All the News About Denver’s Best Residential Community Since 1961 • Volume 58, Issue No. 2 • February 2019
INSIDE THIS ISSUE PAGE 6
Restaurant Roundup: BluNozer Closes, Ester’s Opens, Oblio’s Opens Its Arms
PAGE 8
March With A Purpose: MLK, Jr. Marade Turns 35
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Signs Of The Times: Womxn’s March At 3
PAGE 12 Herd of Longhorns being driven through downtown Denver on 17th Street during the 2019 National Western Stock Show Parade on Jan. 10. Cowboys with lassos rode ready to rope any steer that threatened to leave the group. Photo by Reid Neureiter
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SEEN AND HERD DOWNTOWN
A Guide To Summer Camps 2019
The Beavers at A-Basin Gets A Lift
UPCOMING GPHC MEETINGS Thursday, Feb. 7 and Thursday, March 7 at 2823 Fairfax St. at 6:30 p.m. All are welcome to attend.
PARK HILL CHARACTER
Life Is A Great Book Ed Wood: Writer, Planner, Pacifist By Tom Korson
Special to the GPHN
At 94, Ed Wood, a Park Hill resident since 1987, still walks a mile a day. So when my wife and I see him walking toward Cake Crumbs or Grape Expectations, I feel encouraged. Wood was born in Alabama. Until age 9, he lived with his parents in the Deep South. By 1932 the Wood family lived in Charlotte, but his father’s business lost everything in the Depression. Next stop, Chicago. Wood’s father had a cotton brokerage business there, and Ed was graduated from LaGrange High School in a suburb of the Windy City. But every summer Wood spent at his grandmother’s truck farm outside Mobile. When the family lived in the Chicago area, in a neighborhood which was predominately Irish Catholic and Polish Catholic, all of a sudden Wood, a Protestant, experienced the challenge Ed Wood and his partner, Elaine Granata. Photo by of being a minority. That experience Cara DeGette was helpful to him later, when he beperately needed young bodies.” So he left came a city planner in Baltimore. the program in physician training and volHe wanted to join his father in the cotton unteered for the infantry. business, but by the time he finished high He was sent to the Western Front in school World War II had started. France, as a replacement for a soldier who Infused with patriotic ideals, Wood volhad been wounded or killed, and when he unteered for the Army in 1943 and was got to his unit, he didn’t know anyone. And trained at the Army Specialized Training he felt woefully unprepared for combat. Program in California. Then, the Army But, at the vulnerable age of 19, into comsent him to medical school to be a docbat he bravely went. After a day and a half, tor. But Wood felt bad about the hundreds he was badly wounded. “Lots of shrapnel, and hundreds of other men who were sent some of which is still in me,” he says. (If straight into the infantry on the battlefields of Europe, at a time when the Army “descontinued on page 11
Big Winners
On Jan. 18, Gina DiGiacomo of Park Hill Cub Scout Pack 286 made history at the pack’s annual pinewood derby, taking first place the first year that girls were allowed to be cub scouts. DiGiacomo, at right, is a seven-year-old tiger cub and a resident of Park Hill. When asked what made hers the fastest car in the pack, DiGiacomo noted that the sparkle paint she added gave it “glitter power” that helped propel it to the win. Pictured at left are Landon Frasure and Chase Frasure, who placed second and third in the derby. Congrats to all. Photo courtesy of Michelle DiGiacomo