People laughed when Denver tour guide extraordinaire and historian Phil Goodstein started a recent excursion with some personal history.
“When I got my Ph.D., nobody was interested in my areas of expertise, such as the role of the general strike in European social democracy from the French Revolution to World War I or the character of Polish nationalism and the upheaval of 1830 and 1846-48,” he said.
The tour group, as Goodstein expected, laughed.
But it wasn’t a joke. His first book – he’s written 13 – is titled “The Theory of the General Strike.” It also was the dissertation that earned him what he calls a Ph.D. in useless information.
You can read the book, but if you like a whole lot of fun with your history, you will be better off checking out one of Goodstein’s walking tours of Denver.
His annual Haunted Halloween bus tour, which is scheduled through Colorado Free University, is set for Saturday and Monday nights.
It features more than a dozen stories, including a hippie murder, a fearful, ghostly German shepherd and the ghost of a process server who haunts a lawyer’s offices in an old mansion. There is also a changeling and his haunted house, which became subjects of a popular Hollywood film.
Goodstein is a Denver native who was reared in Park Hill and attended East High School. But those wonder years definitely were not the best of his life.
“I just hated it,” Goodstein said. “And they hated me, so it was mutual.”
On a recent tour, he told the group that he was kicked out of East in 1970. But Goodstein saw it more like a pardon than an academic setback.
He left Denver three times to enroll in different colleges but eventually found the only place that would take him was Metropolitan State College. There, he came to enjoy learning.
He attributed his new interest in education to Metro State’s then-focus on adult learners.
“It wasn’t a school spoon-feeding students,” he said. “People who were at Metro then wanted to go to school. They wanted to learn.”
He also found his main interest shifting from political science to history. After Metro State, he earned a master’s degree at the University of Denver and his doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1981.
He said he had to hustle to make a living thanks to a doctorate of useless information.
Goodstein found himself working at the weekly City Edition in 1983 after its editor overheard him criticizing Denver newspapers.
“I said, ‘One of the key qualifications of getting a job with a Denver newspaper is to know absolutely nothing about the city,”‘ Goodstein said.
The editor challenged Goodstein to write an article if he thought he could do better.
“Much to my surprise, he liked my stuff,” Goodstein said. “On that basis, I became the front-page writer. … Two or three years week in week out, I am delving into what makes the city tick. Its history. Its traditions. Its scandals.”
That in part sparked a passion for Denver history. So he decided to teach it at the Colorado Free University.
Students signed up in good numbers for Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Denver, but only in the winter.
“Then on a beautiful evening in July 1986 nobody showed up for class, and I got bored,” Goodstein said. “So I figured I’d go out for a stroll. And here I was simply walking down Colfax (Avenue) backward, wildly waving my arms about and talking to myself. People started following me around. And on that basis, I figured I might as well give walking tours.”
Upward to 500 people a year have followed Goodstein around Denver over the last 19 years. He has 40 different neighborhood tours, including those focused on cemeteries.
One of those tours looks at the seamy side of Denver. It explores the history of sex, spooks, sleaze and scandal along Colfax Avenue, a tour that grew out of an excursion in 1989.
“We stumbled onto a bottle party in an alley,” Goodstein said. “We were asked if we’d like to shoot up with the crowd. Then, we were discussing the difference between topless and bottomless bars. Then a streetwalker approaches us as a guest speaker.”
One outraged woman from the tour called the Free University to complain about “the foulmouthed, evil-minded instructor who for all intents and purposes ought to be giving a tour of the seamy side of Denver.”
Ever the entrepreneur, Goodstein soon started just such a tour and wrote a book on the subject.
Some of those seamy stories show up on the Haunted Halloween tour so beware: It is not for children or the easily offended.
It is, however, perfect for those who like their history served up with a healthy portion of fun and those with a fondness for really useless information.
Reach staff writer Ed Will at 303-820-1694 orewill@denverpost.com.
HAUNTED HALLOWEEN
BUS TOUR OF SPOOKY DENVER|Castle Marne, 1572 Race St.; 6:30-8:30 p.m. and 9-11 p.m. Saturday; and 7-9 p.m. Monday (Monday’s tour is wheelchair accessible) |$25|303-399-0093 or freeu.com
