What Made Boulder Great? Actually, A “Violet” Dose of Capitalism
Having grown up in Boulder, Colorado, I (and most of my old friends around me) have seen Boulder change substantially over the decades. Boulder, throughout the later 60s, 70s, and 80s was always known as a free-thinking, creative (and sometimes drugged) society, where the laws of physics, nature, economics, and even the United States really didn’t seem to matter to a lot of people, especially the younger generation that were conducting the bulk of this intellectual freedom seeking. But that’s not really what made Boulder great; we need to look back at our parents to really understand what established Boulder firmly on the map, and it started well before the city’s crazy-left reputation was established.
Boulder, for those of you that transplanted here in the last 30 years, was a mecca of big industry, lots of Federal government, and a modest-sized university. Boulder was capitalism, at its finest. Those of you that moved here after 1985 may have distant, vague memories and heard passed-down folklore about that, and those of you that arrived after 1995 are just probably horrified to hear that at all. Sorry, folks – it’s true. Boulder was the middle/upper-middle class city under the foothills, 18 miles from Denver (separated by miles of bare land, unlike today), where industry started and flourished. It was a town full of black-tie-wearing super smart people sporting pocket-protectors and a love for the outdoors. It was a town where Democrats and Republicans lived in harmony, shared ideas, had mild yet friendly debates, and then flipped the burgers over one more time before all sitting down to a nice summer meal. Boulder wasn’t blue, and Boulder wasn’t red; Boulder was hardcore violet.
Looking back at the industry in Boulder, how many of you knew that Boulder was the home for most people that worked just south of town at Rockwell International? This was also known at Rocky Flats. Rockwell made, among other things, the uranium triggers necessary to initiate a plutonium reaction in our nuclear warheads. Every plutonium weapon in the US arsenal had a trigger made by many of our parents, including several of our classmates’ dads (and several thousand other people in town). In essence, Boulder kept us safe. But Boulder was also the home for Tecnetics, out on east Arapahoe Avenue. Several of us worked there for a while during our college years; but who else knew that Tecnetics produced the power supplies for the Tomahawk missile systems still in use today? One of our classmate’s father was the CEO out there for a while. Yup – that’s Boulder still being the evil defense contracting city, keeping us safe. And, of course, there was the always secretive Beech Aircraft just north of the Boulder city limits, nestled against the foothills along US 36. How many of us knew that the facility contained multiple buildings, had a multi-level underground complex, and was involved in the assembly, subassembly, and fueling of missile and other aerospace systems for both commercial and defense industries?
What about IBM just northeast of Boulder, by the Gunbarrel subdivision? IBM’s campus sprawled over 100 acres and employed thousands of people, mostly living in Boulder, including several of our classmates’ parents. How about Storage Technology (STC), in Louisville? One of the world’s foremost producers of large-scale data storage platforms for many, many years. I still remember one of our classmates, one of the STC owner’s daughters, driving the Seville or the 450SL to school, parking next to my little Toyota (which was still more fun, sorry Robin…).
And who remembers Neodata? It was the third largest employer (2,600) in Boulder county, with (again) lots of our parents working there, and it was one of the first subscription fulfillment (and direct marketing) organizations in the country. It served over 100 million subscribers each month.
Boulder was a solid foundation for several major industries, and most of its residents either worked in, or supported those companies. Did you notice that virtually all of them (except IBM) are gone?
Boulder was also a targeted location for the feds to build several facilities that also employed thousands of our parents, including the National Bureau of Standards (no longer NBS, now NIST), where the global atomic clock is housed; the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR – where Woody Allen filmed part of “Sleeper” in 1973), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Boulder, at its core, was not a drug-infested, hippy-loving, Woodstock wanna-be place. Those were the Boulder kids of the 60s and 70s. But their parents were uber-smart, hard working, (mostly) white collar folks that established what really made Boulder great.
Over the last 30 years it has increasingly pained me to drive through what was once a very attractive, cool little city of Boulder. To drive through Martin Acres and south Table Mesa today is to see a mostly run-down area that was once a thriving middle-class family-oriented community. This isn’t just south Boulder; it’s in a lot of the city. It’s depressing to drive down city streets where no money is left to do simple things like landscape and de-weed the center islands, because the city leadership is more interested in placing that money into protecting local prairie dogs (seriously – they spend outrageous money on prairie dog mitigation).
But then people talk about all the cool things to do and all the cool restaurants down on the mall, etc. They talk about what a great community Boulder is to live in. Reality has been quite different for some time, however: Why it is, since the mid 1990’s, that traffic arteries entering (in the morning) and leaving (in the evening) Boulder are some of the worst traffic in all of Denver? Why is it that most people that work there don’t live there any longer? That is absolutely a change since the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Why are people leaving Boulder to raise their families in more traditional educational districts instead of the social experiment that Boulder seems to never escape? Why is it that all the things I witnessed when working the streets as a paramedic in Boulder almost never made it to the media? Boulder is working overtime to maintain the age-old utopian image, but the tarnish is getting a bit thicker, unfortunately.
Please don’t get me wrong: I loved growing up in Boulder. I loved going to school there, being in a very active Boy Scout community there, returning to and working there after the military, and being able to call it home. But I also don’t regret holding onto those memories and leaving Boulder, since it’s been overrun with extreme views that have only worsened in the last 25-30 years. Those are not the roots those of us that grew up here have based our fond memories around.
Those viewpoints, the unfriendly attitude toward big industry, and the cost to live there have all contributed to something else: The rise of south Denver. The Denver Tech Center didn’t even exist in the early 70s, yet now the corridor from Waterton Canyon all the way to Smoky Hill Road, and down through Castle Rock houses roughly 75% of the wealth and industry in Colorado. Those counties saw opportunities to attract large employers Boulder didn’t want like Lockheed Martin (many large complexes in the SW metroplex), Liberty Media, Great West Life, Comcast, Charter Communications, AT&T, and literally hundreds of other major corporations. The surrounding cities and communities have enjoyed plenty of growth, kept open space and outdoor living a focus and a culture, and most importantly kept the cost of living manageable, especially when compared to Boulder.
This prosperity could have been all Boulder’s. The relentless march toward maintaining open space and quality of life could have been kept as well. But instead Boulder chose to try to eliminate lanes of traffic on major thoroughfares to force people into public transportation and bike usage (failing to recognize that people were already commuting into town by the thousands daily; bikes don’t work for that as well). Boulder frowned on incentivizing business when it got too big, and chased most of them out as a result. Boulder (city and county) has been almost militant to family land owners in the surrounding county, basically threatening extortion for those owners to “donate” part of their land to open space should they ever want to sell, subdivide, or just build a second home on their family farm for their kids. But the most disappointing fact in all of this: Boulder used to lead, but a large influx of extreme ideas erased Violet Capitalism and replaced it with an abstract desire to socially experiment with what was once a truly cool, accepting place.
