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Much anguish has appeared in print lately about a
proposal to erect an illuminated sign with 40-foot-high
letters that spell out DENVER.
I can understand why some people don't want the sign. It would consume electricity, which was recently in short supply, and if offered a choice between the air conditioner when it's 96 outside and looking at a gaudy sign that told me something I already knew, by all means unplug the sign. Also, if you're in Denver, do you really want to be reminded?
But who's for it, and why?
Perhaps there's some concern that people gridlocked on Colorado Boulevard in Denver will get confused and think they're on Academy Boulevard in Colorado Springs, and they won't know that they're in Denver, where they'll sell you gas even if you don't have a fish on your car.
But the real reason behind the big DENVER sign is probably just jealousy. Other Colorado jurisdictions boast big letters that you can see from all over town, and poor Denver doesn't.
The last time I visited Fort Collins, it sported an
A
up by Horsetooth Reservoir. To new arrivals, this
must seem curious, since the letter does not appear
anywhere in the city's name, and it isn't scarlet, so it
doesn't convey any provocative implication of Hester
Prynne.
Colorado State University was once known as Colorado
Agricultural & Mechanical College, which made its
students Aggies,
and thus the A.
There is (or was -- it's been a while since I looked) an
M
above Golden, for Colorado School of Mines. When
I was in high school and visited that campus, we were told
that it was the largest illuminated letter in the world,
which was a reason to attend Mines rather than some lesser
institution which offered female classmates, no calculus
requirement and the same draft deferment.
One should be skeptical of collegiate claims -- More
than 95 percent of our graduates find jobs in their
fields
could mean that English majors get to say Do
you want fries with that?
rather than Quiere papas
fritas con esto?
I recall hearing, during some energy crisis, that they had turned off the big M, then that engineering students would devise solar- or wind-powered illumination.
But I don't know what happened to the M -- the emblem I have seen when heading into the mountains from Denver at night is a large cross made of fluorescent lamps.
At first I thought it was a remnant of the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan ran Colorado, and our klaxons and kleagles were more technically inclined than their primitive Southern colleagues, who used flames to illuminate their hilltop crosses.
I was wrong, but I still don't know the real reason. A church? A mortuary? Site of a disaster? Support for old-fashioned capital punishment?
To move west, Colorado contains the world's largest
college symbol -- a 320-foot by 420-foot W
of
whitewashed rocks that looms over Gunnison. It's for
Western State College, which offers the highest higher
education in America -- 7,734 feet.
Such hillside writing is not limited to colleges. San Luis is the oldest town in Colorado, and you can see that message, painted large on stones, spread across a bluff as you drive in from the south.
Both Salida and Saguache boast an S
on a hill
near town, and I brag to friends down there that Our S
is bigger than your S.
I do not know the name of the eminence which the
Saguache S adorns, but ours is on Tenderfoot Hill. This
provides an easy way to tell residents from visitors, who
call it S Mountain.
One of the ignorant was a woman from Missouri who wrote
to the local paper recently. She complained that her
innocent teen-aged grand-daughter was traumatized or worse
by exposure to obscene graffiti in the gazebo at the top of
S Mountain.
Some of that should be of historical value by
now,
said a friend who grew up here. I distinctly
remember carving [expletive deleted] on the floor one night
in 1969, although I don't remember much else about that
night, and my writing is still there.
If it's fresh, it's vandalism,
I replied. But
if it's old, like the pioneers inscribing their names on
Register Rock along the Oregon Trail, then it's a cultural
artifact protected by the National Park Service. How long
do we have to wait?
There's no answer to that, but the urge to write something large explains why somebody wants those big DENVER letters.
It does come as something of a surprise that world-class major-league Denver would find bush-league backwaters like Salida, Saguache and San Luis as role models worthy of emulation, but stranger things must have happened.
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