Colorado Trivia & Tidbits - Page 9

Composer Cecil Effinger, of Colorado Springs, invented the musical typewriter in 1954, a machine that allowed composers to create musical scores by typing notes rather than writing their compositions out by hand. He went on to found the Music Print Corp. to manufacture and sell his invention.

Steamboat Springs (pop. 9,815) named one of its ski areas Howelsen Hill in 1917 after Carl Howelsen, known as the "Flying Norseman." Originally from Norway, Howelsen popularized ski jumping in Steamboat Springs and helped organize the community’s first Winter Carnival in 1914.

The lark bunting faced tough competition from the mountain bluebird and the western meadowlark before being named the state bird in 1931. A Fort Collins teacher named Roy Langdon lobbied for the bunting, because it wasn’t already representing other states and it would reflect the state’s plains instead of the mountains. The male bunting is black with white wing patches and edgings. The birds often can be seen in the Pawnee National Grassland, which covers 193,060 acres north of Greeley (pop. 76,930).

Longmont (pop. 71,093) was founded in 1870 by a group of Chicagoans who wanted to build a new town in Colorado. They sold memberships in the Chicago-Colorado Colony and, using the proceeds, bought 60,000 acres of land in northern Colorado. After importing people, lumber and building materials to the area, they built a small town in 1871 and named it Longmont, after Longs Peak, a 14,255-foot mountain visible from the town.

Completed in 1937, the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun near Colorado Springs stands at an elevation of 8,136 feet, looking out over the Pikes Peak region. Named for the American humorist by its builder, Spencer Penrose, the shrine has an 80-foot observation tower and was built from gray-pink granite quarried from a single boulder.

Spencer Penrose and his wife Julie established the El Pomar Foundation in 1937, investing $21 million to provide resources and opportunities for the people of Colorado. Since then, the foundation has provided more than $310 million in funding to non-profit organizations in the state, working in areas such as the arts, education and community services.

One of Dr. Susan Anderson’s first patients after she arrived in Fraser (pop. 910) in 1907 was an injured horse, but she soon treated human patients, including ranchers and railroad workers. "Doc Susie" practiced in Grand County for nearly 50 years, often accepting food and firewood as payment. She died in 1960 at the age of 90.

Grand Junction’s (pop. 41,986) wettest month on record was September 1896, when 3.78 inches of rain fell. The record for the city’s wettest day also was set that month—on the 22nd—when 3.03 inches of rainfall, associated with a tropical storm, accumulated in 24 hours.

Nederland (pop. 1,394) celebrates Frozen Dead Guy Days annually in March. The event commemorates Bredo Morstoel, who died in 1989 and was frozen by his grandson, Trygve Bauge, who hopes to one day bring his grandfather back to life. Today, Morstoel’s body is packed in dry ice in a metal shed in Nederland.

Beginning at the Gates of Lodore, a catacomb of slot canyons in Dinosaur National Monument, white water rafters descend the Green River through Lodore Canyon and rapids named Hell’s Half Mile and Disaster Falls. Maj. John Wesley Powell and his expedition, on their way to the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon, explored the red-hued Lodore Canyon in 1869, naming it after an 1820 English poem, The Cataract of Lodore, by Robert Southey. The monument is headquartered in Dinosaur (pop. 319).

A donkey named Paco Bell won a second term as mayor of Florissant, near Woodland Park (pop. 6,515), last July. The mock election fun was part of the town’s annual Heritage Days, with three candidates opposing Paco Bell. Two of the donkeys couldn’t make it—one due to colic, the other to a trailer breakdown—so the incumbent went up against a white donkey named Birdie and won handily.

On only two days each year, at the spring and fall equinoxes, the rising Sun shines onto 1,000-year-old rock art on the walls of Crack Cave in Picture Canyon, in southeastern Colorado, lighting up the carvings for 8 to 12 minutes. Springfield (pop. 1,562) hosts equinox festivals, in March and September, to celebrate this phenomenon and offers tours through the Comanche National Grassland to the cave.

The Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, first blazed in the 1820s, provided traders and settlers traveling to the Southwest with an alternative to crossing the arid Cimarron Desert. After splitting from the Cimarron Cutoff at Dodge City, Kan., the Mountain Branch entered Colorado near present-day Holly (pop. 1,048). The Santa Fe Trail remained an active trade route until 1880 when the railroad arrived at Santa Fe, in New Mexico Territory.

During a visit to Estes Park (pop. 5,413) in 1873, English traveler Isabella Bird climbed nearby Long’s Peak with local resident "Rocky Mountain Jim" Nugent. In letters to her sister, Henrietta, Bird described her experiences, writing of Nugent, "He is a man any women might love, but no sane woman would marry." The letters were published in 1879 as the book A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.

The Wet Mountain Valley lived up to its name in 1889 when heavy rain flooded Grape Creek near Westcliffe (pop. 417) and washed out the tracks of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad spur. The first tracks of the narrow gauge line arrived there in 1881, helping to establish the town, which founder Dr. William Bell named after Westcliffe-by-the-Sea in his native England.

The Tattered Cover Book Store opened in the Cherry Creek section of Denver in 1971 as a small, 950-square-foot shop. Today, the company boasts three locations—downtown Denver, Cherry Creek and Highlands Ranch—and, with more than 150,000 titles, is one of the nation’s largest independent booksellers.

The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, in Golden (pop. 17,159), a coalition of nonprofit environmental and outdoor education groups, celebrated the 10th anniversary of its founding last year. The group works to protect and preserve the ecosystems on Colorado’s 54 peaks that reach 14,000 feet.

At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Ga., swimmer Amy Van Dyken—a native of Englewood (pop. 31,727)—became the first U.S. woman to earn four gold medals at a single Olympiad. Van Dyken, who has asthma, began swimming at age 6 after her doctor suggested that it would help build lung capacity; it was seven years before she could swim the length of the pool.The Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve became the nation’s 58th national park last September. Located in the San Luis Valley northeast of Alamosa (pop. 7,960), the park contains more than 30 square miles of sand dunes (some as tall as 750 feet), six peaks that reach 13,000 feet elevation, alpine lakes, grasslands, wetlands, and large stands of aspen and cottonwood trees—all providing a diverse wildlife habitat. Also found there are several 9,000-year-old archaeological sites.

The state adopted "Nil Sine Numine" as its motto in 1877. The Latin phrase, which appears on the state seal, means "nothing without the deity," although it’s also interpreted as "nothing without God" or "nothing without Providence." In Colorado’s early mining days, some even described it as "nothing without a new mine." The motto is credited to William Gilpin (1813-1894), first territorial governor of Colorado and a booster of Western settlement.

Cascading 181 feet down seven distinct "steps," Seven Falls near Colorado Springs has attracted tourists since the late 1800s. Property owner and naturalist James Hull constructed a stairway beside the falls in 1885 and charged for the privilege of seeing them. Today, 224 steps lead to the Eagle’s Nest observation platform, which also can be reached by an elevator rising 14 stories inside the granite walls of Cheyenne Canyon.