Paul Danish

This interview is with Paul Danish, former City Councilman and author of the Danish growth-limitation ordinance, AKA the Danish Plan. Contrary to the revisionist history of the local newspapers, it was not the City Council that implemented growth-limitation. Paul Danish was forced to put the issue on the ballot to get the growth-limitation ordinance passed.

Mr. Danish wrote a column for the Colorado Daily at the University of Colorado back when it was a good newspaper. The first time I saw Mr. Danish was at a City Council meeting back in the ‘70s. Bob Trenka was practically screaming at Paul Danish and turning red faced. Trenka was a red headed councilman who, along with Bob White, represented the local realtors, land developers and Chamber of Commerce-types in the community. Boulder was fortunate to have Danish on the Council, in the opinion of this author. — S. Byron Gassaway

Danish

I came to Boulder in 1960 to go to school. It was actually my third choice. I had applied at Stanford and Brandeis, and had not been accepted. In retrospect, I guess, I was pretty lucky that I wasn’t, because I think the University of Colorado was almost the perfect campus to be on in those days. I think it was in the first-rank of places that were inventing the ‘60s, and that was certainly more exciting than being at one of the academies that discovered them only late in the game.

In the early ‘60s, CU was in an interesting state of transition. It only really began building its graduate school in the ‘50s, and this was mainly started by Quig Newton. He cashed in on some of the fears about Sputnik to get some federal and state funding for building up the sciences at the University. Of course, the early ‘60s was just the period that the Baby Boomers began arriving at CU, at about ’63 or ’64, but those who were born about the time of Pearl Harbor began arriving in 1959 and 1960.

I was born in 1942. I got to Boulder in September, 1960. I recall that the enrollment at the campus had just passed eleven thousand for the first time that semester. That was an all-time record. It had broken ten thousand in 1959 and there was quite a bit of excitement about that because that had been the first time it had reached ten thousand since World War II, or right afterwards when theVets had come back.

The place was probably very typical of large universities in its mix and climate of opinion in that period. Most of the people were still very much children of the ‘50s . . . the Silent Generation. But there was a small and growing minority of people who were interested in the issues of the ‘60s. As it turned out, they controlled the student paper. The Left at CU . . . there was the Liberal Left, which congregated around the Colorado Daily. Its agenda was civil rights, what today is called Détente, although we didn’t have a word for it then, and student rights, principally an end to in loco parentis.

There was a Bohemian group in town, Beatniks, influence by the Beats. And there was The Young People’s Socialist League, which constituted the radical fringe. And there was, of course, a certain amount of overlap among these. The total number of people involved in all of these movements couldn’t have been more than three or four hundred.

The Socialists were interesting . . . They were the Norman Thomas Socialists. Their faculty advisor was Alex Garber. He was an assistant-professor of sociology, a very bright guy. He was sufficiently abrasive, radical, and outspoken that he could never get tenure. After his final try was turned down, he went out to Sacramento State College and just clicked like crazy and became Department Chairman in no time flat. And then he moved on to other places in California and I lost track of him. I was always impressed by the man, (he was) very strongly anti-communist.

To the Young People’s Socialist League in those days, the splits between Democratic Socialists and the Bolsheviks in the ‘20s were still recent history. The nastiest thing they could call you was “Stalinoid.” These weren’t large factions, but they certainly dominated the discussion in political ideas on the campus, and of course, the ‘60s were a time of tremendous ferment in terms of political ideas.

For the Liberals, Kennedy pretty much set the tone, of course. There was great excitement when he won the election of November, 1960. A lot of this was manifested in the Colorado Daily in its pages. Its editors were liberal. They were socially engaged and their primary mission was to make the paper relevant – by which they meant that the national, international, and local political agendas would be brought to the attention of the student-body, usually in terms of how it affected them in their role as students.

So a good deal of time could be spent discussing international student affairs, for instance. If we were talking about civil liberties, you’d talk not only about the injustices of the House Un-American Activities Committee, but also how it affected life on campuses. A good deal of time was spent talking about student rights. Universities were highly paternalistic in those days, and although the Administration of the University of Colorado was reasonably liberal, it was loath to depart with authority.

The paper was criticized from the Right for ignoring the campus, which was probably true enough. It had stopped covering fraternity and sorority social life. This rankled a good deal. In fact, the Rocky Mountain News, at one point – this was after the Colorado Daily had called for the admission of Red China into the United Nations – attacked the paper for sneering at the always beautiful homecoming festivities and for being soft on communism, which I thought was quite a combination.

On the Right, there was a good deal of political ferment that started in reaction to Kennedy, and by 1962 Goldwater was all the rage. This led to a great clash at CU that year. In ’62, Barry Goldwater was scheduled to speak at the university. He was to speak in early February. He was being brought in by the conservatives to speak in the Glenn Miller Ballroom, which seats about eighteen hundred people. The Republicans, terribly afraid that he wouldn’t have a warm reception, tried to reserve something like four hundred or eight hundred seats for members of the Boulder County Republican Party.

The Young People’s Socialist League took umbrage with this, so the week before the visit the seating arrangements became a major argument. It was the only thing discussed. There was enormous ferment the whole week long. Finally the speech was moved to Macky Auditorium and the Republicans were allowed to keep reserved seats, but in the wings.

Of course, there was a full crowd. Goldwater came and gave what turned out to be his standard rap, but nobody paid much attention because he was introduced by Ed Rozek, who was just furious after this week of argument about the seating. He gave an eighteen minute introduction to a nineteen minute speech and spent a lot of time red baiting the socialists – and for that matter, the Colorado Daily. At one point, he was waving Izvestia and shouting that we find the same criticisms of Senator Goldwater (in the Daily). We argued about red baiting and the introduction for a month after that. It got very nasty.

The general atmosphere of acrimony (wasn’t helped) when CU’s football team, which had finished in the top ten in 1962 and had gone to the Orange Bowl to lose to Louisiana State, got mixed up in a rather sticky recruiting scandal and led the Regents to fire the football coach while all this was going on with Goldwater. That led the lone Republican regent to charge that the university had violated every rule of fair play since the Magna Charta, which I always thought was a wonderful phrase.

Ultimately, thirty five players were thrown off the team and CU couldn’t appear on television for two years. A guy named George Anderson owned a drugstore, where Bova’s Pantry is now, called Anderson’s Drug and the Colorado Daily discovered that it had been a source of a football slush fund used to pay players. They’d go in to buy something, pay for it with a ten dollar bill, and get fifty dollars in change, or something like that. George was running for Regent at the time, and needless to say, his candidacy did not survive that. But I guess we forgive and forget, because I just noticed that he received an Outstanding Alumni Award at the winter graduation.

The most spectacular thing that happened that year was right at the end, when Rozek, smarting from the attacks that he had endured in the wake of the Goldwater introductory speech, sued, charging there was a conspiracy to stifle his academic freedom.

He named nine defendants, including the editor of the Colorado Daily and, I think, the president of the student body, Quigg Newton, some professors. Since it was the end of the year, they were worried that they couldn’t keep some of the witnesses around to testify, so they wanted to preserve their testimony, sort of a disposition taking process.

It turned out that there was a provision in Colorado law to do this left over from the days when farmers would die on the high plains and they needed their testimony in land cases and you could go and preserve it. Ed’s lawyer, a fellow named Kramer, one of the brightest attorneys in Colorado, proposed to do this with these nine potential defendants in this suit, and that would have been very convenient because there would have been no cross-examination with this deposition-taking process. The University’s council didn’t think that was a very good idea. They got the case quashed eventually, but that was a very spectacular year. That was 1961-1962.

The following year, 1962, was the year the Colorado Daily got itself in big trouble. It started out when the editor, whose name was Gary Altman, printed an editorial about the football scandal and said, “We hope the Buffs lose tomorrow’s game.” That did not endear him to many people, including a regents candidate named Dale M. “Pete” Atkins, who was elected in large part because of that. He attacked, often quoting George Patton: “Americans don’t lose.”

Then the football team started losing – and that meant that the paper didn’t have a lot of sympathy. And that was too bad, because the next thing Altman did was print a long article by a friend of his that was, in passing, and attack on John Kennedy. It was written by a radical, but it also had some nasty things to say about Goldwater, and one of them was (that he was) “. . . a mountebank, murderer, and no better than a common criminal.” The University thought that that might be libelous – and they were probably right.

At any rate, they forced the editor to apologize, and there was an election going on in 1962, and Quigg Newton, who was president at the university, was a pretty controversial figure. He had been mayor of Denver and had a lot of political enemies within his own party. The Republicans couldn’t stand him and thought he was the devil incarnate because he was kind of liberal. They started using the irresponsibility of the student paper to attack the University. The Colorado Daily’s conduct became a major issue.

Editor Altman was relentless. He called for the admission of Red China into the United Nations, which was a sure-fire way to pour gasoline on an open fire in those days and called for the abolition of the draft, which in 1962 was a pretty radical thing to suggest.

And his friend, who wrote the controversial article in the Daily, wrote a second article explaining the first article in which he called Dwight Eisenhour “Old Futzer.” When the Rocky Mountain News pointed that out the day Eisenhower was to come to Denver to speak to the Republicans, that was the final straw and Altman was called in and fired by Quigg Newton. It was a pretty rough time for those of us who worked on the paper. Some of us resigned in protest, and those of us who didn’t wouldn’t speak to those who did for some months and vice versa.

In the end, the paper came through it pretty well. A kid who’d been the editor of the yearbook, Tom Parmiter, came over and became editor of (the Daily). The last time I saw him was in ’77. He’d just gotten his Ph. D. and was Vice Chancellor at the Michigan State University of Medicine in East Lansing. The paper did persevere through the whole thing. Quigg Newton didn’t. He resigned a month later because the Republicans had won the election.

It sounds like Boulder was more radical than Berkeley at the time.

Oh, no. Remember that in Berkeley at that time, the most important thing that happened to them – it was 1959 or 1960 – HUAC had held hearings in San Francisco, and these hearings had turned, by the standards of today, relatively violent. It was a preferential-seating issue again. The Committee had held its hearings in a small chamber at San Francisco City Hall, and most of the seats were reserved for its fans, and there was an enormous amount of interest in it. The hearings were being picketed by students and they only let a minimum number of people who were critical of the Committee in to watch the hearings. The result was that there were sit-ins, disruptions . . . there was knocking on doors. The police were called and they dragged people down the stairs. Fire hoses were turned on the crowd, and so on.

A big movie was made about this on the Right called Operation Abolition in which it was intimated that people who didn’t like HUAC were all communists, of course. Well, one of the things that came out of this was that Clark Kerr, who was president of the University of California at the time, imposed something on the campus called the Kerr Directives, which essentially banned political activity on the campus at the University of California. Thinking about it twenty five years later, it was sort of like imposing martial law. It was an outrageously un-American thing for him to do it. I think he should have spent some time in jail for it.

At the time it was quite popular. So Berkeley was quite a quiescent campus all through the ‘60s. The accommodation the students had come to was that they could do their political activity on the sidewalk next to the campus. They set up card tables and groups would recruit and pass out literature and polemicise – so you had a little Hyde Park out on the street. In that sense, CU was more radical in that we did have speakers come in. Goldwater could not have spoken at Berkeley under the Kerr Directives.

What happened, in the end, was that when they had the San Francisco Convention . . . the Republicans in 1964 . . . the moderate Republicans organized at the University of California. And that led Kerr to extend the ban on political activity to the sidewalk.

(Also) what happened was that all of those kids who had been down in Mississippi for the Freedom Summer in 1964 came back, and they just weren’t going to take that. So when the ban came in, they violated it. A bunch of them were thrown out of the school. They set up their card table again. A police car drove up to arrest them and they arrested a kid named Jack Weinberg, who was a member of the Congress for Racial Equality.

They got him in the car and about three or four hundred people surrounded the car and let all of the air out of the tires and then started making speeches from the roof of the police car. That was the Free Speech Movement and that was the thing that started American campus unrest. I always thought the Free Speech Movement was the single most justified campus protest of the ‘60s.

I often felt that Kerr, who was viewed as a hero of American administrations – a sort of Robert McNamara of education – was a complete rodent in that thing and should have been drummed out of the trade and should have spent some time in federal prison. He simply violated people’s civil liberties and constitutional rights in a way that cannot be accepted in a democracy. Ultimately, he got what he deserved – which was that he lost his job and nobody takes Clark Kerr very seriously anymore.

By then I had moved on to the Collegiate Press Service, so I knew quite a bit about the Free Speech Movement. I’d take these vacations from Boulder for about six months to a year during the ‘60s – and that was one of them. I was in Philadelphia running the Collegiate Press Service and the Free Speech Movement broke out. I had been out to Berkeley and thought, “this is very interesting.” They had, out at Berkeley, what would today be called Democracy Wall – and that’s the escape-valve for a very political campus in a state of repression.

When I got to Philadelphia to run the Collegiate Press Service, the first thing I saw was an issue of the Daily Californian. It had reported that they had just closed the thing down, and I thought that there was going to be an explosion on that campus. There was, and I spent a good deal of time covering it, long distance, and it was only much later that I found out that all those long-distance phone calls were being paid for by the CIA. The reason for that was that we shared offices with the National Student Association and the NSA was basically being paid for by the CIA for twenty years.

The NSA had been founded in the late ‘40s so that American students could be represented in an organization called the International Union of Students, which had been founded after the war in Prague, Czecheslovakia when the Russians took over Prague in 1948.

When the communists took over Prague, they of course, took over the International Union of Students, too. What was to become the CIA, which was not actually formed until the early ‘50s, was quite concerned about there not being a non-communist alternative in the world.

Ultimately, with the CIA and other Western intelligence services help, one was set up called the International Student Conference. It ran out of Leyden, in the Netherlands. American influence in that required that there be an American student organization.

The National Student Association was ultimately chosen as the American student group to represent students. But since there was no grassroots support for this, the only way to get money for this was through the government. The CIA poured a lot of money into it, mainly through some front foundations. The principle one was the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, which was (part of) the Corning Glass Foundation. It funded the National Student Association from about 1954 until they were unmasked by Ramparts Magazine in 1967.

During that time, the U.S. National Student Association supported some of the most radical and revolutionary changes in the United States. Most of the U.S. Civil Rights movement was invented in its basement. The agency’s view of this was, apparently, that segregation had become an embarrassment to the United States overseas, so they’d use some of their money to help get rid of it and to do some public good. (It was) roaringly illegal of course . . . but an intriguing attitude.

During all this time, the Young Americans for Freedom, in particular, and the Right in general, was constantly attacking the USNSA and tried to destroy it by getting its campuses to disaffiliate. The officers of the Association were constantly fighting these things, but never terribly worried about them because they had a considerably stronger base than a bunch of student governments.

The irony, of course, is that little Nazis like Tom Huston, who was president of the YAF at the time, were just constantly red baiting the USNSA – which it turns out was CIA-run. This goes to prove that most right-wingers wouldn’t know a true Leninist if one came and spit in their face – which they do regularly.

I think that the thing that had the most to do with the radicalism of the late 1960s more than anything else was the draft and the war in Vietnam. There was an interesting and contradictory signal that was being sent to students, in particular, male students. And that was the whole thrust of education in America. It was quite optimistic in the ‘50s and ‘60s, (to wit), you can do anything (and) you can be anything. They were being controlled from the outside. It seemed quite repressive at the time. Expectations were high – and they were not being met.

That creates an atmosphere that leads to all sorts of experimentation, rebelliousness, and craziness. In fact, it went on and really didn’t end until the draft ended. And once the draft ended, if you were watching campuses, it was like throwing a switch. Within four years, when one generation graduated and another one came on, the atmosphere of campuses was as different as night and day.

I suppose no story of the ‘60s would be complete without talking about drugs in Boulder. In 1964 there was the first great student marijuana-bust. The Bohemian group had discovered marijuana, probably in the early ‘60s. It had become more flagrant about its use throughout ’62, ’63, and 1964, when they got caught. Somebody finked to the cops and they all got busted. There were about twelve people arrested in all. It was a pretty serious matter, of course.

There was a time that the prevailing view of marijuana was that portrayed in (the movie) Reefer Madness. The stigma was just awful. The father of one of the kids had been a teacher at West High for forty years and was considered an institution there. When the news came out about his son, who was really quite a brilliant writer – he’d written several fiction stories and had just written one for Playboy – his father committed suicide. It caused a lot of misery in those people’s lives.

And the extraordinary part about it was Judge William Buck of Boulder, the District Judge who heard the case, just about the most rock-hard Republican jurist as you are going to find, declared the law unconstitutional. He let them all walk. The Colorado Supreme Court reversed him on the judgements, of course, but the prosecutions were pretty well dropped. I thought that was an extraordinarily courageous and just thing to do at the time.

Probably one of the most serious unfinished agenda items of the ‘60s is drugs. We’re going through another period of reefer madness right now with pretty much the same sort results – and that’s disturbing, I think. Of course, by the late ‘60s, nobody much cared about that anymore. In the late ‘60s there was a major dance held in the ballroom at CU, and five hundred tabs of LSD were given out for the participants.

I suppose the most important thing about me and Boulder was that I stayed. So it must have something right. I stayed, of course, for the physical environment. Everybody does that, but much more for the social environment. Boulder is full of intelligent people. That counts for a great deal, who you can talk to. I think also Boulder has people who can be iconoclastic without being nihilistic. One of my sabbaticals out of Boulder took me to San Francisco in 1968, which was an interesting year to be in San Francisco. I came back after a year. I was working for the Chronicle then. It was a pretty good job.

What I didn’t like about California was that there was – the place was more liberal than Boulder at the time . . . this was two years after Haight-Ashbury, apart from the fact that it had real bigotry and real reaction, as opposed to conservatism, on the Left was this enormous group-think. People held opinions because they were fashionable, and that was certainly done here, too, but I think less so. I think it always has been.

CU always had a good deal of campus unrest during the ‘60s, but it never went as far as it did at other places. The administration would give a little more, the students wouldn’t ask quite as much, and the difference could be split. I guess there was a major student strike in Boulder during the Cambodian incursion. I was in Washington for that one, but there were never the sort of student strikes that there were at Harvard or Columbia, which were more radical affairs. And even the one at Berkeley was. CU never approached that level.

But then, I think the level of repression here was never of that level. Part of that comes from the tradition of it being the American West. The difference between the West and the East is that in the West they don’t care where you come from, but they do expect you to spend some time on the cross. But it’s not a very long time.

Frank Oppenheimer told me that when he got down to Pagosa Springs after he left the government in his exile there during the McCarthy period, that he wasn’t accepted by his neighbors there until he had spent one winter and shared all the hardships and tribulations that everybody went through down there. And then he was completely accepted. I was in Pagosa Springs in 1975 and asked a rancher there if he remembered Frank and Jackie Oppenheimer. He said, “Hell yes! I used to deliver milk to them when I had a route.” And then he told me some stories. It was obvious that they were really liked in the area. I think that somebody being able to come in from the outside and his past doesn’t count if he accepts the prevailing values of the area is the essence of the frontier. It’s what Colorado is all about. And that, of course, is a climate where enormous possibilities can happen. It’s a place where people are encouraged to create dangerously. I guess that’s why I stay.

Copyright 2026 by S. Byron Gassaway