Monday, September 21, 2026

Denver's calendar keeps Jill Sobule Day, a year after Council wrote it down

2025 · Hilltop and Swallow Hill, Denver

On Sept. 21, 2025, Denver City Council named the date Jill Sobule Day. She was born in Denver on Jan. 16, 1959, grew up in Hilltop, won a Nuggets poster contest at ten, and in 1995 put an openly gay-themed song into the Billboard Top 20 thirteen years before anyone borrowed the title.

Jill Susan Sobule liked to introduce herself the same way every time: I'm from Denver, Colorado. Hilltop. Carson Elementary, Hill Junior High, St. Mary's Academy as the only Jewish kid in the choir, guitar at Mass. Her father, Marvin, was a veterinarian. Her mother, Elaine, was a musician. At ten she won the Nuggets poster contest. She said her dad really drew it and she colored it in. The prize was meeting the team at halftime and an AM/FM clock radio that promptly exploded.

CU Boulder, political science, a junior year in Seville that turned into gigs in Spain and North Africa. Then New York, Nashville, a Todd Rundgren-produced debut almost nobody heard, and 1995, when Atlantic put out the record with her name on it. "I Kissed a Girl" was a suburban comedy about two women comparing notes on their boyfriends and deciding the experiment had merits. The video put Fabio next door. It became the first openly gay-themed song to crack the Billboard Top 20. "Supermodel" walked into Clueless the same year. Katy Perry later used the title and a different song. Sobule kept the original.

She wrote about anorexia, the death penalty, shoplifting, the French Resistance, and seventh grade at Hill, which became the Off-Broadway biomusical F*ck 7th Grade, a New York Times Critic's Pick. She voted in Denver. She stayed a Nuggets and Broncos person on purpose. On May 1, 2025, she died in a house fire in Woodbury, Minnesota, at 66, the night before she was due onstage at Swallow Hill. Council answered that fall by putting her name on this square of the calendar. The date is not a statue. It is a reminder that the first version of the song came from Hilltop.

Sources: Denver City Council — Jill Sobule Day proclamation · Colorado Music Experience — Jill Sobule · Denver Gazette — John Moore on Sobule · Wikipedia — Jill Sobule

Thornburgh leaves Fort Steele and starts a march Colorado still has to explain

1879 · Fort Fred Steele, Wyoming, toward the White River Ute Agency

On Sept. 21, 1879, Maj. Thomas T. Thornburgh rode south from Fort Fred Steele near Rawlins with about 190 soldiers, civilians, wagons, and more than 300 animals. Indian agent Nathan Meeker had asked for troops. Eight days later the column crossed Milk Creek onto the Ute reservation. Thornburgh was dead within minutes. The same afternoon Meeker and his male employees were killed at the agency.

Meeker had been sent to the White River Agency to turn Nuche hunters into farmers. He withheld rations, plowed horse pasture, and moved buildings onto ground the Utes used. After a shoving match with the leader Johnson, he wired for the Army. Thornburgh, a Civil War veteran stationed at Fort Steele, took five days to outfit the column and left on this date. The ride was supposed to take about a week.

On the Yampa, Ute leader Nicaagat — Jack to the Army — told him that bringing the whole force onto the reservation would be read as war. Meeker, briefly, asked Thornburgh to camp at Milk Creek and come in with five men. Thornburgh agreed, then changed his mind. On the morning of Sept. 29 he crossed the dry creek. Firing started from the ridges. A sharpshooter killed Thornburgh almost immediately. The command fell back behind wagons and dead animals and stayed there five days. Captain Francis Dodge's Ninth Cavalry, Buffalo Soldiers on a seventy-mile forced march, reached them first. Col. Wesley Merritt arrived Oct. 5 with several hundred more men. The Utes withdrew.

Twenty miles southwest, at the agency, Meeker and ten employees were killed. Arvilla Meeker, Josephine Meeker, Flora Price, and Price's two children were taken toward Grand Mesa and released in late October. Congress held hearings. Nobody was convicted. In 1880 the United States pushed most of the White River and Uncompahgre Utes out of Colorado and onto a reservation in Utah. The town that grew on the agency ground took Meeker's name. Milk Creek is still a quiet valley with a monument and an argument about who fired first. The march that started today is the part that is not in dispute.

Sources: Colorado Encyclopedia — Battle of Milk Creek · Colorado Encyclopedia — Meeker Incident · Wikipedia — White River War · Greeley Tribune — Meeker timeline

4.2 inches of first snow, a 28-degree low, and a 92-degree high share the date

1951 · Denver

Sept. 21, 1951, dropped 4.2 inches of snow at Stapleton, the first of the season after 109 snow-free days. The same square on the calendar later collected a 28-degree low (1983 and 1995), another 2.7 inches of snow in 1995, and a 92-degree high in 2017. Astronomical autumn arrives tomorrow at 6:05 p.m. MDT.

September in Denver likes to audition both seasons on the same afternoon.

In 1951 the first snow of the year arrived on this date: 4.2 inches at Stapleton, northeast winds to 27 mph, and a low of 32. It closed a 109-day snow-free stretch that had started after a trace on June 3, the second-shortest such run on the books. The trees were still fully dressed. They always are.

The date has a colder twin. After the wet dump of Sept. 20, 1995 — 4.7 inches on leaves that had not gotten the memo — another 2.7 inches fell on the 21st. The official low that morning was 28 degrees, tying 1983 for the date record. The high was only 37, the lowest maximum this square has ever posted. In 1895 rain flipped to snow overnight and downtown finished with 11.4 inches across the 21st and 22nd, still one of the heaviest first snows of any season. In 1902 the clock from 8 p.m. on the 20th to 8 p.m. on the 21st measured 2.70 inches of rain, the fattest 24-hour September total Denver has.

Then the other column. On Sept. 21, 2017, Denver hit 92 degrees, the hottest this date has been. 2015 reached 89. 2020 reached 88. The 1991–2020 average high is a polite 77.

Astronomical autumn is not today. It is tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept. 22, at 6:05 p.m. MDT, when the sun crosses the equator heading south. Daylight this morning is about 12 hours and 12 minutes and shrinking by two and a half minutes a day. The aspens already know. The official first-snow average is still Oct. 18. Do not tell 1951.

Sources: Extreme Weather Watch — Denver Sept. 21 records · ThorntonWeather — NWS week in Denver weather history · FOX31 — earliest Denver snowfalls · Timeanddate — 2026 equinox in Denver