Interview with Gwen Dooley

Gwen Dooley was on the Boulder City Council and was a people’s candidate in the finest sense. She represented the people in their fight to keep Boulder from being altered in a negative way by developers and a new transient, but well-to-do class of people who were buying up older homes in historic neighborhoods to tear down and replace with condos or income-producing properties.

She ran for City Council and served in an attempt to slow or stop developers, realtors, and special-interests from destroying Boulder’s historic neighborhoods with high-density condominiums and the resulting increase in traffic and parked cars. She was one of the first to realize that change, if it were to occur at all, would have to come from within the system.

There was a transient, upper-middle class element in Boulder that was wreaking havoc on older neighborhoods by buying older homes and turning them into income properties or condos. With no sense of place or history and no sense of community or neighborhood, these people saw Boulder only with dollar signs in their eyes and as a place to turn a tidy profit through real estate ventures.

Had a few people not fought long and hard to preserve historic parts of Boulder from developers, it is conceivable that it would have ended up being a huge condominium ghetto. As one who appreciates the historic neighborhoods in Boulder, I feel that we owe a huge debt of gratitude to people like Gwen Dooley for their efforts to preserve parts of Boulder from so-called urban renewal. — S. Gassaway

The Interview

When did you move to Boulder?

I came to Boulder in the Fall of 1957 from Pekin, Illinois. I had been out to Colorado before, but not to Boulder. A friend of mine who had gotten out of school before me had come out here and come back to Illinois at Christmas in 1956, and had come over to see me and said I ought to think about coming out to Colorado instead of going to the University of Illinois, which I was slated to go to because both my parents had gone there. I said: “Why should I go out there?” She said: “You’ll love it.” You can live out there in Levi’s, a sweatshirt and a pair of tennis shoes.” I thought that sounded pretty good. So that was really the selling point – that all you needed was three items of clothing.

That was really an interesting period of time. I remember my sister’s record albums like the Four Freshmen and Pat Boone. All the men had crew cuts.

It was easy to differentiate people by whether they liked Pat Boone or Elvis Presley. It was that clear. If you liked Pat Boone, you wore white bucks. You were a preppy, basically. That was the mentality.

Was Pat Boone considered saccharine even then?

Yes. He sure was – if you were in the other camp, which I was.

So there were the hip people and the squares.

Yeah. Basically, I think music was the dividing line, just as it is today.

Would you have considered yourself a Beatnik at that time?

Not in the ‘50s. I don’t think the Beatnik era hit Boulder . . . well, yeah, ’58 or ’59, I guess. There was a place on The Hill called The Ten O’Clock Scholar which was down below where The Spoke is now. A friend of mine who worked at The Sink and I would go over there and have Expresso and talk philosophy. We dressed in our usual somewhat raggedy duds, although there were people who would go there dressed in black, existential-mood clothes. We’d sort of snicker at them, because we were actually taking philosophy classes at the time and we enjoyed talking about it.

Were you majoring in philosophy?

Yes. I changed every year. I started out as an art major. In my freshman year I decided that those who can’t do – teach. There wasn’t much to learn in art. I don’t think there was, except for someone like Rich Dudley.

What was it like in those days at CU? I recall that when I started at CSU in ’68 they still had En Loco Parentis. It was a major breakthrough when they allowed students to have beer on campus and opened a 3.2 beer bar in the Student Center and there were co-ed dorms on campus for the first time. The era was ending where they only had a visitation period on Sundays where the co-eds were able to visit boys in the boy’s dorms and vice versa. Students had to leave their doors open and have their feet on the floor under the old rules. Was it like that at CU?

It was one more step conservative than that, some of which I think the city could benefit from right now, if it could be reinstated. Freshmen were not allowed to have cars. I think the city could benefit right now if the city would put that policy back in place, because after your freshman year you realize you don’t really need a car in Boulder. You could reduce the traffic down. At the time you only had ten thousand students. You pretty well knew everyone on campus, at least visually.

There was nothing co-ed about the dorms – there was either a women’s dorm or a men’s dorm. You had to be in by a certain time of night. I think it was pretty much pegged to the library hours during the week. You had to sign-out if you were going to be out during the weekend. You had to be at somebody’s home. They would come by in the evening and check you off, making sure you were in. Of course, it didn’t take you too long to figure out that you could go back out, especially if you lived on the ground floor. If you weren’t terribly big, you could go out the window.

Did they kind of wink at that?

No. You had, I think, to be pretty radical to discover that. It was Spring Semester before I figured out that there was something going on that I wanted to go to, and I think it was mainly just to do it – just to thumb your nose (at them).

In the ‘60s, another big issue was what was termed “relevant classes.” I don’t know if you remember that. There was pass-fail grading and students wanted a lot more say in the curriculum. Do you think that, academically speaking, C.U. was better in the early ‘60s than it is now?

Yes. I think it was. It is my understanding that a grade that was evaluated as a C then is evaluated as a B now. I don’t think there is any question but that it was more difficult. I was a graduate student in the late ‘60s in the Department of Philosophy, so I knew about the push for getting the students into the curriculum discussions and committees.

What was it like as far as racism or anti-Semitism?

The whole campus was so WASP-ish. There were very, very few Blacks. The only Blacks I can really recall were in athletics. And there were Jewish fraternities and sororities. I don’t think it was an issue really, because we’d all been conditioned during the Eisenhour days to accept that as a pattern. It wasn’t a big deal. By the same token, I didn’t notice any anti-Semitism. Nobody paid any attention to that stuff, it was more like a social thing. Boulder was a nicer place to live.

I mean, where you lived was restricted, especially if you were a woman. You had to live either in a dorm, an acceptable boarding house, or in a sorority. Of the three, the sorority house offered the most comfortable, acceptable style of living.

If there aren’t any Blacks around, if you’re not around a situation that can evoke racism, (and) you’re not around Jewish people, and I wasn’t, not in my home town, then when you are confronted with prejudice, it seems really bizarre because the thought never occurred to you to discriminate against somebody because they’re Black or Jewish. It can hit you even more forcefully as being absurd.

Do you think Boulder more has lost its uniqueness over time?

Well, Boulder was a really lovely place at that time, but I don’t really think that it was that different from the town I came from in Illinois in terms of the things that you’re talking about. Things like television not ruling people’s minds. The fast-food places . . . you had drive-ins, yes, but they were all distinctive, like they were in Boulder. Down at Folsom and Pearl there used to be a little drive-in down there and we would go down and get 3.2 beer there. I mean, every town at that time had their distinctive places. Owen’s on The Hill, places like that – all these small towns (had them), and Boulder was a small town at that time.

From 1957 to 1961, I was primarily a student, and students were both insulated and not from the community. We were free to go. We were not treated differently, I think. At that time, most of the residents of Boulder were businessmen or they were retired. There were a lot of people retired from the armed-services here, and it was a really laid-back town. It was really easy going. I remember in the ‘60s when they started the “No shoes, no shirt, no service.” It was really bizarre, you couldn’t sit on the curb, right? All of which you’d been able to do quite easily in the ‘50s. Nobody raised an eyebrow. People were very accepting of each other in Boulder.

Do you sense a time when Boulder changed irrevocably from what it was to what it is now?

I think everybody has a dividing line. I think there are more dividing lines, like 28^th or 30^th Streets are now, politically that is. At the time, Crossroads shopping center was a big field with horses grazing in it and Arapahoe was a two lane blacktop, and past that was the Twin Burger, which was the hottest, fastest drive-in going in town. They had great hamburgers. It was very pleasant to go out there and sit in your car under the trees out by the creek.

Was there a motel with a swimming pool right near that?

Well, there were a couple of places. There was the El Rancho Motel, just east of 28^th and Arapahoe, and the Three Birches Hotel, both of which had pools. At least, I remember one pool. I think it was El Rancho. People used to go skinny-dipping in it. You had to be fast, before the cops came, before somebody reported you. But, as I said, Boulder was fairly easy going.

At that time, there were some political sort of people writing, what was her name? Miss Picket. E.C. Picket would write every week these one, two, three liner ads in the newspaper, usually in the back page of the first section or in the last two pages of the first section and outlined in black. They were barbs aimed at the liberal professors at C.U. or something like that. They were usually pretty bizarre. I’d always read them for the humor of the day.

Was she considered a kook? Did she relish the role, do you think?

I think she considered herself a gadfly. More rational people, I think, thought o​_f her as being a kook. I think there very definitely was a different mental and physical ambience in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

There were divisions, wouldn’t you say?

Yes. I think so, in terms of people here in Boulder. I think a lot of political activity was directed at a national target. The political activity in Boulder was a spinoff of looking at it nationally and bringing it back and looking at what was happening here, like I remember a condominium association that was ripping off the students and we were marching and picketing against them right where The Spoke is now. They were in that building. It must have been in ’68.

So you were active in politics then?

SDS folks, at least two of the big ones were fellow students in philosophy, Bruce Goldberg and John Butney, so yeah, I was involved in that. But they were also a sexist outfit. I shared the idea, did some poster work, but the sexism of it bothered me. I never joined, but it was fun to watch.

What was their main raison d’ etre?

Basically, it was to end the schism between the intellectuals and the blue collar workers in society and not to be pitted against each other, as a lot of conservatives were trying to do, and say, “Oh, you’re just a bunch of effete intellectual snobs.” Spiro Agnew was still kicking that old, dead horse around.

I think that the SDS, and previous to that, the New Left, were all thinking along the same lines, which was that we’re not going to accept the divide-and-conquer trip that the conservatives were trying to lay down – pitting the workers against the intellectuals. We’re all in this together. We all need to help each other. Oh, some were Marxists and Maoists, there was a real melting pot of intellectual trends in there and intellectual thinkers. Some people were into Marcuse, some people were into Kant. You know, it didn’t matter what your underpinnings were, the result was basically the same, that some things aren’t fair and that we aren’t going to be led along and go off to the gas chambers, or into this dead-end way of thinking.

As SDS met with resistance, for example, on the campus the problem they faced was that conservative students, the counter-faction, were saying that SDS should not be able to use the UMC facilities, that they’re not just a student organization, that they were obviously involved with people off-campus. I forget what their rationale was, but they tried to boot SDS off campus.

They had every right to be on campus. So that’s how we go involved in supporting them. Initially, I wasn’t an SDS member. And, as I said, I never was. But that was what led me to get involved with them, because they had every right to be there.

What motivated you to run for City Council and get elected?

I ran in 1977, and that’s the first thing I’d ever run for. I’d been involved on the Citizen’s Committee on Community Development. That got me involved with a lot of other people who I tried to get to run, and none of them would run. So I ran sort of by default. If I can’t get anybody else to run, then OK, I’ll run.

Why I ran was because, well, what initially got me active, I guess, was on the real local level, the Justice Center. I lived a block away from it on Pearl Street, in the 400 block, right around the corner from the gay bathhouse, before it became The Pleasure Chest, and then the shelter for the homeless. The gay bathhouse never bothered us, we knew what it was. It never cause any problems in the neighborhood.

The Justice Center, when it was (still) The Ruins, and when The Garden was there, was also very placid and caused no neighborhood problems. When they started building the Justice Center, I realized that we were going to have problems. Change was really coming down. There were going to be a lot of bureaucrats working there, a lot of parking, a lot of traffic, and probably a lot of sirens. I didn’t know about that one, and it was going to mean a bigger impact on the neighborhood.

At the same time,(city councilman) Bob White was down there. We considered him a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He owned a lot of property he was developing, and I just reached the point where I thought, damn it, I’ve lived in this town since 1957, and they’re going to really screw it up. They’re going to develop everything they can to make money.

What they were doing, what they were saying, they were coming out from the East Coast or wherever, and they’re saying, “Hey, this is not a bad place, but if I can change a few things, maybe do this – do X or Y – I can make it more like home, which I left, and I can make some money. Whopee!”

You can’t get a better deal than that. And they started really screwing this town over. And I thought, “Well, Gwen, you’ve really got two choices. You really care about Boulder, but you don’t like these jerks, these money-grubbing developers, and you can either go someplace else, leave Boulder, start anew someplace else – or stay and fight them.”

It was obvious that no matter where I went the developers would be right behind. Any pristine, nice place you found, they’d be right behind, so you might as well stay and fight for what you care about. You might as well stay and fight for what you love instead of moving someplace else and having to learn everything all over again. So that is why I ran.

Copyright 2026   S. Byron Gassaway