September 10, 2001 - 16:21 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Golden Memories

Sitting here today and looking back I realize that childhood, and youth were short time eras in my life.

The things we did then probably covered at the most six years, but in my mind the time seemed to stretch into eons.

In the begining there was an older brother of one of our group who came along and basically rode herd on us, we were near the age that the grown folks would let us go all day on our own. We had all been to Golden, Colorado. It was at that time a small town nestled up against the foothills west of Denver. Its main Industry was Coors. Even during the depression Coors produced laboratory porcelain, probably the best in the country. They also had other things going besides beer to keep functioning.

Golden was reached by two interurban routes of our Tramway, one north and one south each having attractive sights for us. We liked riding the interurban trolley because both lines reached open areas soon after they left down town and the trolleys would begin to put on some speed, and we could watch the front of the old wooden body trolley twist the opposite direction from the back where we sat, speed would accentuate that characteristic.

During the hot summer we would dig up our chips and take a ride out to Golden. Riding out with the car windows open letting a little breeze in, yelling and laughing because when we went during the early work day, few grown ups used the trolley, it was ours. We would admire the buildings of Colorado School of Mines and go to the big drug store in town which was somewhat of a general store too. Often a precious dime or quarter would be spent buying something there that we could not find in stores near us in Denver.

It would be a tad cooler in Golden than in Denver, but soon we would head for the creek that runs through town and hike up into the hills along the roadbed of a railroad that once ran up to Blackhawk, (I think ?) anyway, to the mining area. Tracks had long ago been torn out but it gave us favorable hiking conditions. The creek through there was not a brawling stream but a quietly melodic flow of clear, cold water from the mountains. The flow of air coming downstream was soft and cool, soothing our sweaty bodies.

Flat surface was more or less unknown, we were in a small canyon whose irregular rock walls were a treat to us who were used to straight streets, vertical buildings and the bustle of town.

Each time up there we would again sight see and imagine how things were back in the old days when Indians had their observers of the plains up on Lookout mountain nearby. Like puppy dogs our course was hither and yon, looking at everything, plants, rocks seeking caves and chasing the small scurrying four leggers. Usually we each would find some kind of stick, limb or something that we thought we were using for hiking staffs, of course we used our jacknives to cut patterns on the sticks. Aspen trees did not grown down that low and staffs cut from Aspen were what we really desired. We would climb now and then pretending to be intrepid explorers in a new land.

I think that we never saw another person during each of our forays up the canyon as we communed with the natural world, bareheaded, sunburned noses and all.

Usually we carried a few home made sandwiches and some of us had fancy canteens, the rest of us drank from the creek. It was relatively safe then.

Eventually the day would laten, the sun would begin to drop lower in the sky and we would realize that our day of cool, fresh freedom was coming to an end. Our course was down hill along the stream until dusty and tired we would stop once again at the big drug store and consume the nectar of the soda fountain before we went to catch the trolley back.

If we had come up on the south route, we returned on the north route. There would be a few grown folks headed in to town so we would hold the exuberance down to a small uproar, we were too pooped to stir up much of anything.

We would usually do this about twice in the heat of summer.

I remember fondly the smell of growing things, even there the scent of evergreens was on the air, we had such a good time when we ventured to go out on our own for a day.

We didn't know then that we were storing for later use our Golden Memories . . . . . .

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