Kathy Snow

I met Kathy Snow at New Horizons, a preschool that was started after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated and set up as a cooperative venture. The school was created to teach non-violence and non-racism. Three of my own children attended New Horizons, where many of the ideals of the ‘60s were being lived and taught. – SG

Back in the early ‘70s, my husband and I first arrived in Boulder, totally by accident. We were on our way to Oregon. We had heard that Tom McCall was governor of Oregon and he’d put the word out that they didn’t want any more people moving there — that they had enough population already and they were going to run and environmentally organized state. And, (given) the perverse nature of man, we decided that was exactly the place that we wanted to move.

We were, at the time, leaving Florida — my husband, Tim, and I, and we bought a Volkswagen van and enough money that we figured we could live on for a year or two. We were going to truck all over the United States and were going to end up living in Oregon and maybe buy a bookstore or start working in one or something. We just had loose plans to travel until we got to the spot that seemed right.

We came through Boulder. We were just visiting here and just looking around. We had been camping in the mountains for awhile. Then we had a traffic accident. A guy lost control of his car and hit us broadside and totaled our vehicle. Luckily, neither one of us were hurt too much. We ended up having to stay in Boulder for awhile until we got a settlement with the insurance company.

The only nasty person that I have really met in Boulder was that insurance agent. It was really interesting. I did get slightly knocked about and had to go to the hospital. The doctor warned me that I might possibly have a concussion and that an insurance guy would probably come to our hotel room that night and try to talk me into signing a medical release — and that I shouldn’t sign it.

Sure enough, this guy showed up. He was nasty and badgered us. We told him that we were not going to sign any release until the doctor said it was OK. We told him that all we wanted was enough money to go up to the university and buy a van advertised on the bulletin board – that we would refit it out ourselves and get going.

So we went up to the university and looked to see how much we would need to get a comparable replacement and we gave him a figure. And he said, “Oh. That’s ridiculously high for a vehicle.” He told us that he couldn’t possibly give us that much for it.

So we said, “Well, your alternative is to fix it.” So he told us he would check back with us. And finally he told us he had found a (shop) that would repair it for us. We told him to haul it away and get it done for us. It dragged on and on and on to finally get it fixed and it cost him three thousand dollars more than what we had asked for in the settlement. It was sort of a bizarre start!

During that time, we decided that we would try to enjoy Boulder as much as we could. (August, 1970).

We had enough money to live on and weren’t really upset about finding jobs, at least for a year or two. We still figured we would (eventually) head off for Oregon. So we poked around and figured what kind of things needed doing in Boulder. We signed up to work as volunteers at the Free Clinic. We were working at the Methadone clinic there. We also did volunteer work at the Eco Center that was just starting in downtown Boulder, way before the (Pearl Street) Mall was built. It was up in those crummy old offices up above the old First National Bank Building.

We started doing all the volunteer work that we could sort of fill up our time with. We found a place to stay by going up to the university and looking at the bulletin board. There was a lady who had a sign out for students – that she would take in students – and she had a house up on Sunset Hill and invited us to come up and take a look at the place. We talked to her on the phone and told her what our situation was, that we’d be there anywhere from six weeks to two months until we got our insurance settlement. We had enough money to pay our rent in advance. She looked us over and we told her our story – that we were semi-responsible. That was our first house in Boulder that we lived in up there.

Roger Olson was our next door neighbor, who later became a city councilman. We really enjoyed him and one of my first jobs in Boulder was babysitting his children. We just generally worked volunteer sort of things.

The very first night of the accident, we realized that everything we owned was in the Volkswagen and we tried to figure out where we were going to store our stuff. So we looked up Friends in the phone book for the local Quaker group. Neither one of us were Quakers, but we thought we’d want to contact them to see if any one of them had a garage. The reason we thought of them was because when we’d been active in the Civil Rights movement and anti-war stuff in the South — it was always the Friends and the Quakers who stepped in to help people when they needed it and patched things up and that sort of thing — so we felt real comfortable about calling.

We dialed the number that was listed in the phone book and a professor at the university his name was Walter Uphoff — and his wife Mary Joe . . . We called them and told them of our situation – that we’d just had this wreck and had no intention of staying in Boulder and that we needed somebody that had a garage where we could store a couple of trunks full of stuff for awhile until we got the insurance settlement.

She said she’d be right over. They loaded their car up with the stuff and took it right over to their garage and put it into storage for us and a little bit later she asked us how we knew about Friends. I told her about my connections in the South working with them on civil rights and anti-war causes.

She invited us to go to a Friends Meeting one time to see what it was like. I told her I wasn’t sure I could sit still and be quiet for an hour. She said, “If you can’t, you can always get up and leave. But you just might find it interesting.”

So we went and really enjoyed the people there and all and as a result of the contacts that my first husband made at the Friends Meeting he got his first job here. He had met a professor at the university at the Friends Meeting who wanted him to do a noise pollution project. And he had an electronics background to help this professor set up. He’d gotten a grant to do that and to study levels of noise pollution and air pollution . . . but mainly noise pollution. They were focusing on traffic sounds. They were set up on the corner of Iris and 28^th Streets long before there were any buildings on the corner . . . just the intersection with 28^th Street and the Longmont Diagonal. That was his first job.

We were active with all sorts of things on the side, too. We’d gotten active with draft counseling at the university. Murray Richtel, who is now one of the judges in the city, was active on that too. One of my earliest memories of the anti-war activities in Boulder was the time that the students took over the bridge over Baseline Road to the Boulder Turnpike. I had been real interested in all that was going on, but not really actively participating.

I had come down with this tremendous flu and had been sort of out of my head and been in bed for three or four days. I can remember waking out of a fever and having been sort of semi-in and out of it. I was just vaguely aware of what was going on, hearing the helicopters flying low over the house at the time and waking and asking if the war had started. I felt really shaken and out of it. It’s amazing to me that we had such intensity of feeling then about the Vietnam War. It seems that a gradual mellowing process seems to have gone on for so many of us. The intensity of the reality of that possibility still sticks with me.

You mean that the war had come home?

Right. It was sort of us against them instead of all of us working together. There were three or four Army helicopters flying over as well as the news helicopters. I just remember the sound of the helicopters flying continuously over the house.

I was also really active in the Eco- Center downtown that had been set up by a group of people in response to all of the Earth Day activities. That was a really interesting group of people! Two ladies who were most active in setting it up were Sandy Cooper and Mary Taylor. Mary Taylor’s husband is a professor at the university.

Was the Eco- Center the precursor of Eco-Cycle?

Much before that! It was an office that we set up that had all sorts of clippings and environmental things and was sort of a coordinating center for all the different environmental groups that were just getting started . . . everything from recycling to atomic waste and a lot of stuff about general planning and a lot of work on Boulder Creek. And the fights to keep Boulder Creek from being re-channeled to keep it as natural as possible were part of it. We sort of organized and coordinated (it all) from the office.

It was a general clearing-house for all sorts of environmental information. If somebody wanted to find out about recycling, they could call in and find out about it. If they wanted to find out about zoning, they could find out about that. We tried to keep a general data bank of everybody who was real active in Boulder, and we developed one of the first unified mailing lists. We tried to get the word out to everybody about environmental groups. It was staffed mostly by volunteers. People just made donations and tried to keep it going. A lot of things grew out of that.

Did city support of recycling of cans and bottles grow out of that?

I don’t believe so. Not at that early time. Some of the ideas and some of the impetus grew out of that. That’s where I got my first job. I had been working as a volunteer. One of the people, Sandy Cooper, was giving up a job that she had with a group called Foreign Ecological Institute that was really into organizing seminars to teach people about environmental impact statements. She was giving up that job so that she could go back to school and suggested that I apply for it. And that’s how I got my first job in Boulder. So before we got the first insurance settlement, we were both working.

Could you tell me more about Sandy Cooper?

Sandy was really instrumental in the Eco-Center and really active in all sorts of planning. She got more and more interested in urban planning. I think she’s now . . . I don’t know if she has her degree or is still working on it at C.U. in urban planning. She was working for awhile as a consultant for some planners. She worked for awhile with Vince Parika, who was a country planner, and they set up a consulting organization where she worked for awhile. It was real interesting to see the evolution of the thing.

I remember working for awhile for People’s Clinic, which was (then) called the Free Clinic. It was located on Alpine. We worked out of the basement of a group of offices. I have a real vivid memory of working with the Methadone Clinic there and taking a group of guys, and I think one or two women – but just taking them for an outing one day up to Flagstaff Mountain. We were looking out from Artist’s Point on Flagstaff – looking at the great panorama that’s up there and really enjoying it. All of a sudden, one of these guys broke into the most incredible profanity that I have ever heard in my life. The air was literally blue. Your ears just sort of flapped a little bit. Out of nowhere, he started cursing and going on.

We were all just shocked and sort of just sat there and let him flow on with it. Finally, he wound down a little bit and he sat and wept . . . just wept and wept. Eventually, when he could talk, we asked, “What was that all about?” He said that he had come from New York City and that he had never seen anything like that in his entire life. He felt that if he had seen something like that and had been aware of what was out there in the world that he probably never would have gotten into hard drugs.

It was like he felt as if he had been caged all of his life and all of a sudden somebody had opened the door and he saw what it was really like out there. It was really a moving experience. It has always been a real strong memory for me of those times.

It was obvious that it was painful to him. I remember being so shocked at that revelation – that there were people that had no idea of what was available and what was out there in the world. How lucky we are to have it there for the taking and use and enjoyment — the great beauty that is there and other people not even being aware of it.