Colorado history

Monday, September 14, 2026

An Orkan crash-lands on Pine Street, a Telluride kid grows up staring past the box canyon, and a Denver-born writer puts a prison birdman on the bestseller list.

Mork lands in Boulder and television finds an attic on Pine Street

1978 · Boulder

On Thursday night, Sept. 14, 1978, ABC put an egg-shaped spacecraft down in Boulder and introduced Robin Williams as Mork from Ork. The pilot ran as a two-parter. By Monday the rest of the country was saying nanu-nanu at the office coffee pot.

Mork had already crashed Happy Days that spring. The ratings were loud enough that Garry Marshall spun him into his own show and pointed the egg at Colorado. Mindy McConnell, played by Pam Dawber, lived in an 1883 Queen Anne at 1619 Pine Street, a few blocks off a Pearl Street Mall that was barely a year old. The interiors were Paramount Stage 27. The opening credits were Boulder: the canyon, Folsom Field, the music store, the porch.

Season one filmed around a city that was arguing about housing prices, Rocky Flats arrests, and whether Boulder needed its own Sears. The show did not solve any of that. It did freeze the brick mall and the Victorian attic in amber for four seasons and 95 episodes. Williams sat in chairs upside down, reported to Orson, and turned shazbot into a word that still works at a Pearl Street brewery if you say it quietly.

People still photograph the house. Someone lives there, so the polite version is a curb shot and a walk back to the mall. The series ended in 1982. The address did not. Boulder spent the next four decades being the place an alien would reasonably pick if the assignment was to study humans and the scenery was part of the brief.

Sources: Wikipedia — Mork & Mindy · Boulder Daily Camera — the house and the mall · IMDb — original U.S. air date

Ingo Swann is born in Telluride and later teaches spies to look around corners

1933 · Telluride

Ingo Douglas Swann arrived at 2:30 a.m. on Sept. 14, 1933, in a mining town of a couple hundred people boxed in by the San Juans. He grew up under a sky he later said was too clear to ignore, then coined the phrase remote viewing and spent the Cold War drawing rooms he was not supposed to be able to see.

Telluride in 1933 was still a zinc-and-lead town, not a film festival. Swann's father drove a truck. The boy claimed an out-of-body hop during a tonsillectomy at three and spent the rest of a long life trying to make laboratories take that sentence seriously. After Westminster College in Salt Lake and a stretch in Korea with the Army, he landed at the United Nations Secretariat and painted on the side.

In the early 1970s he walked into the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, then into Stanford Research Institute with Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ. He is credited with naming remote viewing: sit in a room, describe a target you cannot see. The CIA's Stargate work followed. He also claimed a mental flyby of Jupiter before Voyager got there, rings and all. NASA later found rings. Whether those two facts are cousins or strangers is a fight that has outlived him.

He died in New York on Jan. 31, 2013. Telluride kept the box canyon and added lift tickets. The kid from 1933 kept insisting the mountain wall was not the edge of the picture. Colorado produces that kind of confidence with some regularity. Most of us just use it on fourteeners.

Sources: Wikipedia — Ingo Swann · University of West Georgia — Ingo Swann papers · Encyclopedia.com — Swann biography

Thomas E. Gaddis is born in Denver, then writes the Birdman onto the page

1908 · Denver

Thomas Eugene Gaddis was born in Denver on Sept. 14, 1908. He left, became a Los Angeles probation officer, and in 1955 published Birdman of Alcatraz, the biography that turned Robert Stroud into a movie and a myth Denver still claims as a hometown footnote.

Gaddis grew up in the city, then spent seven years on a California probation caseload and a dozen more teaching adults at night. The book that stuck was not a Denver story. Stroud had killed in Alaska, stabbed a guard at Leavenworth, and spent decades in solitary raising canaries and writing a digest of bird diseases he was not allowed to publish on the outside. Gaddis got the letters, the files, and a narrative Hollywood could shoot.

John Frankenheimer's 1962 film put Burt Lancaster in the cell and earned four Oscar nominations. It also sanded Stroud into a gentler man than the files describe, which is what movies do when the raw material is a murderer who happened to be good with finches. Gaddis later co-wrote Killer: A Journal of Murder about Carl Panzram, another convict who did not sand easily.

He died in Portland in 1984. Denver's claim is the birth certificate and the habit of producing people who leave and then send a story back. On Sept. 14 the city can at least say the man who put the Birdman on the shelf started here, before the canaries and the celluloid.

Sources: Wikipedia — Thomas E. Gaddis · New York Times — Gaddis obituary · IMDb — Thomas E. Gaddis