his papacy was another strike against it.

Chaput, as noted, is a very orthodox cleric and a noted intellectual.  He is a Capuchin Franciscan and also a Potawatomi Indian.  He was the Archbishop of Denver before becoming the Archbishop of Philadelphia.  Many hoped he'd be made a Cardinal, but he never was.

I wish he had been, and I'm not alone.

He hasn't gone quietly into retirement.

And he just came out for denying President Joe Biden communion in the journal First Things.

Now, right away some casual readers here, if there are any, are going to be confused.  Reading this blog some days you'd think that I was a diehard opponent of Donald Trump, and others you'd think I was a diehard opponent of Joe Biden. Rather, I'm like Catholic apologist Gloria Purvis who unleashed a blistering defense of Catholic orthodoxy, against Melania Trump, last week upsetting Trump supporters even though she wasn't supporting Joe Biden either. Rather, she was supporting Catholic orthodoxy  noting that Biden and his crew are seriously outside of Catholic doctrine in supporting things a Catholic in good standing cannot, and Melania is a baptized Catholic in a marriage that Catholics don't recognize as a marriage.  The theme was scandal.

And so is Archbishop Chaput's

This gets into something I just noted here the other day, which is that those who like to define Joe Biden as a "Catholic" President or the nation's "second Catholic President" are more than a little off the mark.

Yes, it's true that Biden is a Mass attending Catholic.  And so was Jack Kennedy.  But Kennedy, as much as he is lambasted here, and he has been, may have been a more faithful Catholic than Biden, even though Biden appears to be a personally much more honorable man, and Kennedy had the personal morals of an alley cat.

All of which assumes a lot.

Joe Biden has a heavy burden in front of him.  Donald Trump has managed to wrap himself in the mantle of populism and nationalism, even as he is personally a horrific example of personal conduct.  His personal relationships with women doesn't appear to compare favorably with Biden's and are much more like Kennedy's.  At the same time, he's been the most pro life American President since 1973 and he also has been more loyal to the working class since any President since Truman.  There's a reason that populist feel that he's a "real" American and that anyone else is a traitor, and that's a lot of what Biden has to overcome.

Biden could in no small part do that by being true to his origins. . .and his Faith.  And if his faith means anything, he should do that in any event.  With his historical track record, that won't be easy.

Which is where Archbishop Chaput comes in.  The Archbishop starts off:

Readers may recall that during the 2004 presidential campaign, Sen. John Kerry led the Democratic ticket. As a Catholic, Kerry held certain policy views that conflicted with the moral beliefs of his Church. This led to internal tensions among U.S. bishops about how to handle the matter of Holy Communion for Catholic public officials who publicly and persistently diverge from Catholic teaching on issues like abortion. At the time, Washington’s then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, along with Pittsburgh’s Bishop Donald Wuerl, had very different views from my own regarding how to proceed.  

I believed then, and believe now, that publicly denying Communion to public officials is not always wise or the best pastoral course. Doing so in a loud and forceful manner may cause more harm than good by inviting the official to bask in the media glow of victimhood. What I opposed in 2004, however, was any seeming indifference to the issue, any hint in a national bishops’ statement or policy that would give bishops permission to turn their heads away from the gravity of a very serious issue. At the time, fortunately, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith resolved any confusion about correct practice in these matters with its July 2004 memorandum to then-Cardinal McCarrick, Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles. It includes the following passage:

5. Regarding the grave sin of abortion or euthanasia, when a person’s formal cooperation becomes manifest (understood, in the case of a Catholic politician, as his consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws), his Pastor should meet with him, instructing him about the Church’s teaching, informing him that he is not to present himself for Holy Communion until he brings to an end the objective situation of sin, and warning him that he will otherwise be denied the Eucharist.

6. When “these precautionary measures have not had their effect or in which they were not possible,” and the person in question, with obstinate persistence, still presents himself to receive the Holy Eucharist, “the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it” (cf. Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts Declaration “Holy Communion and Divorced, Civilly Remarried Catholics” [2002], nos. 3-4). This decision, properly speaking, is not a sanction or a penalty. Nor is the minister of Holy Communion passing judgment on the person’s subjective guilt, but rather is reacting to the person’s public unworthiness to receive Holy Communion due to an objective situation of sin.

To my knowledge, that statement remains in effect. And it reflects longstanding Catholic sacramental discipline based on the Word of God.

And indeed it does.  

Archbishop Chaput goes on to state:

The implications for the present moment are clear. Public figures who identify as “Catholic” give scandal to the faithful when receiving Communion by creating the impression that the moral laws of the Church are optional. And bishops give similar scandal by not speaking up publicly about the issue and danger of sacrilege. Thus it’s also worth revisiting the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the evil—and the grave damage—of scandal:

2284.  Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense.

2286.  Scandal can be provoked by laws or institutions, by fashion or opinion. Therefore, they are guilty of scandal who establish laws or social structures leading to the decline of morals and the corruption of religious practice, or to “social conditions that, intentionally or not, make Christian conduct and obedience to the Commandments difficult and practically impossible.”  This is also true of business leaders who make rules encouraging fraud, teachers who provoke their children to anger, or manipulators of public opinion who turn it away from moral values.

Those bishops who publicly indicate in advance that they will undertake their own dialogue with President-elect Joseph Biden and allow him Communion effectively undermine the work of the task force established at the November bishops’ conference meeting to deal precisely with this and related issues. This gives scandal to their brother bishops and priests, and to the many Catholics who struggle to stay faithful to Church teaching. It does damage to the bishops’ conference, to the meaning of collegiality, and to the fruitfulness of the conference’s advocacy work with the incoming administration.

"Scandal".

It's a word that we hardly seem to believe exists anymore but which we are seemingly simultaneously getting a reintroduction to.  

It's meaning is not the same in the secular world as it is in the religious sense, but it is related, and oddly in contemporary time perhaps it has once again intersected.

Archbishop Chaput, in First Things, calls for the observance of certain absolutes, absolutes that Joe Biden states he's for.  Joe Biden, at the same time has lived a life of moral compromise.  Most politicians do.

But most politicians haven't been presented with the challenges that Biden has.  He has to succeed.

And most politicians don't have as heavy of past burden as Biden.

And that means doing the bold and unconventional.  And that in part means going back to what is fundamental, and what we profess to be true.  Not that its easy. Great confessions are not easy, which is party of why great sanctity is not easy. But that is why we should strive to go through the narrow gate.  Going the broad path is easy. . .  but the result is far from assured. . . which ironically makes it the harder one in the end.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Metropolitan Community Church, Denver Colorado.

The thing omitted from this commentary was that I was somewhat lost when I took this photo, even though I've been in this neighborhood a million times.

Oops.

Churches of the West: Metropolitan Community Church, Denver Colorado.: 

Metropolitan Community Church, Denver Colorado.

I really know nothing about this church at all, other than its in the Capitol Hill region of Denver where a lot of older churches are.  It's not far from the large Episcopal Cathedral in Denver.  Based upon what I can find about it, it fits into the politically and theologically liberal branch of Protestantism, and its occupying a church that was almost certainly built for another denomination some time ago.  

My photo of it is awful, but I was in a hurry at the time I stumbled across it.

December 12, 1940. Compass and U-boots

 

December 12, 1940 photograph of construction of a water tower at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital, now the Anschutz Medical Center, in Denver.

Day 469 December 12, 1940

The Sheffield Blitz, three days of Luftwaffe bombing of that English city, began.

And it was the Christmas shopping season.

Department store display, Sachs, December 12, 1940.

Remembering Denver’s deadliest riots a century later

Remembering Denver’s deadliest riots a century later: Historian Steve Leonard explains why the August 1920 Denver Tramway strike remains relevant today. PLUS: Archival images show how the protests brought the city to a standstill.

August 6, 1920. The Denver Post Wrecked By Tramway Strikers.

The Denver Post was wrecked by Denver's tramway strikers.

And in Poland, the fate of Warsaw looked grim.

August 1, 1920. Denver Tramway workers go on strike.

Denver Tramway Building in Denver, which now houses the giant Denver REI outlet.

Workers for Denver Tramway, the cities streetcar company, went on strike on this day in 1920.

Founded in 1886, Denver Tramway had expanded aggressively and become a monopoly in the city.  Its workers founded a union in 1918 and were demanding fare increases in order that their wages could be raised.  Denied their goal, they went out on strike on this day.

 Cable car barn on 14th and Arapahoe.

The company responded by bringing in strike breakers, with the first street car piloted from the cable car barn at 14th and Arapahoe by strike breaker John "Black Jack" Jerome, whom the company had hired to organize strike breakers.  The strike would soon turn violent and up to 1/3d of the cities police reported by August 6 to have received serious injuries.  Denver's mayor called for armed citizens to enforce the peace on that day and Federal troops arrived later that day and restored order.

Cheyenne State Leader from August 1, 1920, noting that strike breakers were being brought in.

The net result was that the union was broken and would not be reorganized until 1933.  Seven Denverites were dead, all of whom were in the nature of bystanders to the violence.

Jerome, who was born Yiannis Petrolekas in Greece, would go on to have a successful career in his dangerous profession.  A poor immigrant to the US who had arrived in 1905, he had first sought his fortune in aviation but in 1917 he changed his name and founded the Jerome Detective Agency.  Having worked in the streetcar industry, he offered its services to strike and union breaking, which made him a rich man.  His company expanded during this time and at one time even employed Dashiell Hammett, prior to his becoming famous.

He invested in real estate and, during the depression, in horse and dog racing.  In 1933 he returned to Greece a rich man, while still retaining business interests in the United States.  He died in San Francisco in 1953, his funeral delayed as an undertakers union went on strike in protest over his having broken a strike of theirs in prior years.

Strife

Denver put a curfew in place and the Colorado National Guard has been called out to address riots in the Centennial State's capitol city.

National Guardsmen of the 40th Armored Division, California National Guard, August, 1965.

The riots stem from several recent incidents of violent deaths of African Americans, the most recent at the hands of a policeman in Minneapolis Minnesota.

Those riots have spread all across the urban United States.  It's hard, from a distance, to grasp why hundreds of miles away from the scene of the offense riots take place against a community that didn't participate in the offense.  It points to something underlying, and the pundits will be full of analysis over it over the next several weeks.

But on the topic in general, distant riots aren't calculated to achieve anything and end up punishing the communities that were affiliated by them.  Businesses move, employment drops, and those who were deprived to start with are more deprived.  It's a compounding tragedy.

And its one that, in this context, we should be well past.  And yet we're not.

Will the bad news never cease?

Forget the impeachment, forget the imbroglio about Ukraine, forget Vladimir Putin scheming to make himself Russian Czar for eternity.

There's really serious bad news out there.

Taylor McGregor is leaving her position as a sports announcer for AT&T SportsNet in Colorado to take up one as a reporter for the Marquee Sports Network in Chicago, where she'll cover the Cubs.  She covered the Rockies in Colorado.

Will the tragedies never cease?

For those unfamiliar with McGregor, the tall blond sportscaster combined Kate Upton quality good looks (it's my blog. . . I can say that) with really excellent sports delivery.  Indeed, it was that delivery that makes her a great sportscaster. 

McGregor is one of Keli McGregor's daughters.  Keli McGregor was the president of the Rockies and died of a heart attack, due to an undetected viral infection, at age 48.  Taylor was 17 years old at the time.  Since that tragedy she went on to the University of Arkansas where, as in high school, she was a standout athlete in her own right.  At about the time of her graduation she was seeing baseball player Ty Hensley who was about to break out into the major leagues, but never really did.  Hensley plays with the Utica Unicorns now.

Hensley's star may have faded, although he's still achieved something I never will in actually being a professional baseball player, but Taylor's has risen.  After graduating she was located as a sportscaster in Casper Wyoming for awhile where it was obvious that she was headed for a lot more than broadcasting local sports.  Indeed, I've noted that before.

What a radical shift from not even all that long ago.  The other television channel, KTWO, was for some time the only local television station and its news department was a big deal when I was a kid.  Locals, for whatever reason, welcomed it when they got competition, but now they're back to being the only local broadcast station.  Both stations, for some time, have had the feeling to them of being training grounds for television news folks who are moving on to elsewhere, however, with those younger broadcasters being of varying qualities, sometimes great (like sportscaster Taylor McGregor who is now back in her native Denver and broadcasts particularly for the Rockies, at which she is excellent) and sometimes not so much.

I guess that gives Casper bragging rights really.  Just like we do over the small number or pro players from here or who played here at one time.

Sigh.

But watching Rockies baseball will never be the same.

January 3, 1920. A Roaring Start

1920 was certainly off to a "roaring" start.

The news on January 3 was all about the Palmer raids of January 2, which came one day after the first Palmer raids on January 1.  A huge sweep of the nation had rounded up a lot of "Reds", which in this context were simply radicals of all stripes.  Indeed, in Russia, where the civil war was raging, the Reds of the Communist Party had proven to be bad news for the socialist left, even the radical socialist left, as well as for anarchists.  In the US, however, they were all being rounded up together.

Radicals were even reported lurking in Denver stores.

The Press, which was generally Progressive, didn't shed any tears for the radical right. Now the Palmer Raids are regarded as an embarrassment, but the time, not so much. . . at least for awhile.

Mexico was showing up again on the front page and had been for some time, we'd note.  Fighting was still ongoing and an election was scheduled.  In the midst of it, Carranza had decided to try to reorganize the Mexican Federal army.

Radicals in store or no, the National Western Stock Show, a big even that's still held annually in Denver, was about to get rolling.

In Washington D. C., famous figures of the recent war continued to visit.

Admiral Jellicoe with Admiral Niblack on the latter's arrival at the Union Station, Washington D.C., January 3, 1920