The ladies settle on the Sunrise Cafe for this month’s lunch. It’s a good halfway point. Fern lives with her daughter in Welby, and Wanda is in Harvey Park South, not too far from where she grew up.
“Why have I never left?” Wanda will say, repeating the inquiry as if the thought had never even occurred to her. “Because it’s home.”
Wanda Bradley Chase and Fern Clement Cole have been best friends since first grade. Ask Wanda what Fern was like in their youth, and a mischievous expression crosses her face. “Oh, she was an ornery little brat.” Fern laughs. “I knew something like that was coming.” They love each other like sisters.
Lunch is set for eight people, but 12 show up. “Hasn’t been this many in a long time.” “Isn’t this great?” “See how disorganized we are.”
Since they belong to the generation for which casual means not too casual, they arrive with their lipstick just so and necklaces arranged artfully over their blouses.
“Are you a Garden Homer?” Emmie — Emmie Butler Randolf — asks Fern’s daughter, Carol Ann Rosa.
It is not clear whether Emmie means Garden Home, the community, or Garden Home, the school. In any case, both are long gone now. Evidence of their existence is visible only to those know where to look, and even then, a good squint and a better imagination are required.
What survives are its children. Wanda, Fern, Emmie, Jackie Cooper Nelson, Shirley Harvey Hardman, Hope Moore Waggoner, Jeanne Ma hana Sunderhuse, Marian Roberts Raver. They grew up in its little houses during the Depression and picked apples from Mr. Anderson’s trees and got their eggs and honey from the farms. They remember when Alameda Avenue ended at Morrison Road and downtown had no skyline, only the May D&F tower.
They are in their 80s now. For years, they have gathered for a monthly lunch. In this fashion, they keep Garden Home alive.
I didn’t know until recently that Westwood grew out of Garden Home. I don’t mean that Garden Home was an early version of Westwood. They are two completely different places that happened to occupy the same spot. One pre-World War II, one postwar. One rural, one urban. The former largely occupied by poorer white families. The current by poorer Mexican families.
Curiosity leads me to Sharon Catlett. She has written a book of southwest Denver history, in part because people find it all too easy to think southwest Denver has no real history. Catlett, being of the mind that the story of a community lies in the life and labor of its workers, decided to fill in the record with “Farmlands, Forts, and Country Life: The Story of Southwest Denver.”
She writes: “Although they generally possessed less wealth and prestige, Westside residents were strong, industrious people of integrity and perseverance. They knew how to grow crops, build houses, make repairs and survive tough times.”
Until Denver annexed it in 1947, Garden Home was part of unincorporated Arapahoe County. It was wheat fields and dairies and fresh strawberries and gravel roads. It had one school, Garden Home, grades one through 12. Wanda started there in first grade and graduated with 31 seniors in 1941. Her soon-to-be-husband, a North High student, teased her: “You should sell the cows and move to town.”
The ladies guess they’ve been meeting monthly for 15 to 20 years. (I should mention another Garden Home group meets for breakfast, and that one includes men. They are not rival gatherings. The men just like to have their meals earlier in the day.)
The Garden Homers are connected by their shared past but not bound by it. They don’t spend time wringing their hands over what used to be. They raised their families and contributed in the unobtrusive way of people working too hard to call attention to themselves. All are now widows but Jackie. Her husband, Emerald Nelson, 94, may be the oldest living GHS graduate. At this table, only Emmie comes close. She’s 90.
“Ninety?” Emmie says. “I’m not 90; what a terrible thing to spread around.”
“She’ll be 90 in July,” Marian says.
“That’s better than the alternative,” Carol says to laughter.
Marian has lived in the same house for 70 years. Her in-laws moved to Garden Home from South Dakota. “They put up a tent, and then they built a floor inside and walls around it, and that little house is still there.”
Castro Elementary’s sports fields now sit where Garden Home School once did. Castro itself was built on the old school’s football field.
It’s hard to picture what once was, but Wanda’s childhood home is still standing, and so is Marian’s in-laws’ place. It’s tiny, little more than a shack. But I squint at it, and I imagine a family building the walls around a tent, and for just a second, I’m a Garden Homer too.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
