Colorado basked in glory 46 years ago. Ike played golf at Park Hill, drivers roared down the Valley Highway clear out to Hampden Avenue, and the Air Force Academy decided to build a football stadium.
In Lower Downtown, the post office opened its postal annex – the “most highly mechanized mail-sorting facility in the country” – at 16th and Wynkoop streets. Mechanized conveyor belts were capable of reaching out the back of the building into railroad boxcars stuffed with mail bags.
My, how things have changed.
The annex now is dusty rubble, having been demolished to make way for the Environmental Protection Agency’s new regional headquarters. Next door on 15th Street will be more expensive condos and trendy restaurants in the former skid row now called LoDo.
It was during the demolition that officials found a time capsule in a copper box, buried in 1959 behind the building’s stone dedication plaque. On Thursday, 46 years to the day after the annex opened, Steven Shores, local manager for developer Hines Co., pried the stubborn box open.
The box was stuffed full with newspapers, photographs of President Eisenhower and local postal dignitaries, the names of the 1,000 postal employees in Denver, every stamp in circulation (now firmly stuck together), a leather-bound Bible and a 49-star American flag.
“This is incredible,” said Barbara Gibson, Lower Downtown’s unofficial historian. “Do you think that’s really Ike’s signature on his photo?”
Headlines in The Denver Post, then an afternoon paper, proclaimed that the seven commercial airlines at Stapleton Airport were fighting Mayor Will Nicholson’s efforts to expand the airfield.
Another headline shouted, “Siberia Holds Key to Soviet World Power.” The story claimed that the Soviet Union, struggling to outstrip the U.S. in productivity, “has an ace up its sleeve – riches beneath the ground that are beyond the wildest dreams of man.”
In sports, the Denver Bears baseball farm club had won two straight games, while Air Force Academy officials endorsed a plan for a football stadium.
Airmail stamps were 7 cents, special delivery 21 cents. And a two-bedroom house along the Cherry Hills Country Club golf course could be rented for $250 a month.
Gibson said the 49-star flag was somewhat rare because of its short life, only seven months between Alaska’s statehood in January 1959 and Hawaii’s in August the same year.
Staff writer Mike McPhee can be reached at 303-820-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com.
