Steve Miles

I was born in Boulder on November 7, 1948. I went through Sacred Heart School in 1963 and graduated in 1966. In 1967 I sort of went to college and started in with the hip scene and then dropped out. I was busted in Boulder in 1967. It was one of the first busts. We had five joints and five peyote buttons in the car. Officer Scarface, we used to call him – he used to stop me all the time and ask me why I was hanging around with the Hill Rats, a bunch of kids who were hanging around on The Hill who were just sort of the rowdies of the time. You know, the younger kids, fifteen, sixteen years old, and I was 18. They claimed (to police) that they were the ones who turned me on to pot.

In 1967 I was busted while driving around town in a Valiant convertible. I had nine kids in the car coming back from a park, and I couldn’t fit everyone in, so I stuck two kids in the trunk. I had just turned eighteen and we were driving across town with a headlight out, smoking a joint, and got pulled over by Officer Sapp – I guess that was his name. We called him Scarface because he had this big scar across his face. He pulled me over and said, “All right, Miles, looks like you’ve been partying.” He pulled us out of the car and searched us and I knew there was some pot in the car. We quick put the joint out. I had put the joint out. I knew somebody had the pot.

He got us all out, it was right next to Boulder High School on 17^th Street and a Beatles song, Hello Goodbye, was playing on the radio. He had all seven of us get outside the car with our hands against the car and was searching us and he said, “Oh, open up the trunk for me.” So I opened up the trunk and here are these two more guys laying there. One of these guys had stashed two more joints in the spare tire. Officer Scarface found (the marijuana joints) and one guy had five peyote buttons in his pocket. He threw us all in jail. It was the first (drug bust) of juveniles in Boulder. I had just turned eighteen and the paper said, “Steve Miles and seven juveniles were arrested.”

I’ve lived on University Hill all my life, except for a short time living on Sunset Hill with my father, who was a doctor and wanted to be close to the hospital, but we never sold our house on Lincoln Place. I moved back there after he died in 1960. He was also born in Boulder – as was his mother.

Do you know anything about STP John?

STP John . . . He had a following. He was sort of a nice guy. I guess he had this charisma . . . Kind of like Manson, but he wasn’t a violent guy, actually. He had a following about him, and (his followers) called themselves STPers. They were pretty-much street-type people and they lived up in old mine shafts – mines up in the mountains. They just lived wherever they could. They would traipse into town at night and hit all the parties they could find.

One of STP John’s main followers was (a guy named) Bishop, and there was another one whose (street) name was John the Baptist. He used to go around preaching. He didn’t have a soapbox, but he would pull up his little show on Thirteenth and College and start preaching his philosophy. They were a couple of the characters in the STP Family.

STP John was killed. I’m trying to think of the year, stabbed by a friend of mine, Bob Coleman, at a party. I’m trying to remember the order in which it happened. Bishop was also stabbed at the same time. I forget for sure, but I think John was shot by Bob Coleman, and (then) Bishop got up and stabbed . . . after Bob shot John, Bishop got up and stabbed Bob. Bob didn’t die, but he went to prison for shooting John and got out several years later. I’m not sure if he’s in town anymore or not. They all had their STP stickers that you get from the STP oil cans at the gas station and put them on their jackets. I guess they were named after the drug STP.

Did they take STP, the animal tranquilizer?

Yes, well, there was a rumor that it was a drug that was being experimented on by the government or something. I don’t know how much truth there was to that. They were all pretty far out. They liked to party, I think. Basically, they were into LSD and getting drunk a lot. They never really got their act together.

I remember there was a really skinny guy on The Hill with wire-frame glasses who used to deal drugs, and he used to speak incoherently most of the time. Do you remember who that was? Did he belong to the STP Gang?

You might be talking about Gold Finger, who was a glue-freak. He always used to have his hands in gold paint, because he was always spraying this gold paint (to get high).

Yeah. That’s the guy. I understand his mind is mush now.

He was pretty-much mush back then. Yeah, the STP people were dealing, but I don’t know where they were getting their stuff. There weren’t many dealers back then. Gary Isky was the first person that I know of to have gotten arrested. Gary was the first person in Colorado to get prosecuted for the sale of LSD and he was my neighbor. We used to do acid before it was illegal, and got it from Jurgon Deno, a dealer on The Hill before LSD was illegal. I don’t know where in the heck he got it. Then Gary Isky was the first major (drug bust); the first one to get prosecuted, (which was) kind of a big deal at the time.

Do you remember the riot on The Hill?

There was really a riot. The first night I wasn’t there. What happened though, some friends of mine were there, and the story goes that this fellow was getting busted on The Hill for selling drugs, and at that time The Hill was like Haight-Ashbury (in San Francisco). It was people milling back and forth, back and forth, and there was hash, acid, grass – you know, whatever you wanted.

This one guy got harassed by this cop, and all of a sudden this cop found himself surrounded by all these hippies, harassing him – and he panicked, let the guy go, and got in the car, and everybody started rocking the police car back and forth, and he got out of the car and took off.

Then the momentum picked up, and then they started the police car on fire. The cop had split and all of a sudden a rock got thrown through a window and all the shops started getting looted, except for the hippie shops, like the Brillig Works, which at that time was Clancy’s Book Store. I’d seen Timothy Leary there once. He was a friend of Clancy’s. Clancy is still around town. You should talk to him.

I bought some pot from a six-year-old kid up on The Hill once in ’69. I was looking for a friend of mine at the Golden Q and when I couldn’t find him, I asked his little brother who was there if he could get me some pot, and he brought some back within ten minutes and sold it to me and disappeared into the pool room to give the money to someone else.

There was a good chance that he bought that pot from me because I used to sell to that friend of yours, and back then, there weren’t many dealers; not many main dealers. There were a lot of street dealers, so it’s hard to say. I dealt on The Hill from ’67 until I got busted in ’76, actually. When I first started selling pot, it was worth ten dollars an ounce. Actually, we were selling matchboxes for five dollars. I was either at my house selling or at the pool hall selling. I guess that was my life, either selling pot or going up on the Flatirons and hiking. I pretty much made my living selling pot for six or seven years. I made lots of money and spent lots of money. I had a car, money, food, (but) I never saved any.

Did you get paranoid all the time?

I didn’t, at the time. I only sold pot. I didn’t get into hard drugs at all. Somehow I felt my karma was going to be OK if kept it to that. I did wind up getting busted for sales in 1976, and I quit then.

I don’t know if I can print this, but I’ve heard that (name of well-known Boulder entrepreneur withheld) used to be a dope dealer in Boulder.

I used to buy from him. Ok, here’s the story, do you want a story?

Yes!

Ok! Back in 1967 they opened up a place called the Endor above the old Eighty Eight Cent Store, which is right across the street from 11^th and Pearl. The Peking Restaurant was there for awhile, after that. It was right across the street from Old Chicago. It was (in the 1100 Block of Pearl). Anyway, up above there, there was an old dance studio, and they turned it into a psychedelic night club called Endor. And Baby Magic was the sort of home-base band there. They had groups, mostly local groups, but occasionally they’d get some names in there.

The walls were painted with psychedelic colors with black lights – the whole trip. It was really something! They had light shows, and I met X there. He was my age. We were both about 18, and he lived up there, actually. He was part of Baby Magic – the whole company that put on the light show and did all the concerts.

Anyway, X lived up there in one of the rooms, and I used to go up there and buy hashish from him. I never bought any pot from him, but he always used to have hash. He was a very spiritual guy, and he was never into anything else . . . maybe psychedelics and LSD. I used to deal with him, and then about 1970 he went on a religious trip and I think he quit doing drugs – fairly early for the trend. He was an early quitter. He used to get and preach his Uransha book. He was really into the Uransha. I’m not even sure what it is. It’s like a book that was supposedly discovered in a phone booth in New York City or something that recently surfaced. It’s supposed to be some ancient teachings. I’m not really familiar with it enough to talk about it.

Anyway, they used to have some wild gigs up there at the Endor. That was the place we used to hang out. I really liked X back then, and we were fairly good friends. He was such a gentle guy and very spiritually minded, and I respected him for that. It seems to me that he came from a wealthy family. He kind of lived the life of a street person . . . not a street person, but a hippie, you know . . . A kind of real casual lifestyle, without a lot of material possessions. He might have had some (financial) backing for his company (which he later founded in Boulder).

I want to get back to that riot on The Hill. The first day (of the riot), I wasn’t there, and they actually burned a cop car, and Jones Drugs was broken into. The Colorado Bookstore, which now has cinder blocks, used to have these tall windows (along) the full length of the building. Where those murals are now used to be windows, which were broken out, and all those stores were looted. I guess people were running down the streets with cameras from Jones Drugs along with dark room enlargers and drugs.

So it had nothing to do with the Vietnam War?

There was another riot that had to do with the Vietnam War that came off as a protest that took place on the Boulder Turnpike at 28^th and Baseline. But this other riot had to do with this guy getting busted on The Hill.

What happened the next night was that rumors went around that this riot was going to continue on The Hill, that there was going to be this riot, and there was all this tension. What happened was that word spread like wildfire among all my friends and everyone I knew. All of a sudden, thousands of people showed up to see a riot, you know, which made it happen. The police were there, of course. They were prepared this time, and they’d brought in police from all different counties. They’d set up in the Hilltop Building and the standoff actually took place on the corner of 12th and College.

The police were on one side, and the kids on the other side – a lot of students and just a lot of Boulder youngsters. All of a sudden, somebody threw a rock. It sort of started slow, then this tear gas canister went off. And from then on, it was just rocks. On the corner of 11^th and College, on the northwest corner, which was a cinderblock apartment used as a crash pad on and off over the years, some of the militants had got together there and made a bunch of Molotov Cocktails in the basement. There was actually warfare (which) went on into the evening with rocks and Molotov Cocktails.

There must have been a hundred police there. It was massive. It was really massive. Like I said, I lived on Lincoln, and it started on 13^th and College, and that whole length of College was a battle zone. The brought in a helicopter from Denver with a spotlight on it and went on into the evening. It was a really crazy, two day situation there.

The other riots were a result of the mining of the harbor in Haiphong. It started out to be rather bloody – people getting bashed with cop sticks. I wasn’t at the one on 28^th Street.

Did you ever go to Shannon’s, the bar on Pearl Street across from the Daily Camera building?

Sure. Shannon’s was a real, kind of Old Western type of bar . . . kind of a ho-down, you know. There was a lot of dealing going on there, too. Do you remember the night a guy was shot next to the Daily Camera? That’s the only story I can think of, and I’m trying to remember exactly how it really happened. I think he was dealing. I’m not positive, but the cops were after him and he ran across the street and pulled out a pack of Life Savers. The cops claimed it was a gun. They shot him and he died, right there against the Daily Camera building.

I was a cook at Shannon’s back in the ‘70s and a bullet came through the window that faced Pearl Street from the kitchen. Although the dishwasher assured me that the bullet was intended for him, I quit that night.

The bikers used to hang out there, and of course Dusty Drapes and the Dusters used to play there a lot. That was the bar in Boulder. Steve Stills used to come in there. He also used to come in to Goldini’s. It’s now called The Timber Tavern. (In 1986)

Do you remember the vehicle he used to drive around town? The big, yellow Unimog. It was a Mercedes Benz, four wheel drive vehicle that belonged to Steve Stills. Stills owned it, but his manager used to drive it.

They used to live up on Sugarloaf. I used to see that vehicle up there.

Right. And Steve Stills used to own some land up at Gross Reservoir. That’s where the inside picture of his album was taken, where he’s sitting on a rock with these trees. That picture was taken on his land. You can just see this little piece of the reservoir.

But he sold that. There was a big deal in Boulder about him selling that property for residential use. They wanted to buy that for parkland or something. They wanted to protect it and he wanted to sell it.

I used to know Dan Fogelberg. I used to work for Columbia Records as a photographer, and I did Dan Fogelbergs promotional work when he came here. I think this was about 1965.

That same year I went up on the campus and there was a crowd of people at the Mary Ripon Theater, and I’d just gotten out of school and walked up there and there was a guy up there giving a talk, and it turned out to be Robert Kennedy. I sat down there behind the podium, sitting there behind him, and he was giving a lecture. I don’t know if he was running for something or what, but anyway, I remember sitting behind the podium, and nobody else could see him, except for me and a couple of other kids who were sitting behind him . . . but he had his tie on and his white shirt, and it was real warm out. He had his pants rolled up above his knees and his shoes off and he was there scratching these hairy legs behind the podium. I just have this image that I’ll never forget.

After it was over, I went up to get his autograph and I asked him: “Can I have your autograph?” And he said: “Well, ok.” And I realized I didn’t have a piece of paper, so I opened up my wallet and pulled out a picture of my eighth grade girlfriend. That was the only piece of paper I had, so I handed that to him, and then I got a pen from somebody and I got his autograph on the back of my girlfriend’s picture. After he was leaving, he got into his limousine, and being a kid, I was with a couple of other kids, we jumped on the back of the limousine and the Secret Service came and shoved us off real quick. There wasn’t quite the security there is now with the Secret Service back then, but they let us know real quick.

How do you compare Boulder in 1986 to then?

Oh, gosh, Boulder was friendly back then and you’d always see someone downtown that you knew. Of course, now I do still, but it’s, you have so much more of an air of, uh, it’s more touristy. It’s more snobbish, more elitist, it isn’t anything like it was. I don’t think we appreciated what we had – I know I didn’t. I never traveled much and I never realized the physical beauty that Boulder has and that the rest of the world just doesn’t have. I traveled since I was a kid, but when I was a kid I never appreciated it.

You’d walk down the street and you’d see somebody you didn’t know and they’d say “hi,” you know, and then I would say “hi.” I still try to do it, but I find myself not doing it as much because I get these strange looks now. Boulder definitely isn’t as friendly as it used to be. It has just grown too fast. I go up on the Flatirons a lot and sit there and look out at the expanse and the change, and it brings tears to my eyes almost every time. I just want to go back to the early ‘60s.

On the side of what is now Boulder Drug, it used to be Burgess Drug, and they used to have a graph of Boulder’s growth starting back in the early part of the century. I remember in about 1960 I was looking at that and it was up to twenty-some thousand. About 1968, maybe it was, I was looking at it and Boulder was nearing some thirty thousand people. And, of course, they were real proud that Boulder was growing. 1909 was here, and we were there, and if they could only see now, if that graph was still there, it would have gone off the building. Since then has been a Coca Cola ad there and other things. I just wish that graph was still there. You probably remember that sign on north Broadway: “Stay awhile, play awhile, you’ll like Boulder.”

Parades on Pearl Street were a big event in my life. They had the Pow Wow Parade every summer. And then we had the Homecoming Parade for CU every year, and all the old Boulderites. I don’t know if you remember Sam White? He was an old man who was always downtown.

Didn’t he have a long, white beard? He looked like a Hollywood version of an old miner.

Yeah, that’s the guy. He had a big, long, white beard. Sam White – born in Boulder. He lived to be almost a hundred years old and he died in the ‘60s.

I remember, in about 1958, they were having the CU Homecoming Parade and I was sitting in front of Doc Champion’s gas station right there on 18^th and Pearl watching the parade and, all of a sudden I heard screams. People (were) screaming and yelling and then, all of a sudden this float came barreling down Pearl Street on fire. It was in flames and this guy . . . they’d used napkins to make this float, it was Kappa Kappa Gama’s float, I know because my sister was in that sorority . . . and there were children on this float, and this guy saved them by throwing them off. It was rushing by and there were these kids screaming on it.

So they wanted to get this float away from these crowds and there were these children on the float that were throwing candy and stuff, and so they had to slow down this float and throw off these kids, and then just went barreling off down the street with this thing on fire. It seems to me it wasn’t being towed by a car, but was built on a truck. I remember that these kids were saved by this guy and it was a bit, heroic deal.

And the old Fox Theater, which used to be right next to the old Boulder Theater where the Sushi Bar is now, the New Orleans Building, used to be the old Fox Theater, and it burned down in a great ball of fire. I remember old Father Louis, who was at the old Sacred Heart Church, was there and he was talking to this guy and saying it was a good thing the place burned down anyway, that they didn’t show anything but trash there. It was a Saturday morning and we all heard the fire engines and ran down there and watched it burn.

Do you remember the old Hygienic Pool? It’s now the Spruce Pool. It used to be called the Hygienic. It was indoors – an old wooden thing. I always wondered why they called it hygienic anyway – it was such a dirty place. It goes back to 1909 or something.

Do you remember the Carnival Cafe’?

Yes. The Carnival Café. When someone didn’t finish their plate, they would have their “Special,” they called it. If you needed something to eat, you’d just come take someone’s plate and eat what someone hadn’t eaten. I knew a guy who lived for a year on that food. He’d just go in there and eat their leftovers. It was good food. It was the first real organic food café in Boulder. That’s where I had my first sprouts.

I worked there and one day the electricity went out and all the refrigeration went out. Tanya Schwartz, who owned the New York Deli, sent over truck loads of ice from here restaurant all day and kept the perishables from going bad. She even had her own people bring it over. She’s another person who paid her people well, like Mo Seagle did at Celestial Seasonings. Her lowest paid people were making six dollars an hour.

There was a lot of giving back then. I think a lot of people had gone through a real depressed state that things just didn’t pan out – like love and generosity – there was something there that had just sort of died. I think that people I’ve talked to that lived in Boulder back then, there’s a longing for those times, and I think it might even be nationwide, you know. They had food co-ops here, too, and everybody chipped in and nobody went without. I think the hard-drugs had something to do with it.

I think a lot of it had to do with unemployment, the rise in the price of fuel, and when gas was a quarter a gallon you could buy a VW bus and drive from here to Santa Cruz on $20 or less. I think people just lost their mobility, and when high unemployment became permanent, which it has, I think we’ve been in a permanent recession since ’73, and it changed people. It was no longer hip to be hip. Everybody cut their hair and became straight to survive.

I know, it’s fascinating to see what’s happening to our society. It’s sad as hell. But it’s fascinating to see the route it’s taking, because it surprised the hell out of me. I thought we were really on track. I don’t know if we’ll ever get back there or not. I have hopes it will – the people caring for people.

I remember when the Hog Farm came to Boulder – Wavy Gravy – with all their buses, and set up on campus and had their carnival. I did some LSD and some STP and I don’t know what else. I thought I saw God that day. I was there and this guy came up to me and said, “Would you like to try my thinking machine?” He had a tank of nitrous oxide on his back. So I said, “Sure.” And we got another couple of people and sat in a circle. He had this tube hooked to the tank and he sat in the middle of us and passed the tube around. We were all inhaling this nitrous oxide and just going way out there. Everybody was just going . . . What would happen was you would go out and come back into reality. I was there, taking inhalations off this thing. When I came to, I was moving along with everybody else in synchronization, saying: “The tube , the tube, give us the tube . . . the tube.”

We were all rotating, and when I came to, there was a crowd of people standing around us and Wavy Gravy was standing there with his microphone going, “What’s going on here, ladies and gentlemen? We seem to have a crowd of people down here getting high on some substance.” I was really embarrassed when I came to, and it turned out the guy who had the tank was Ken Kesey.

What year was that?

It was ’68. The Merry Pranksters – it was a wonderful carnival. They had places for the kids to go through these big plastic tubes. They had a tent set up for soundless movies and one of the Merry Pranksters would mouth his own words to the movies. They had a pig dressed up as Uncle Sam with a red, white and blue hat on with painted psychedelic peace signs all over.

Is this actually at the time they were called the Merry Pranksters? Was it the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test?

That’s right. They were travelling across the country. They set up their carnival on campus and it was one of the grandest days I’ll ever remember in Boulder. Actually, it was a couple of days. It was a real carnival in a field right next to Folsom Field – just south of it.

That was Ken Kesey and Wavy Gravy. When I came to from that nitrous oxide and found myself gyrating with these people, grabbing this tube and everybody . . . See, they had this loud speaker system and Wavy Gravy was going around talking to everyone, and he had come up to us, so he had brought the entire crowd of people around us. I was sitting there with Ken Kesey and a couple of other people, high on nitrous oxide.

Wavy Gravy’s Home Page: http://www.wavygravy.net/

Postscript to Steve Miles interview:

Dr. McFarland also mentioned STP John when I interviewed him and he had this to say:

He always paid his medical bills and he would come in and pay the bills for everybody else. He would go work to make money to pay bills. He was one of the few guys that paid bills in that crowd. The early leaders got killed off and then things got nastier and nastier.

The story I always liked about STP John was that he used to harass heroin dealers. He would go stand next to them when they were trying to make a sale, and he was dirty and scruffy and weird. And it would be hard to inconspicuously be selling heroin with John standing there. So I congratulated John on that and told him: “I really appreciate your efforts to stop all these heroin sales.” And he sort of looked proud and said: “Well. I intend to raise my children in Boulder.”

He was killed when he was 20. He was a very civic-minded citizen. We were doing a pancake breakfast at the old ruins, which is now where the jail is, to raise money for the People’s Clinic, and he arrived and became maitre d and wore a little white napkin on his arm. He ushered everybody to their seats, and he was supurb! Someday I’m going to look up his parents and let the know how much he did for the community!

 

Copyright 2026  S. Byron Gassaway