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315 18 Boulder began celebrating victory over Japan in the predawn hours of August 14, 1945, shortly after unofficial news of the Japanese surrender flashed around the world. Gathering around a bonfire at Pearl and Broadway, University of Colorado students sang patriotic songs so loudly that sleepy residents asked the police to quench the festivities. Police in Loveland controlled the crowd by hauling in a piano and organizing a street dance. In Denver, soldiers tossed their undershirts into bonfires. Well-behaved citizens of Colorado Springs waited until President Harry Truman made the news official at 5:00 p.m. before they started snake-dancing through the streets. With abandon seldom seen in that city, “Pretty girls began kissing soldiers and sailors. They ran into the streets and smacked them as they rode along in cars.”2 Confetti rained from the Thatcher Block in downtown Pueblo, where a drenching rain could not keep revelers inside. Leadville’s merrymakers fired guns as they celebrated with troops from Camp Hale. In Alamosa, Norman Kramer soared in his yellow crop-dusting plane to write thousand-foot-high Vs in the sky. Coloradans celebrated August 15 as an official holiday, but they quickly returned to work. With the bonfires barely cool and the sky Vs a fresh memory, people looked to the future with uneasiness. Would peace bring bad economic times, as had the end of World War I when unemployed veterans sold apples on street corners? When Colorado’s business and political leaders struck off on a postwar course of continued growth and development for the state, they were following a path their predecessors had pursued for years.1 —RobeRt G. AtheARn, 1976 Postwar boom DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c18 chapter eighteen 316 Would the release of millions of men from the military throw the nation back into the Great Depression of the 1930s? On V-J Day, Camp Hale was already reduced to a military contingent of 500. What would happen to Leadville if Hale closed completely? Would postwar demand for molybdenum be sufficient to keep the Cloud City alive? As Camp Carson prepared to repatriate its remaining 6,613 German prisoners of war, some in Colorado Springs wondered if the camp—the great driver of their city’s prosperity —would die. Nine days after V-J Day the army announced that 860 officers and enlisted men would be released from Pueblo Army Air Base, and by early November it had been deactivated. The military no longer needed the shells producedbyColoradoFuelandIron ,sotheforgeunitclosedlessthanaweekafterV-J Day. Men were assured of other employment at the steelworks; women were not. If cities such as Pueblo faced a slump, what would become of small places such as Aspen, which had little to recommend them except scenery? Worried about the town’s image, Aspen launched a “Clean-Up” campaign in mid-September 1945: “Many people are poor as are many towns, but there is no excuse for any town or person remaining dirty. Clean people and towns are alert, and progressive . Let’s take a first step toward a shining Crystal City—Clean Up.”3 Aspen had good reason to spruce up. Three months earlier Walter Paepcke, a Chicago industrialist, had visited the “Crystal City.” According to the Aspen Times he quickly became one of the town’s “top-flight boosters.” In late August 1945 he returned with Walter Gropius, head of Harvard’s Department of Architecture and one of the nation’s foremost city planners. They met with citizens at the courthouse to discuss the town’s future. Such attention pleased the Aspen Times. “Aspen,” it said, “needs to be discovered and everyone must help to improve the town.”4 The optimism that flickered in Aspen burned in other places as well. Ira K. Young, president of the State Chamber of Commerce, predicted that “lasting widespread unemployment” could be avoided if Coloradans would spend some of the money they had saved during the war. Others, seeing jobs as a man’s right and a woman’s luxury, took comfort in knowing that as many as half the jobs lost in ordnance and ammunition production would be lost by women. Pueblo realtors reported, “Scarcely a day passes now when they do not have two to three inquiries from men recently discharged.”5 Coloradans had probably saved more than a billion dollars during the war, a tremendous sum during a time when highly skilled laborers earned a dollar an [3.140.198.173] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 22:12...

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