Denver - the home that wasn't

When we returned to the U.S. on September 1st of 1968 we found it to be a much different place than the one we had left on April 15th of 1965.

Although Canadians were aware of the turnabout in Vietnam (starting with the Tet offensive) - and the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and the riots and fires - they weren't directly impacted. The reaction was along the lines of "Look what our idiot neighbors are up to now"...
The news reports on the U.S. networks were radically different... It was hard to believe they were talking about the same events.

Another thing that struck us immediately was the absence of young men. While we were out of the country over a million of them had been drafted into the military... It was quite noticeable... Yeah - it had never even crossed my mind that I was intentionally giving up my status as a legal Canadian immigrant at a time when tens of thousands of other young Americans were desperately seeking it...

But back to the topic at hand:

Denver simply didn't work out. We spent 2 weeks at a motel north of town and mom couldn't find a job... It was a beautiful area but it simply "didn't feel right"...
Now - Karina had never wanted to go to Denver in the first place. She had been wanting to move to Southern California since she was about 10 years old - and the entire time we were in Denver she nagged mom about it from morning til night...
After 2 weeks in Denver we still had quite a bit of money left from our Winnipeg "fire sale"... And around September 14th mom finally got tired of Karina's incessant whining and bought plane tickets for San Diego... But not "first class" this time :-)

One last Denver story:

We celebrated my 15th birthday while we were in Denver. Mom made all the arrangements at a very nice nearby restaurant that had a "house band".
She told them that it was actually my 16th birthday and concocted this story about how in the "old country" it was a tradition for young men to have their first wine on their 16th birthday and how we had just returned from overseas and hadn't found a place to live yet and how devastated I'd be if I missed that "rite of passage" I'd been looking forward to my whole life. I imagine she laid it on pretty thick - probably even managed to squeeze out a few tears :-) So - the restaurant agreed to serve me wine with my dinner... (Of course, I'd been having wine with meals since I was 11...)
Now - you might be inclined to think that serving alcohol to minors wasn't that big of a deal back then... Yeah - it was that a big of a deal... Probably more so than today... Mom was just that good :-)

So - dinner was excellent. They had a special table set up for us - they announced that it was my 16th birthday - everyone in the restaurant applauded - the band did "Happy Birthday" - they gave us free cake... And I had to pretend that the wine was a huge deal :-)

And that's about all I remember from Denver... Well - except for some very pretty "outdoorsy" blonds in Jeeps... But that goes without saying...