Roadside Attraction: Boulder Eats Exhibit at the Museum of Boulder

Just because you've been living in a town for a good while doesn't mean you know its history all that well.  There are always stories to discover, so when a friend told me there was an exhibit at the Museum of Boulder about local restaurants I might remember, I decided to go.  The museum, at 2205 Broadway, is right next door to the Carnegie Library for Local History where we'd researched the Boulder Theater story*, at the intersection of Pine and Broadway.

The Boulder Eats exhibit begins with a riot of signs and menus from Boulder restaurants that will call up fond memories for some visitors (well, this one for sure), including Tom's Tavern, Juanita's, the New York Deli, Daddy Bruce's BBQ, and the Zolo Grill.  Along with more than 300 objects from their collection, the museum provides some history you might not have known...

It was news to this writer that Daddy Bruce Randoph, who died at 94 in 1994, was not the first African-American to open a restaurant in Boulder. That honor belongs to O.T. Jackson, who managed the Chautauqua Dining Hall in 1898, and later owned a seafood restaurant and an ice cream parlor. The exhibit notes his involvement in the 1910 founding of Dearfield, a farming community for African-Americans south of Greeley.  Daddy Bruce made a more recent imprint on local history, also because of his community spirit. In the 60s he began serving free Thanksgiving dinners in Denver's City Park, at first offering a couple hundred meals from a portable grill.  By the middle of the 80s Bruce was serving thousands of free dinners at his restaurant in Denver's Five Points neighborhood. 

Exhibit displays a history of kitchen appliances including a Victorian-style cast iron stove, a later 1920s model, a circular metal ice box with 100-pound capacity, a Fifties-style stove and fridge, and a microwave.  Exhibit historian and food writer John Lehndorff helped provide a timeline of Boulder's natural food businesses, including the 1969 founding of Celestial Seasonings followed in 1970 by the Green Mountain Grainary, the first health food store downtown, and first to offer Celestial Seasonings tea, the 1976 founding of Rudi's Organic Bakery, and the 1987 founding of Wild Oats Market, which became the 2nd largest natural foods chain nationally.

Owing to recent raids on food businesses in other states by ICE, the exhibit curators decided not to display photos of immigrants working in local food businesses.  Instead, they posted the silhouette of a worker, and noted the large part immigrants have played in harvesting and preparing food.  

The curators decided, however, to post a photo of a guy who worked as a janitor at The Sink on University Hill during his student days at CU. That was Robert Redford, who left us back in September.  The Sink is still in business, though, at 1165 Thirteenth Street...

There's also an ongoing, award-winning exhibit in the Boulder Experience Gallery that provides a panorama of local history including racing bicycles recalling the Red Zinger classic (1975-'79), runners and wheelchair racers from the Bolder Boulder 10k that began in 1979 and has continued on every Memorial Day since, and a satellite recalling Ball Aerospace, also in Boulder. 

The Boulder Experience also displays artifacts from deeper history as well, beginning with the stories of Chief Niwot and the Arapaho tribe, the true "legacy Americans" who first lived here, along with photos, musical instruments and clothing from the era of cattle ranches that began to take over after the 1861 Treaty of Fort Wise restricted tribal land access.

Downstairs from the main level where you enter, there's an interactive children's area with geometric toys on the wall, and a mural of a VW Microbus with colors and symbols from the Summer of Love era.  That seems appropriate (this is, after all, Boulder), and though I'd thought the artist had made a bit of an error in choosing the "bay window" bus with its curved windshield, I was off base.  The "bay window" bus first appeared in August 1967, when it was still the Summer of Love, for the 1968 model year.  In May of that year, students joined union workers on a national strike in France.  But that story is for someone else's history museum...

*Footnote: The Boulder Eats exhibit on the history of food in Boulder will be open through July 26, 2026.  The Museum of Boulder is open Mondays and Wednesday through Sunday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM and is closed on Tuesdays.  June through August, Monday hours change to noon to 8:00 PM.  You can visit museumofboulder.org to confirm ticket prices, but we saw that children under 5 are free, kids 5-17 and college students are $8 (along with seniors), and that standard tickets are $10.

 

And "Roadside Attraction: The Boulder Theater", our history of the recently-restored Boulder Theater, appeared as our blog post for December 15, 2025. 

Photo Credits:

All photos are by the author.

Wild Animal Encounters Part 3: Reflections on Kindness and Risk

A couple of weeks ago on an unseasonably warm Thursday morning, a trio of these mule deer showed up in my garden. They wandered off before I could get a picture, but came back with six friends during the afternoon rush hour, maybe not a safe time for a herd of deer to be on Broadway.  I followed them when they crossed into a neighbor's front yard.  For a minute it seemed they might wander off to the north and east, which seemed a safer direction. But then they decided to come back to the driveway, close to the speeding cars and trucks. So, maybe because I didn't want to see any of my fellow mammals hurt (either these furry ones or the ones driving by), I walked out onto Broadway with my hand up. Southbound and northbound traffic, all 4 lanes of it, stopped. To my surprise, all the deer but one followed; maybe they'd wanted to graze at North Boulder Park, 3 blocks west, anyway. I motioned to the lone straggler, a male, and yelled "Come on."  He did, and crossed safely.  A BMW driver gave me a thumbs-up, and traffic flow resumed.

Why am I telling this story?  Because what might have seemed like a foolish action to others seemed like the only thing to do. I didn't want to witness an accident, and it seemed like simple kindness to prevent one.  Maybe my six years of Saturdays volunteering in the vet clinic at the local Humane Society* came into play. There was some risk involved, but it seemed worth it.  On the subject of kindness and risk, it would seem that in everyday human interactions, kindness should not be punished, but it recently was, in Minneapolis.  On January 24 in that city, Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse employed by the Veterans Administration, was filming a demonstration against Operation Metro Surge on his phone when he went to the aid of a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by ICE* agents.  When he attempted to shield her with his own body, he was pepper-sprayed and thrown to the ground by ICE agents, who fired at least 10 shots at close range, with 6 shots fired after Mr. Pretti's body had gone motionless.  His last words to the woman he'd tried to protect were, "Are you okay?"  As they had following the ICE killing of Renée Good on January 7, federal officials refused access to the crime scene by Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.  In the case of Ms. Good's shooting by an ICE agent, a medical doctor offering to aid the victim was ordered to stand back by the shooter. Minnesota authorities recently sued, and a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order to block the Dept. of Homeland Security "from destroying or altering evidence." 

Gauging public sentiment by the number who'd written Congress demanding independent investigations, attending street demonstrations, and organizing memorials, the ICE attacks seem to have struck a nerve that previous scandals have not, with outrage amplified by multiple videos depicting two crime stories completely at odds with ICE or DHS explanations.  Today, there were memorial bike rides organized in around 250 towns and cities around the world, including this one that began in Boulder... 

We started in North Boulder Park with a group of over 760* cyclists of all ages, and rode eastward across town to Carpenter Park, with local police and volunteers directing traffic, often to the sounds of honks by approving motorists.  By the time we'd circled west again along Boulder Creek to the Central Park Bandshell, the crowd greeting us seemed to number well into 4 figures.  A poster we noticed read, "Whenever cruelty becomes normal, compassion becomes radical."

*Footnotes:  

Our local Humane Society is the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, providing adoption services, offering classes, training volunteers and accepting donations at 2323 55th Street, Boulder, CO 80301, tel. 303-442-4030, and at their website: boulderhumane.org. 

ICE is a reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The initial estimate of participating cyclists was provided by volunteers posted at the exit from North Boulder Park, and is likely an undercount of the final total, because there were many cyclists behind our group.

Photo Credits:

All photos are by the author.

Film Review: "State of Siege" --- Past Becomes Prelude

It's 1972, and Costa-Gavras, director of the political thriller "Z", has taken us to an unidentified Latin American country, with the first scene focused on this parked '48 Cadillac Series 62 convertible...  

Soon enough, one of the police cars in the background will circle around to this old Caddy, and an officer will discover the body behind the front seat.  It belongs to Philip Michael Santore, who had claimed to work for USAID in the country, which the Montevideo license plate tells us is supposed to be Uruguay.  The story is largely told by flashbacks telling us how we got here.  Before police find the body, though, we see armed squads of them stopping traffic and searching cars. It turns out that Santore was the last of 3 kidnapped officials whose fate and whereabouts were unknown.

In the flashbacks, we see the Tupamaros, a revolutionary group, kidnap 3 individuals.  Below, we see the moment they capture Santore, with his chauffeured green Chevy Nova trapped between a van and Peugeot, behind a Dodge Dart and Fiat 600, with another car behind. It turns out that the drivers of all these cars are involved in the abduction...

Santore, played with cool reserve by French actor Yves Montand, faces interrogations in a newspaper-lined cell hidden behind a secret door in a garage.  Over the course of several sessions, the masked interrogators reveal convincing evidence that Santore is not who he claims to be, and that he has been routinely advising the police on using torture to extract confessions.  Even after these revelations, Santore projects a calm attitude when answering questions, never raising his voice...

Here, another US envoy is about to be kidnapped in what appears to be his usual ride, a '64 Olds Jetstar I...

Below, Tupamaro "carpet cleaners" transfer the Brazilian Consul wrapped in a rug into another wagon from their red and white 1955 Chevy Nomad; whatever else you could say about them, the Tupamaros had good taste in cars to commandeer.  By 1972, a fascist military dictatorship was 8 years into its nearly 21-year rule in Brazil, and the Tupamaros regarded that government as an enemy.  By 1969, Tupamaros had shifted their tactics from symbolic protests and robbing banks (like John Dillinger, because that's where the money was) to even more brazen tactics, including kidnapping.  

In a later sequence, kidnappers driving a van get nervous about nearby police cars, and take a sudden detour to dump their other American captive, a less-valuable prize than Santore.  This scene has comic aspects, as we see the guy with the briefcase decide to ignore the squirming, blanket-wrapped captive in real time.  The scene seems a metaphor for the human capacity for denial...

The students at a local university are not in denial, however.  They can see the bad economy caused by rampant inflation, and attempts by an increasingly authoritarian government to censor speech and the press, all features of life in early 70s Uruguay.  In another comic scene, the police raid the campus while the students broadcast protest songs. The police run from one end of the quadrangle to another in their hapless attempts to find all the speakers...

Costa-Gavras dramatizes the slide from democracy to something much less by having perceptive and outspoken journalist Carlos Ducas (played by German actor O.E. Hasse) attend press conferences and a legislative session, where representatives argue, seemingly without fear of expressing divergent views.  At a press conference, a government spokesman asserts that the declared state of emergency (or "state of siege") has been extended 2 years beyond its authorization because the protests, strikes and kidnappings are "intolerable for the country." But Ducas (in brown tie on the right) bravely replies that something else is intolerable...

He seems aware of what's going on below the surface.  By the early Seventies, the police and government operatives were involved in extrajudicial killings, and Costa-Gavras dramatizes actual examples.  In the case of the abduction below, the death squad members don't bother to mask themselves (unlike the KKK a decade earlier in the US) because they are minions of the government, operating with impunity as anything like the rule of law collapses.  The agents drive their ubiquitous VW to their young victim's house, collect him from his stunned mother, and bring him to the beach, where they beat him and shoot him dead.

In the end, the Tupamaros decide to take more extreme measures of their own. After government agents round up key members of their movement, the president decides not to release political prisoners in exchange for Santore, and in a suspenseful set of votes that take place on a city bus and inside this green Caddy, the dissidents decide to kill him.  It seems that for once, Santore is right when he tells his captors that killing him would be a sign of cruelty and political powerlessness, but that deciding not to kill him would be a sign of weakness...that is, powerlessness.  In the real world events on which this story is based, when a US agent who had taught Uruguayan police torture techniques was killed by revolutionaries in 1970, the country spiraled into a cycle of repression, resulting in a 1973 military coup and followed by a dictatorship that lasted nearly a dozen years, and presaged the US-supported Pinochet coup in Chile by 2 months.  Ironically, Chile was where Costa-Gavras filmed "State of Siege", in what turned out the be the last full year of democratic government under President Salvador Allende.

Photo Credits:  All images are from "State of Siege", copyright 1972 by Valoria Films (France) and Constantin Films (Germany).