Colorado history

Wednesday, September 9, 2026

The Broncos win the first game the AFL ever plays, Ed Dwight is born and later makes Denver his studio and launch pad, and a polite Monday rain starts the 2013 Front Range flood.

The Broncos win the first game the American Football League ever plays

1960 · Nickerson Field, Boston

On Friday night, Sept. 9, 1960, the brand-new Denver Broncos beat the Boston Patriots 13-10 at Boston University's Nickerson Field. It was the first regular-season game in American Football League history. Denver had lost every exhibition. Vegas made Boston a 16-point favorite. History declined the spread.

The crowd was 21,597. There was no national television. The game was on Friday because the Patriots did not want to compete with the NFL Giants on Sunday or with Harvard and Boston College on Saturday. Bob Howsam, who owned the Broncos and also owned KHOW, put the broadcast on his own station. Season tickets back home were $24.50 and $28.

Gino Cappelletti kicked a 35-yard field goal for the first points the league ever recorded. Frank Tripucka then found Al Carmichael in the flat; Carmichael reversed field and went 59 yards for the first AFL touchdown. In the third quarter Gene Mingo, a high-school dropout who had written the team a letter asking for a tryout, returned a punt 76 yards. He was so rubber-legged he shanked the extra point into a divot. Denver still won 13-10.

Mingo became the first African American to score in the AFL. He would lead the league in scoring that year with 123 points, then again in 1962. The socks were mustard with vertical stripes. The home field was still called Bears Stadium, a baseball bowl built on a landfill. The 1960 Broncos finished 4-9-1 and last in the West. Two years later they burned the socks in a parking-lot bonfire and started over.

The franchise that opened for business on a Friday in Boston now plays in a stadium on the same West Colfax dirt. The scoreboard is larger. The socks are not. The original joke, that Denver could field a professional football team at all, is the part that aged best.

Sources: Wikipedia — 1960 Denver Broncos season · Mile High Report — the first game · Denver Post — historic anniversary · Wikipedia — Gene Mingo

Ed Dwight is born, then Denver gets the sculptor NASA almost sent to space

1933 · Denver

Edward Joseph Dwight Jr. was born Sept. 9, 1933, in Kansas City, Kansas. At President Kennedy's direction he became the first Black American admitted to the Air Force school that fed NASA's astronaut corps. Colorado later got the version of the story that stayed: an MFA from DU, a north Denver foundry, a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in City Park, and, at 90, a seat on a Blue Origin flight.

Dwight enlisted in the Air Force in 1953 and earned his test-pilot credentials at Edwards. In 1961 Kennedy told the Pentagon to put a Black officer into the Aerospace Research Pilot School. Dwight finished the course and ranked in the mix for NASA's 1963 astronaut class. He was not selected. He resigned his commission in 1966.

Colorado is where the second act started. He worked for IBM, opened a barbecue restaurant, and began welding scrap metal after hours. George L. Brown, the state's first Black lieutenant governor and a Tuskegee Airman, asked him in 1974 for a sculpture at the Capitol. Dwight moved to Denver, learned the University of Denver foundry, and took an M.F.A. in sculpture in 1977. Ed Dwight Studios still occupies a warehouse-scale shop on the north side of town.

The public work is easy to find without a brochure. The Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in City Park was dedicated in 2002. Other commissions sit in museums and on civic lawns from Denver to the National Mall. In May 2024 he flew on Blue Origin NS-25 at age 90 and became the oldest person to reach space. He called it destiny more than a correction.

Today he turns 93. The Air Force portrait is still the one that travels. The city that gave him a foundry is the one that kept him.

Sources: Wikipedia — Ed Dwight · Colorado Public Radio — 92nd birthday conversation · CBS Colorado — back from space · Britannica — Ed Dwight

A Monday rain starts the storm that floods the Front Range

2013 · Front Range

On Sept. 9, 2013, rain began to fall on eastern Colorado. After a hot, dry summer and a string of fires, people treated it as a favor. The low-pressure system did not move. By the end of the week the foothills had taken 12 to 20 inches, Boulder had rewritten its rain book, and the South Platte basin was a disaster zone.

USGS and the National Weather Service both date the event from this Monday. A stalled upper low over the Southwest pulled tropical moisture north from the Pacific and the Gulf. Afternoon storms on the 9th put an inch on Boulder in twenty minutes and flooded rush-hour streets in Greeley and Evans. Nobody called it historic yet.

The rain kept coming. Flash-flood warnings went up on the 11th. The worst water arrived the 12th and 13th. Boulder finished the storm with more than 17 inches for the week and 9.08 inches on its wettest day, shattering a mark that had stood since 1919. Lyons, Jamestown, and canyon towns along the St. Vrain and Big Thompson were cut off. Nine people died. More than 31,000 structures were damaged or destroyed. Damage estimates landed near $3 billion.

Governor Hickenlooper declared a disaster on the 12th. The presidential declaration followed. CDOT spent years putting the canyons back together. The South Platte through Denver was loud but not 1965 loud. The mountains north of town took the blow.

Sept. 9 is the quiet date on the timeline — the day the rain was still a relief. The rest of the week is why Coloradans still side-eye a forecast that says the system will linger.

Sources: Colorado Encyclopedia — September 2013 Floods · USGS — Flooding in the South Platte and Fountain Creek basins · CDOT — flood overview · 9NEWS — 2013 flood timeline