Colorado history

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

A Wheat Ridge kid becomes the Red Elvis, a Graland graduate writes wilderness into the map and helps Denver land a baseball team, and autumn officially clocks in at 6:05 p.m.

Denver's Red Elvis is born, then becomes famous everywhere but home

1938 · Denver and Wheat Ridge

Dean Cyril Reed was born in Denver on Sept. 22, 1938, grew up in Wheat Ridge, sang at Harmony Guest Ranch near Estes Park, and studied meteorology at CU Boulder just long enough to decide Hollywood was the better forecast. Capitol Records barely noticed him. South America and the Eastern Bloc did. They called him the Red Elvis. Denver mostly did not.

Reed graduated from Wheat Ridge High in 1956 as a track kid who also did chorus, student council, and intramurals. Summer gigs at Harmony Guest Ranch near Estes Park paid for guitar strings and, some weekends, a check to the American Cancer Society. He played Phipps Auditorium. At CU he joined the gymnastics team, sang folk and country in Boulder bars, and left meteorology after two years for Los Angeles.

Capitol signed him in 1958 and groomed a teen idol. The singles barely moved here. "Our Summer Romance" detonated in Chile, Peru, and Argentina. Reed stayed. He outsold Elvis on that continent, hosted television in Buenos Aires, acted in Mexican and Italian pictures, and picked up the nickname Mr. Simpatia for free shows in barrios and prisons. Politics moved left with the itinerary. He never joined a Communist party and never gave up his U.S. passport. The State Department still kept a file.

By 1973 he lived in East Germany, the singing cowboy of the GDR, filling halls from Leipzig to Moscow. One of the songs written for him was titled, with unnerving accuracy, "Nobody Knows Me Back in My Hometown." He came home in October 1985 for the Denver International Film Festival and a documentary called American Rebel, then lit into KNUS host Peter Boyles on the air and hired a bodyguard for the rest of the week.

On June 13, 1986, he drowned in Lake Zeuthen outside Berlin, a few weeks short of 48. East German authorities called it an accident. Friends said suicide. Family in the States said otherwise. His ashes were later re-interred at Green Mountain Cemetery in Boulder. Tom Hanks optioned the biography Comrade Rockstar and never made the picture. The joke writes itself and then refuses to land: the most famous Colorado pop star of the Warsaw Pact is still a trivia question on this side of the mountains.

Sources: Colorado Encyclopedia — Dean Reed · Wikipedia — Dean Reed · DEFA Film Library — Dean Reed

Tim Wirth is born in Santa Fe and grows up to draw Colorado's wilderness lines

1939 · Denver, Boulder, and Washington

Timothy Endicott Wirth was born in Santa Fe on Sept. 22, 1939, graduated from Denver's Graland Country Day in 1954, and spent the next four decades representing Boulder and the Denver suburbs. He wrote the Indian Peaks Wilderness Act, helped pass a Colorado wilderness bill, and chaired the Senate task force that helped Denver land a Major League Baseball team.

Wirth's Colorado chapter starts in a Hilltop classroom. Graland Country Day in 1954, then Phillips Exeter, then Harvard and a Stanford doctorate. He came back in 1970, unseated Republican Donald Brotzman in 1974, and held Colorado's 2nd District — Boulder and the near-north Denver suburbs — for twelve years.

In 1978 he authored the Indian Peaks Wilderness Act, which locked about 73,000 acres of the Front Range between the Peak to Peak Highway and the Continental Divide into federal wilderness. That is the skyline you see from Boulder on a clear day, written down so a later Congress would have to argue with it. In 1993, after he had already left the Senate, a broader Colorado wilderness package he had pushed became law.

He won Gary Hart's Senate seat in 1986, served one term, and declined a second. In Washington he organized the Senate Task Force on the Expansion of Major League Baseball, one of the quieter reasons Denver got an NL club instead of another round of "maybe next time." After the Senate he ran global affairs at the State Department and later the United Nations Foundation.

The birthday is New Mexico's. The work — Indian Peaks, the 2nd District map, the expansion committee that helped put a team at 20th and Blake — is Colorado's. Wilderness bills do not play Red Rocks. They just keep the view from turning into a subdivision.

Sources: Wikipedia — Tim Wirth · Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress · Indian Peaks Wilderness Alliance

Fall clocks in at 6:05 p.m., and Denver still cannot decide what the date should feel like

1946 · Denver

Astronomical autumn arrives in Denver today at 6:05 p.m. MDT. The same square on the calendar has posted an 88-degree high four times, a 29-degree low in 1995, and, in 1946, a trace of snow that opened the longest snow season on record: 263 days, until another trace on June 11, 1947.

The sun crosses the equator heading south at 6:05 this evening. That is the official start of fall, even if the aspens started last week and meteorological fall has been on the clock since Sept. 1. Daylight is not a tidy 12 and 12. Refraction keeps the sun visible after it has geometrically set, so Denver still gets a few extra minutes of glow. True equal day and night usually shows up three or four days later.

The date itself is a mood board. Official highs of 88 degrees landed in 1944, 1953, 1958, and 2007. The record low is 29, in 1995. The chilliest afternoon was 1941, when the high stopped at 45. Average, if you trust 1991–2020, is a polite 76.

Then the snow column, which September keeps trying to close and failing. On this date in 1946 a trace fell downtown and started the longest snow season Denver has measured: 263 days, ending with another trace on June 11, 1947. In 1895 rain flipped to snow overnight and the 21st–22nd stacked 11.4 inches, still one of the heaviest first snows of any season. In 1913 a thunderstorm ran northwest winds at 40 with gusts to 44. In 2024 the date picked up 0.82 inches of rain, the wettest Sept. 22 in the modern book.

Wear a jacket to dinner. Leave the snow shovel where it is. Tell 1946 you said that.

Sources: Timeanddate — 2026 seasons in Denver · NWS Boulder — Denver autumnal equinox climate · Extreme Weather Watch — Denver Sept. 22 records · NWS Denver weather history notes