Harriett Wanamaker was everyone’s grandmother in the Observatory Park neighborhood of southeast Denver.
Kids and adults alike gathered around Wanamaker, who died March 16 at 93, to hear her stories or to tell their own.
“She messed up every joke she tried to tell” but she was great with the one-liners, said her daughter Melody Duggan. “Our house has always been the ‘safe place’ for people.”
In a poem, written for Wanamaker’s 90th birthday party, neighbors Maureen and Bob Keller wrote that Wanamaker nursed sick birds, dogs, cats and even a “psycho squirrel.” The party was attended by 250 people.
“Harriett’s death is a terrible loss to the neighborhood,” said Maureen Keller.
Wanamaker was reputed to be able to play Solitaire all night and rarely missed having her evening Manhattan cocktail.
Wanamaker was “never judgmental,” said Duggan, “even when we all went off and became hippies, grew long hair and smoked weed. She figured people got tough and smart from their mistakes.”
Harriett Anderson was born in Dubuque, Iowa, on Aug. 31, 1914, and grew up in Goshen Hole, Wyo., south of Torrington, where her parents tried and failed to homestead.
The family — with eight children — moved to Denver when she was small and she attended East High School.
Her father, James T. Anderson, built their home on Garfield Street out of scraps from the construction site of the Montgomery Ward building on South Broadway. The store is gone; the little stucco house is still there.
Anderson dropped out of school at age 14 to help her family and became a sales clerk at the Golden Eagle department store downtown.
Years later she earned her GED. She also had a job exercising the polo ponies at the Phipps Ranch.
A rhythm guitarist, she and her brother, fiddler Andy Anderson, and a friend, pianist Rene Capelli, played in Colorado mining camps for several years, earning $1 a night plus the “kitty,” or donation bucket, Duggan said.
Later, the three went to California and played with such groups as the Tex Williams and Spade Cooley bands and the Sons of the Pioneers, Duggan said.
Anderson returned to Denver to marry Roy Wanamaker, whom she had met earlier while she was waiting tables at the Blue Bonnet Cafe on South Broadway.
They married in 1939. He died in 1994.
She played her Gibson guitar, which she had bought second-hand on Larimer Street, until nearly the end of her life.
She taught her family all the “old songs,” Duggan said, and as they gathered at her deathbed they sang the songs to her.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two other daughters, Marilyn Wanamaker of Denver and Helen Denson of Nebraska; two sons, Roy Wanamaker of Denver and Michael Wanamaker of Pueblo; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
