When we were first introduced to the term pandemic, not a lot of people used the word. That’s the not case any longer. COVID-19, the virus that has infused fear into nearly society in the world, is the scourge that has helped add pandemic to our collective societies.
Pueblo, once the second largest city in Colorado, suffered through a big city-like COVID wave. It wasn’t a wave that suddenly appeared. In fact, the city had found itself in a lull. In Fall of 2020, Pueblo’s rate of infections had actually dropped to a very manageable 224 cases. But that was the calm before the storm. Each subsequent month experienced a steady and dramatic increase. Two months after recording its lowest number of cases, it counted 6,300 by year’s end. The virus’s highest death toll was December when 162 deaths were marked.
The city, as so many others, is now facing the challenge of COVID’S spawn, Omicron, a variant of the virus that has just begun its march across the globe.
One of the great pleasures of living in Colorado—and particularly, southern Colorado—is the music that clings to its roots, roots that go back generations. Johnny ‘Ritmo’ Rodriguez gifted audiences all across the state with a unique blend of rock and roll to Mexican ballads to ‘throwin’ chancla’ with anyone. “We were family; we were strong; we were each other’s energy,” said TJ, the group’s keyboardist and son of the elder Rodriguez. Rodriguez died in February, a victim of COVID.
Last April, La Voz Bilingüe dedicated its front page to a story a lot of Coloradans don’t know and possibly, even more would care not to remember. In the April 27th edition of the paper, we wrote about Camp Amache, once the home to an estimated 8,000 displaced Japanese-Americans. The camp’s residents were there not because they had broken a law, but because of a war time law that forced them out of their homes, away from the West Coast, and to the interior of the country. Today, this stain on ‘American exceptionalism’ stands lonely on the tall, windswept plains of Eastern Colorado, out of the way, but not out of memory. The drive to Granada, the closest town to Camp Amache, is a 228 mile trip from Denver.
Like the face of a once lovely movie icon, the face of Colorado is undergoing significant change of its own. Its once verdant landscape is now dry and brittle, with cracks impossible to mask and its condition is only growing more severe. Climate change has parched Southern Colorado, leaving jig-saw-like terra firma in its place. University of New Mexico Water Resource Director, John Fleck, who has monitored drought in the Southwest for decades, says don’t look for a turnaround anytime soon. “Climate change changed everything…it’s been a gradual warming atmo- sphere for a good part of the last seventy-five years.” His own state’s Elephant Butte Reservoir was measured this summer at 95 percent below normal levels.
In a July 2021 story, we highlighted one of the treasures of Pueblo who goes by the name of Helen Benavidez. She runs the Pueblo Community Soup Kitchen, a place that feeds the ever growing homeless and hungry of the city. Of course, the veteran do-gooder doesn’t do it by herself. Though she has only a couple of paid staffers, she’s rounded up enough volunteers, including octogenarian Floyd Parks to meet the mission. She lets Parks handle the facility’s swamp coolers but adds, “I refuse to let him get on the roof by himself.” The Soup Kitchen relies on a subsidy from the city and donations from local grocery stores.
As the year wound down with days getting cooler and nights getting longer, we thought it only appropriate to include a Halloween story in our coverage of southern Colorado. We didn’t have to go farther than Pueblo for the supernatural.
Union Avenue’s Gold Dust Saloon, once many times rowdier than its modern day incarnation, jumped out as a good starting place. The saloon was once shadowed by the city’s official hanging tree. More than a few patrons and employees of the place swear to the odd noises they’ve heard over the years. A television crew even made a visit and noted a few unexplained, perhaps even spooky, events. Faculty, staff and students at Pueblo Central High School, opened in 1881, also say the school’s music room has unexplained tales. The Rosemont Museum, the Redstone mansion of John and Margaret Thatcher, also hides volumes of stories about things that go bump in the night.
While Pueblo doesn’t get nearly the lights shined on it as many other Colorado cities, Mayor Nick Gradisar says ‘hold on to your hats.’ New jobs are coming to the town, money from President Biden’s $1 trillion dollar infrastructure package is earmarked for more than a few dramatic improvements, including an estimated $25 million for redoing the city’s historic Union Avenue bridge. “It’s nearly a hundred years old and doesn’t meet the (structural) standards…it needs to be replaced.”
The city is on the move said, Gradisar. And it’s only an hour and half from Denver. ‘Come on down!’
