Denver Colorado

Neal Cassady

and the Beat Generation

 

 

 

by tom christopher

originally published in Beat Scene magazine

 

           

 

Colorado men are we

From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,

from the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,

                   Pioneers! O Pioneers!

 

(excerpt from Pioneers! O Pioneers! by Walt Whitman)

 

When the origins and influence of the beat generation are considered, we

see it as a post war movement associated with large American cities with

an artistic tradition.  New York, at first, where the original core of

beat writers met around the Columbia University campus, and a decade

later in San Francisco.

 

But in between these two cities, there’s another place where Kerouac,

Ginsberg and to an extent, Burroughs, fit in and made lifelong friends.

Denver Colorado was home not only to Neal Cassady, but to a whole group

of young people who remain largly unknown, but who’s lives reflect the

working class aspect of beat culture, and also show us how close to the

real roots of American culture beat culture actually is.

 

Allen Ginsberg told his friend Robert La Vigna that after Howl’s

publication he got more mail from the mid west than from the big costal

cities.  Maybe that sums it up.   LuAnne Henderson said that nobody

cared that Jack and Allen were working on their writing.  They were

kids, they just wanted to grab a beer and have some fun.  And that’s

important, too.

 

Denver, ‘the mile high city’, at the base of the Rocky Mountains, with

its land locked location in the southwestern United States, might be

assumed to be the kind of small city that’s prominent on maps because if

its function as state capitol, without ever seeming to have the dynamics

of a real city.  A large small town with a nice open park around a Greek

or Roman inspired governmental complex that makes for a nice

diversionary drive on Sunday afternoon, but that seems an after-thought

or a showpiece, somehow not connected to the busted knuckle industry

that built America along the rivers and railways. That doesn’t apply to

Denver.

 

Denver was officially founded on 22 Nov 1858, though its unofficial

beginnings were on the 16 of September, when William H Larimer, who

liked to be called ‘the General’ discovered the claim-setting cabin

built a month previously by the Saint Charles Town Company of Lawrence,

Kansas, moved in, and staked out his own city at the ﾔmouth of Cherry

Creek where it forms itﾕs confluence with the South Platte’ River.

 

William Larimer was born in western Pennsylvania in 1809, and went to

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a young man, where, besides earning the

commission of major general in the state militia, he practiced the

various trades of hotel keeping, horse trading, general store keeping,

grocery wholesaling, banking, real estate, and railroad building before

losing his money in an 1845 bank crash.  He continued west and by 1858

had reestablished himself successfully in Omaha, Nebraska as a banker.

Though by this time he was married with children, when he heard stories

of gold strikes in Colorado he set off with a group of gold seekers and

‘town boomers’.

 

Before  the site of the city, named after then governor of the Kansas

Territory, James W. Denver, had been discovered, Larimer had been in

negotiation with the Leavenworth and Pikes Peak Express Company to

establish an office in his proposed city.  This was done and when the

first stage pulled into town on 7 may 1859 the survival of the city was

assured.  The General had seen frontier cities rise and die before, and

he was playing for keeps in a game played by those at least as

rootless and driven as he; young claim jumpers, speculators and gamblers

who sometimes wagered town lots in games of questionable chance.  Denver

grew and prospered during this time, however, following political

defeats, the General left Denver in 1862 for Leavenworth Kansas, where

he eventually died in 1875

 

But by 1860 the course for Denver was set.  Gold from the Pikes Peak

gold rush, and later, silver, made the area affluent.  The confluence of

not only the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, but of the Arkansas

River Trail and Smokey Hill Trail guaranteed an influx of travelers

desired by merchants, and the Rocky Mountains, imposing to even a modern

car, made Denver the farthest post west

 

Larimer Street in 1860, when the population was 5000, was a collection

of brick and wood buildings, the mud filled potholes and open sewers

covered by wobbly uneven boards, with piles of furs and pelts stacked on

the streets.  Contemporary maps show 36 taverns clustered around down

town, and the first churches, a Southern Methodist and Roman Catholic

chapel were completed that year.  Other church groups met in taverns,

which did a double duty as theatres, town halls, and even banks, as they

tended to have the biggest safes, to accommodate the large sums of cash

their business required.  Denver was described as a place of ‘many rude

shanties for the sale of whiskey and tobacco’, where ‘gambling and

dissipation were...universal’.  A British visitor, William Hepworth

Dixon wrote in 1866, ‘as you wander about these hot and dirty streets,

you seem to be walking in a city of demons.  Every fifth house appears

to be a bar, a whiskey shop, a lager-beer saloon; every tenth house

appears to be either a brothel or a gaming house; very often both in

one.’

 

According to Episcopal Church records, of the first twelve funerals

conducted, five of the deceased had been shot, two were executed for

murder, one shot himself and one died of alcoholism.

 

A severe fire destroyed the other main business streets of Blake and

Market Streets in 1863, leaving Larimer as the unquestioned main

street.  The old downtown area of Denver, made famous by Jack Kerouac

and Neal Cassady was built after this point, and the area was fully

developed by 1883.

 

Denver continued to grow.  Street cars, pulled along their tracks by

mules, delivered residents to the first suburb of Curtis Park beginning

in 1871.  Gas lights were installed downtown in 1873, and by 1880 the

city sported 80’ telephone poles.  By 1880 the population was 35,000 and

Denver attracted a group of English investors interested in building a

half million dollar hotel, The Windsor.  In the nineteenth century

hotels were the measure of civilization for cities, and with the opening

of The Windsor, internationally noted, with its 300 rooms and staff of

140 persons overseeing a miniature city including a Western Union

Office, a barber shop, two bars, three restaurants, a library, a

laundry, a wine cellar, a tobacconist, and a maze of parlors, meeting

rooms and suites, Denver became a destination in itself. 

 

By 1890, with a population of over 100,000, Denver was the third most

populated city in the west, behind San Francisco and Omaha.  Larimer

Street was compared favorably to New York’s Broadway, and tourists were

sometimes said to outnumber residents.  It was in this year that

Elitches Botanical Gardens were opened, which would later be a beat

hangout

 

As growth continued, newer and grander buildings were built along the

downtown streets not yet developed,and no new building was done on

Larimer Street after 1883.  The once splendid Windsor and others like

the Tabor and the Barclay fell into disrepair, their fates sealed by an

international depression in 1893, the same year the U.S. federal

government demonetized silver, and Colorado, ‘the silver state’ sank

into an economic slide, turning Larimer Street and the other older

sections of Blake and Market Streets into a classic skid row, populated

by the fallen gentry of the earlier age, and the hardscrabble workers

who could aspire to nothing more. The large hotel rooms were eventually

subdivided into flop house cubicles, a screen of chicken wire covering

the tops, often littered with broken glass to discourage crawling across

it.

 

Despite this, newspapers from the turn of the century till the war years

show a typical, healthy city building itself on a local level as the

country goes thru its economic cycles and engages in wars and

conflicts.  Industry and commerce rise and fall, the land is developed,

schools and churches are built, shows, plays, movies, sports attractions

and popular dance bands come and go.

 

	Larimer Street About 1910. photo copyright tom christopher. all rights reserved

 

 

 

 

 

But below the respectability lies the old cowboy town of sunburned

refugees and gamblers.  Indeed there had been a near shoot out at city

hall in 1893 when reform governor Davis H.Waite, vowing to ‘purify’

Denver appointed new police and fire chiefs, and the current ones

refused to leave their offices, quickly marshalling a troop of 200

police and hastily deputized gamblers and saloon keepers who held off

the 400 state troops. The governor eventually backed down and took his

case to the supreme court, where he lost.  He also lost his next

election for governor, blaming his defeat on ‘15,000 gamblers and lewd

women.’.

 

The anarchy of skid row and the rough down town on the ‘other side of

the tracks’ were social facts that had been historically tolerated by

the frontier towns.  They supplied a pool of unskilled labor that spent

a greater proportion of it’s income than did the more stable and genteel

population on the right side of the tracks.

 

At the turn of the century, pornography was publicly available at the

numerous penny arcades downtown.  Alcohol was readily available even

through the prohibition years of 1920 - 1933, and those involved in

bootlegging at that time speak today of paying off the police for

protection, and of selling alcohol to high ranking police officers.  A

form of prostitution operated openly under the guise of a maid system

for boarding houses until 1941.

 

 

	Denver about 1910. The tall building in the center is the Daniels and Fisher Tower, which is still standing. Neal writes of it in The First Third. He would have seen it looking towards the camera from three blocks down at The New Metropolitan Hotel on the corner of  16 and Market Streets, one of many old hotels where he lived with his father

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the city to which the young Neal Leon Cassady returned.  Neal

was born in Salt Lake City, under the misspelling of ‘Cassidy’ on 8

February 1926.  His father, Neal Cassady (born Neal Marshall Casady in

Queen City, Missouri), having deserted his first wife in Des Moines,

Iowa, wed the widowed Jean Daly (born Maud(e) Webb Schuer or Scheuer in

Osecola, Iowa) in Denver, where they met in 1925, and, building a cabin

on a truckbed, took her and her youngest son, Jimmy, to Salt Lake.  They

lived together at 48 1/2 Broadway, and he worked as a barber at the

Desert Gym.

 

It’s unclear from existing records if the Cassadys returned as a

family.  Denver directories from 1928 indicate Jean Cassady may have

lived alone, but by 1930, she and Neal lived in the same building as one

of her older sons, possibly the same apartment, and by 1931 Neal Sr is

listed as having a barbershop in the building that Neal describes in his

unfinished autobiography The First Third as being the last home the

family shared.

 

Saint Clara’s Orphanage, where Neal’s sister Shirley was sent after their parents’ divorce

 

 

 

From the time of his parent’s divorce in 1932 until his mother’s death

in 1936, Neal spent the school year with either his mother or the

extended family of his older half brothers, traveling with his father

during the summer months.  After his mother’s death he lived with his

brothers’ families, as much as they could handle him, but school records

note that though his father’s whereabouts are often unknown, Neal

prefers to be with him.  Neal writes of these years in The First Third,

and accurately describes the neighborhood as it existed then, before

several streets were moved.  His family moved regularly around the

general area of Curtis Park, which was the original suburb of Denver

served by mule driven trollys in the 1880s.  Much of this area is still

as Neal described it.

 

Writer and publisher William Jovanovich grew up in this neighborhood,

though he never met Neal, either in Denver, or later at Columbia

University.  He describes an area that was simply poor, but not a slum,

and a city with roots in the east.  Walking those streets today one sees

a pleasing example of the way American towns were laid out early in this

century, with small wood framed working class bungalows side by side

with the more substantial red brick homes of the bourgeois, and the

utilitarian and archaic boarding houses so common during that time.

Small commercial buildings that once housed a variety of mom and pop

businesses ring the area , and there are a few early apartment

buildings.  Neal writes accurately of the wide alleys that separate the

back yards here, and that helps give the area a low, open, and friendly

look.  This is the type of neighborhood you see in the old Hal Roach

‘Little Rascals’ and ‘Our Gang’ comedies of the 1930s, and it’s easy to

imagine the legions of kids that must’ve swarmed from those old

apartments to the candy shop and off to the ballpark back in the

thirties.  The neighborhood changes from block to block, and some blocks

have never been touched by prosperity.

 

The Lyons was a private residential hotel across the street from The Snowden Apartments, where Neal often lived.  No photos of the Snowden are known to exist, but this photo, which dates to 1910  shows a building similar to Neal’s descriptions in The First Third

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

School photos show a mix of races in the area, with maybe half the kids

white, and the other half a mixture of black, hispanic and asian.  The

white kids don’t remember race as playing much of a role in their

lives.  They played with all the kids at school, and today old friends

are remembered for their athletic or scholastic abilities, not their

color.  Minority kids recall it differently, though, citing mostly

unspoken rules that kept them from mixing freely with anglo kids,

particularly later, during their teen years, but none are overly

burdened by what was taken as a fact of life at the time.  Denver Public

Library has promotional material for the KKK during that time, but they

Don’t seem to have been particularly active.

 

If Neal was poor it was because the neighborhood was poor, Denver was

poor and the whole country was poor in the 1930s.  Neal Sr. was indeed a

hardcore alcoholic who could be counted on to drink vanilla extract or

sterno, an alcohol based fuel, before resorting to sobriety, but Neal’s

mother Jean, who married young and had nine successful births, provided

her family with a sense of culture and security.  Neal’s brothers always

worked during a time when jobs were scarce, and supported their mother

when Mr Cassady was unable or unwilling, and upon her death continued to

support Neal.  Funeral records indicate Mrs. Cassady received an

expensive funeral from her loving family, and when Neal was baptized the

summer of her death, his godfather noted that Neal was already

proficient in his Catholic theology.  Friends say Neal never stood out

as being poor or ill mannered.  Indeed, just the opposite was true, Neal

was noted to intelligent, humorous and well mannered at an early age,

and this must be seen as the result of his mother’s influence, a fact he

acknowlegdes in The First Third.

 

For all the mischief Neal could’ve gotten into, he really didn’t do very

much.  He was self directed and could read in the library for hours,

having acquired an early love of books, and he excelled at the after

school sports either on the grounds of Ebert Elementary School, Cole Jr

High or the ballpark on Welton and 23 rd streets.  He attended school

till about ninth grade, or 1940, and it was about this time that he

began stealing cars and making extended trips to California.  But it

should also be noted that contemporary newspaper stories paint car theft

for the purpose of joy riding to have been a common crime by the young,

and and other articles describe kids of Neal’s age to have been

participating in much more serious, violent crime than Neal was involved

with, some of them getting multiple year sentences in prison for

repeated offenses.  Also, Cassady always worked hard, if he didn’t

always work, often at strenuous adult jobs like tire recapping. 

 

It was late 1941 that Neal met the man who would mentor him and be a

bridge to the group that would become the New York beats.  Justin

Briarly was born on 3 September 1905 in the house his grandfather,

Denver pioneer John Walters had built.  Justin had attended Columbia

University and briefly run a talent agency in New York before returning

to Colorado to practice law and teach school at East High, the most

affluent school in Denver, serving the prosperous families living around

the capitol.  Justin has been described as a

turn-of-the-century-gentleman.  He effected a style of dress and speech

that was archaic for those modern times, with language so influenced by

the movies and popular records.  He was thin with impeccable posture and

a pencil thin moustache, and he was very properly gay.  Neal was

shirtless and 15 when they met at the house of Justin’s uncle.  Justin

was impressed with young Neal’s intelligence and bearing, and arranged

to get him into East High School.

 

	East High School about 1946

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neal and Justin came to have a sexual arrangement, the details of which

vary from telling to telling.  This may not have been Neal’s first

sexual experience with an older man, and it was not his first with an

older person.  Justin introduced Neal to his friends, both male and

female.  Despite his age, it’s hard to think of Neal as a child at this

time, and no one who knew Justin, who died in 1985, has spoken a word

against him.  Indeed, he was eulogized in the Rocky Mountain News as one

of Denver’s most distinguished educators.  Nonetheless, those who point

to Cassady’s alleged criminality and sociopathy should consider the

lessons he learned from the cream of Denver society.  Neal’s friend

Chuck Wooster remembers ‘ I never knew Neal to cheat anybody.  In fact,

it seemed he was the one being used ‘.

 

 

 

	Justin Briarly is on the right. 1942

 

 

 

 

From 1942 to 1944 Neal attended school on an irregular basis, worked in

Colorado and made extended trips to Los Angeles where he worked parking

cars.  He was arrested a couple of times on charges of auto theft, and

once on suspicion of robbery.  He walked away from a juvenile work camp

in LA, and when captured was released to Briarly’s care, as he had been

earlier, in Denver.  In the summer of 1944 he was arrested in Denver

when he was implicated after the fact in a series of burglaries , when

stolen merchandise was found in his apartment.  He served 10 months in

reform school.

 

During his time in reform school, he wrote Justin with some regularity,

and Justin wrote back and sent gifts of school newspapers and fruit and

nuts at the holidays.  Justin continued to work with other kids as a

teacher and counselor, but also worked at getting the brightest kids

scholarships to his alma matter, Columbia. Justin is to be understood as

someone who took great delight in the human experience.  He had a deep

interest in all types of arts and culture.  He took great pride in

watching the kids he was close to grow and mature.  He had the intuitive

sense to spot not only the students who simply had good grades, but the

students with passion and potential, and he found he had a knack for

maneuvering through bureaucracies and finding grant and scholarship

money for his most capable students.  One of these was Hal Chase.

Remembered as one of the brightest kids to go through East High, he’d

made himself an authority on Native American culture while still in high

school.  He’d graduated high school in 1941, done time in the service,

and upon entering Columbia, found himself rooming at the 115 Street

apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams, where he shared a room with Allen

Ginsberg, and met Jack Kerouac, William S Burroughs, Herbert Hunke and

the other occupants and visitors of that famous apartment.  He returned

to Denver in the summer of 1945, and met Neal Cassady at the Denver

Public Library.  At this time they both knew Briarly, but they seem to

have met accidentally.  Hal told Neal about the New York group. When

Chase returned to Columbia, he took a suite of rooms with fellow

Denverite Ed White.

 

One of Justin Briarly’s responsibilities with the Central City Opera was

to sign performers for the summer opera season, and once a year he would

return to New York to do this.  On these trips he would stop by Columbia

and see his former students.

 

Chase had been telling Kerouac about Cassady, and Ed White remembers

Chase thinking that Cassady would be the perfect protagonist for the

kind of writing Kerouac wanted to do.  He may have shown Cassady letters

written by Kerouac, and it was either through Briarly or Chase that

Kerouac read Neal’s reform school letters, or possibly letters to Chase,

and decided he wanted to meet the writer.

 

Cassady meanwhile was in Denver hanging out with a second group of kids,

the ones Kerouac would later dramatize into the Pederson’s poolhall

gang.

 

It should be remembered that these were the last years of the war.

America was fighting a war on two fronts, and every available man had

been pressed into service.  It was common for mature 15 year olds to

join the armed services, and even more common for youth of that age to

drop out of school and work.  After more than a decade of economic

depression there was suddenly an abundance of jobs, and groups that had

previously been marginalised economically; women, minorities and the

young found a surprising affluence.  The young could even drink a

special low alcohol beer at 18, a seeming acknowledgement to their new

status as mature workers.  Lu Anne Henderson said ‘everybody’s dad was

away at war, and when you turned the corner of 16th Street (on a

Saturday night) there was nobody over 21’.  This group made the most of

it.

 

This is the group that included Jimmy Holmes, the most proficient

poolplayer and gambler of the bunch, who has supported himself as a

gambler since then.  Jimmy  was the core of the group.  He was friends

with Al Hinkle from school, and Neal really did approach him to learn

pool, like Kerouac writes, offering to teach him philosophy in return.

There was also Al Hinkle, Neals longtime friend, whoﾕs 1948 marriage to

Helen prompted the famous road trip of that year, recorded in On The

Road.  Ed Uhl, who met Jeanne, his wife of 50 years through Neal, Bob

Speak, later a court reporter in California, Shelly Emeson, later a

Denver lawyer, and a big healthy kid with a bad leg from the polio

epidemic named Don Fulton.  Another close friend of Neal’s was jimmy

penoff, who’d made trips to California with Neal.  There was also Bill

Tomson, the first of the group to meet Carolyn Robinson, who became

Neal’s  second wife.  On the outskirts of the group were the big Greek

brothers Bum and Buddy Maragoos, who were known to be tough, but not

mean.  Further on the fringes of this group, mostly by virtue of a

shared age were another bunch of harder, more criminally inclined types,

some who did hard time and at least one of whom was killed in prison.

One observer of this group, several years younger than the rest, used to

watch their antics in awe, particularly impressed with Neal’s ability

with women.  Later, as a teacher at East High, this person would claim

this particular group was the smartest and wildest group to ever go

through the school.

 

 

	Morey Junior High School. Cassady didn’t go here, he went to Cole, but Al Hinkle, Jimmy Holmes, Bob Speak, Don Fulton, Jeannie Stewart, LuAnne Henderson and others did

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cassady was central to this group.  Known as an inept gambler who used

his intelligence to avoid fights, but who could perform with great

prowess on any athelitic field, he worked irregularly but was central to

social activities, often boosting a car or renting a moving truck he

filled with mattresses to ferry the gang back and forth to parties in

the mountains, to Elitche’s Gardens for dances or out to the Eastside

Tracks for midget auto races.

 

Much