When I was a kid, trips to Louisville to visit one of my first best friends, Mark Whittington, were magical.
Back in those days, Louisville was a remote small town surrounded by open space and couldn’t be accessed easily by highways. It would be years before Louisville grew out to McCaslin and touched Highway 36. The mountains loomed large and seemed to embrace the town in a hug on the western edge.
As a child, you could run the whole town all day, visit a real live Main Street and feel safe wherever your wanderings led you.
The Blue Parrot made the best spaghetti sauce. Old men of Italian heritage tossed Bocce balls in the park. Parents tipped back cups at the annual street fairs while children devoured Italian ice.
Fast forward many years to 1998. I graduated from journalism school and was working for the Louisville Times out of an office on Main Street I shared with a well-known local CPA named Bob Dozier. I had the pleasure of working with the great Percy Conarroe, who had sold the newspaper by then, but still stayed on as a columnist penning “Percy’s Perspective.”
It was an exciting time to be a journalist in Louisville. The town was booming. Businesses were climbing all over themselves to open in the city and town officials were in the unique position of dictating strict design standards for new builds.
While Louisville was expanding to the south and west, Main Street continued to thrive. As a young journalist at a twice-weekly newspaper, I covered it all, from planning meetings to crime to my beloved street fairs.
In addition to writing the articles, I also took and developed the photographs, was the page designer for the main news pages, and delivered the paper when needed. I even took the liberty of putting my three-year-old daughter holding a balloon at one of the fairs on the cover. Don’t judge. 🙂
I became managing editor of the Louisville Times and her sister newspapers, the Lafayette News and Erie Review. At about this time, we noticed that the funky little town of Superior was growing and had big plans to grow faster than any other community in Colorado with a planned subdivision called Rock Creek. In response, we started a newspaper called the Superior Observer to cover the growing area.
I moved on to work at the parent company’s flagship paper, The Daily-Times Call, and later the Rocky Mountain News, but my work always involved Boulder County.
Fast forward again, so many more years later, and I find myself and my family living on the edge of Boulder County. Right out our backdoor is Boulder County open space, with Louisville and Lafayette on the other side.
Most weeks my children attend theater rehearsals at CenterStage on Front Street, sometimes daily. My wife travels to Louisville often and her favorite scenic route to Boulder is Marshall Road. We have many friends who live in both Louisville and Superior.
My 15-year-old rides his bike to Memory Square Park often, because it’s one of his favorite places in the world. His schoolmates and friends live in Louisville.
Yesterday some of those friends had their houses burned down.
It’s surreal.
We watched the flames from our backyard and hoped they wouldn’t come any closer our way. My wife, much more empathetic than me, already was grieving for the huge loss people are now experiencing.
It’s tough to see this happen to a community you love. But I’m an optimist and there are some positive things to grasp on to.
As of now, despite an estimated 500 to 1,000 structures destroyed by fire, there have been no casualties. That is simply amazing. Injuries have been few. Snow is finally falling.
Louisville, Superior, and Boulder are mountain strong. Neighbors in Broomfield, Lafayette, Westminster, Denver, and throughout Colorado have your back.
We will help you rebuild.
And I can’t wait to see the day when old men toss Bocce balls while we tip back a cup at the Steinbaugh Pavilion and my kids eat Italian ice at the next street fair. Hope you join us.
How to help:
If you’d like to make a monetary donation, head to the Boulder Office of Emergency Management.
The Boulder Office of Emergency Management said people who can offer shelter to offer displaced residents should sign up online to be a vetted host through the Airbnb Open Homes Program. The program will contact people if needed.
Real New Journalism 