Juilane Brandauer

Juilane Brandauer was going to college and studying land use planning and lived in North Boulder when I interviewed her in 1986. She discussed the notorious STP Gang whom Fred Shelton had also mentioned in his interview. Juilane shed light on what it was like to grow up in Boulder during the ‘60s and ‘70s.

I have lived in Boulder since 1964. I moved here from from Memphis, Tennessee when I was eight years old and have lived here ever since. My whole family was here and my brother was a hippy on University Hill where he used to play pool for money.

When I was about fifteen years old, some of my girlfriends and I used to like to go over to Central Park and sit around and watch the hippies go by. One night we went over and we were going to smoke a joint and then go over to a friend’s house and watch all-night movies.

So we got over there and it was pretty dark. There were a lot of people hanging around. There were also a lot of transients there. This was about 1971. There were a lot of STP Family people that hung around the park; slept in the park; ate in the park; begged in the park and sold drugs in the park. They would recruit runaway girls in the park and we were pretty innocent at the time! We didn’t realize that anyone would ever mean to do us harm.

We met up with a guy whose nickname was “OD.” We didn’t realize the significance of his nickname until after our experience with him. But he wanted to share some of our reefer. He took us over close to the creek and over behind some bushes, trying to hide out there from anybody that might try to spot us and we smoked our joint and he shared his whiskey with us. We didn’t realize it (at the time), but he’d put a bunch of strawberry mescaline in his whiskey.

We had (previously) done some psychedelics ourselves at that time. It was really no big deal. But that much? It really overdosed us. As we were leaving, we were really pretty intoxicated. He asked one of the girls where she lived . . . where we were going. She told him and we left, went over and got into our car, and a friend drove us over to Sandy’s house.

Were you frightened?

Going with the flow. We didn’t get frightened until later. We were sitting there watching all-night movies, realizing at that point that we had been drugged. We were starting to get off on all that mescaline that was in there. And he had told us right before we had left what he had put in that drink. We were a little frightened over that, but we figured that we could take anything. At that time we (felt) we were invulnerable.

So at that tie we started watching these all-night movies . Then one of the girls started having a bad trip. It was not whole lot of fun. We tried to calm her down and she went to a back room and looked out the window and started screaming.

We thought it was just her, hallucinating, until we got back there and looked out and saw a whole bunch of people hangin out on top of Sandy’s sister’s car. There were about thirty of them hanging around, probably all members of the STP Family.

OD had gone up on University Hill and told everybody that there was a party up at this girl’s house. So they had all migrated down from the Hill and come down to find a party, and there wasn’t one and we weren’t about to let them in. Then they started banging on the doors. By that time we were just blitzed . . . Just out of it.

It was really windy that night, as I recall. They started banging on the door and demanding a party. We locked all the doors, shut all the curtains and locked all the windows. Then they started breaking windows. We called some friends because, at the time, the police were not our friends. At the time, if I known then what I know now, I would have called the police. But I didn’t know and I didn’t trust them, so I called my friends and they showed up for a brief period of time until somebody pulled a knife on them.

They (then) left us to fend for ourselves. Eventually, one of the girls went out and talked to them and convinced them that there was no party there. They started to disperse and after they left we had a couple of hours of extremely high times, just sitting around and looking at each other, melting into the ground.

Did OD leave too?

No. He didn’t show up until later. He finally showed up, knocking on the door after everything had quieted.

What were these people like?

They were scary and dirty. You couldn’t see their faces. I could see long hair hanging down. They were skinny, dirty, a lot older. We had seen a few of them around the park. A lot of times we had to run them off the land over at “Our House,” which was the youth center, for building fires out there and camping — that sort of thing. And we had a few of them that would come in, overdoses.

You worked at the Youth Center?

Yes. I was one of the first peer counselors. When I was hired, I was sixteen (years old).

Do you feel that you were really able to help people?

I’m really glad that I had the experience. I learned a lot. The Mental Health Center took over running Our House after the Youth Services Bureau decided not to take it under their wing. Melba Shepherd was in charge of the Youth Services Bureau at that time. They decided that it was a project that they really didn’t want to have much to do with. So the Mental Health Services decided to take it over and fund it.

I took drug counseling classes. I took runaway classes. I also took leadership training, group dynamic classes, and we had encounter groups. There were all sorts of different counseling techniques that they taught us. I worked with kids that were a lot worse off than I was. I was a little crazy, but I wasn’t half as crazy as some of the other kids. They were always getting busted and always running away from home and that sort of thing. I hadn’t done any of that. It was a very good experience for me.

When I was going to Project Hold, a last-resort holding area for kids who want to drop out of high school, I had a teacher named Don who was in his late 30s and had long, blond hair, a big bushy beard, and who was a father figure to all of us students. During the demonstrations here in Boulder . . . the anti-war demonstrations (I think it was in ’71) . . . at the time that Nixon mined Haiphong Harbor . . . all the anti-war demonstrations started breaking out all over the country. Boulder was no exception.

The very first wave of demonstrations took over the 28^th Street Overpass in Boulder, where 28^th Street goes over Baseline Road and becomes the Boulder Turnpike. And they had pulled up guard rails and stuff like that to block off the turnpike. They completely blocked off the intersection.

I was in Project Hold at the time, and we were trying to keep our older friends at the time from getting drafted, helping them get to Canada, or trying to help them out in any way we could. Being that young, we really didn’t know an awful lot, politically. Things were going on that were atrocious. Mai Lai had already happened. We saw the pictures. We saw the countryside that had been ravaged. We didn’t want the U.S. to be there and we didn’t want our friends to be there.

And so a group of us from the school decided that we were going to go down and be part of the anti-war demonstrations. We had no idea that it was a dangerous thing to do. There were a lot of middle class, Establishment-types in Boulder that would rather have seen us dead than out protesting against the war.

So we went up there to the 28^th Street Bridge where we were supposed to be hanging out, waiting for who-knows what to happen. We chanted slogans and sang. We were pretty scattered, but we were part of the demonstration. At that point there had been someone who had fired shots into the group of demonstrators. It had been pretty scary at certain other points, too. But we had never realized that we had been in any danger ourselves.

Who shot at you?

It had been a citizen who had been pretty irate about having to go around us. Don, the teacher I had mentioned, went into the school one day and nobody was there. None of the pupils had shown up because they were all at the demonstration. So he said, “Well hell! I the school isn’t going to come to me, I’m going to go to the school. I’m going to the demonstration.”

So he went and found all of us there. He sat us down and said, “Listen. I want to explain something here. Do you know what it is you’re protesting?”

And we all explained to him what it was that we thought we were protesting. Then he gave us an overall view of what was going on and what it was that most of the people were there for and that if it wasn’t our idea, then we should leave. He also said that our lives were in danger. “Sooner or later somebody is going to get mad, and somebody may kill some people because this is making citizens very, very angry.”

Anyway, Don was like a concrete pillar for us in all that, and he made a few kids realize that it really was pretty dangerous . . . that they really weren’t sure what they were there for. And they did leave. The rest of us decided to stick it out, and he kept us together.

At one point, a woman got so angry at the crowd that she drove through and hit someone with her car. Some of the more rowdy people in the crowd threw a rock at her car and broke here windshield. All in all, there was a whole lot of peer-pressure in the crowd toward those people that threw the rock that we were anti-war and anti-violence.

Anyway, after everything had quieted down, and I’m not sure what had happened, as far as the school and that sort of thing goes, but they decided that my teacher was in the wrong, going out to the demonstrations and being seen with us — as if he were condoning that kind of behavior, even though he didn’t condone it. He was just there to keep us together.

So they fired him! They let him leave pretty quickly. He never had a chance to say goodbye. He was one of the best teachers I ever had. My mother even liked him. There were a lot of people who really tried to help us, but because of the political heat of the time, they couldn’t.

Do you know what happened to him?

He’s teaching Indian children. He was an auto-body teacher at Boulder Vo-Tech. I think he’s down in Zuni, New Mexico teaching Indian children . . . doing the trade down on the Indian Reservation. He was the best teacher.