The new corporate partnerships often put school officials in an awkward position. The Coca-Cola deal that DD Marketing negotiated for Colorado Springs School District 11 was not as lucrative as it first seemed. The contract specified annual sales quotas. School District 11 was obligated to sell at least seventy thousand cases of Coca-Cola products a year, within the first three years of the contract, or it would face reduced payments by Coke. During the 1997–98 school year, the district’s elementary, middle, and high schools sold only twenty-one thousand cases of Coca-Cola products. Cara DeGette, the news editor of the Colorado Springs Independent, a weekly newspaper, obtained a memorandum sent to school principals by John Bushey, a District 11 administrator. On September 28, 1998, at the start of the new school year, Bushey warned the principals that beverage sales were falling short of projections and that as a result school revenues might be affected. Allow students to bring Coke products into the classrooms, he suggested; move Coke machines to places where they would be accessible to students all day. “Research shows that vendor purchases are closely linked to availability,” Bushey wrote. “Location, location, location is the key.” If the principals felt uncomfortable allowing kids to drink Coca-Cola during class, he recommended letting them drink the fruit juices, teas, and bottled waters also sold in the Coke machines. At the end of the memo, John Bushey signed his name and then identified himself as “the Coke dude.”
Bushey left Colorado Springs in 2000 and moved to Florida. He is now the principal of the high school in Celebration, a planned community run by The Celebration Company, a subsidiary of Disney.
3/behind the counter
THE VIEW OF COLORADO SPRINGS from Gold Camp Road is spectacular. The old road takes you from the city limits to Cripple Creek, once a gold mining town with real outlaws, now an outpost of casino gambling full of one-armed bandits and day-trippers from Aurora. The tourist buses drive to Cripple Creek on Highway 67, which is paved. Gold Camp Road is a dirt road through the foothills of Pikes Peak, a former wagon trail that has narrow hairpin turns, no guardrails, and plenty of sheer drops. For years, kids from Cheyenne Mountain High School have come up here on weekend nights, parked at spots with good aerial views, and partied. On a clear night the stars in the sky and the lights of the city seem linked, as though one were reflecting the other. The cars and trucks on Interstate 25, heading north to Denver and south toward Pueblo, are tiny, slow-moving specks of white. The lights dwindle as the city gives way to the plains; at the horizon the land looks darker than the sky. The great beauty of this scene is diminished when the sun rises and you can clearly see what’s happening down below.
Driving through the neighborhoods of Colorado Springs often seems like passing through layers of sedimentary rock, each one providing a snapshot of a different historical era. Downtown Colorado Springs still has an old-fashioned, independent spirit. Aside from a Kinko’s, a Bruegger’s Bagel Bakery, a Subway, and a couple of Starbucks, there are no chain stores, not a single Gap in sight. An eclectic mixture of locally owned businesses line Tejon Street, the main drag. The Chinook Bookshop, toward the north end, is as fiercely independent as they come — the sort of literate and civilized bookstore going out of business nationwide. Further down Tejon there’s an ice cream parlor named Michelle’s that has been in business for almost fifty years and, around the corner, there’s a western wear shop called Lorig’s that’s outfitted local ranchers since 1932. An old movie palace, nicknamed “the Peak” and renovated with lots of neon, has a funky charm that could never be mass produced. But when you leave downtown and drive northeast, you head toward a whole new world.
The north end of the city near Colorado College is full of old Victorian houses and Mission-style bungalows from the early part of this century. Then come Spanish-style and adobe houses that were popular between the world wars. Then come split-level colonials and ranch-style houses from the Leave It to Beaver era, small, modest, cheery homes.
Once you hit Academy Boulevard, you are surrounded by the hard, tangible evidence of what has happened in Colorado during the last twenty years. Immense subdivisions with names like Sagewood, Summerfield, and Fairfax Ridge blanket the land, thousands upon thousands of nearly identical houses — the architectural equivalent of fast food — covering the prairie without the slightest respect for its natural forms, built on hilltops and ridgetops, just begging for a lightning strike, ringed by gates and brick walls and puny, newly planted trees that bend in the wind. The houses seem not to have been constructed by hand but manufactured by some gigantic machine, cast in the same mold and somehow dropped here fully made. You can easily get lost in these new subdivisions, lost for hours passing from Nor’wood, to Briargate, to Stetson Hills, from Antelope Meadows to Chapel Ridge, without ever finding anything of significance to differentiate one block from another — except their numbers. Roads end without warning, and sidewalks run straight into the prairie, blocked by tall, wild grasses that have not yet been turned into lawns.
Academy Boulevard lies at the heart of the new sprawl, serving as its main north-south artery. Every few miles, clusters of fast food joints seem to repeat themselves, Burger Kings, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s, Subways, Pizza Huts, and Taco Bells, they keep appearing along the road, the same buildings and signage replaying like a tape loop. You can drive for twenty minutes, pass another fast food cluster, and feel like you’ve gotten nowhere. In the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the evening rush hour, when the cars and the pavement and the strip malls are bathed in twilight, when the mountains in the distance are momentarily obscured, Academy Boulevard looks just like Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim, except newer. It looks like countless other retail strips in Orange County — and the resemblance is hardly coincidental.
space mountain
THE NEW HOUSING DEVELOPMENTS in Colorado Springs not only resemble those of southern California, they are inhabited by thousands of people who’ve recently left California. An entire way of life, along with its economic underpinnings, has been transposed from the West Coast to the Rockies. Since the early 1990s Colorado Springs has been one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. The mountains, clear air, wide-open spaces, and unusually mild climate have drawn people tired of the traffic, crime, and pollution elsewhere. About a third of the city’s inhabitants have lived there less than five years. In many ways Colorado Springs today is what Los Angeles was fifty years ago — a mecca for the disenchanted middle class, a harbinger of cultural trends, a glimpse of the future. Since 1970 the population of the Colorado Springs metropolitan area has more than doubled, reaching about half a million. The city is now an exemplar of low-density sprawl. Denver’s population is about four times larger, and yet Colorado Springs covers more land.
Much like Los Angeles, Colorado Springs was a sleepy tourist town in the early part of the twentieth century, an enclave of wealthy invalids and retirees, surrounded by ranchland. Nicknamed “Little London,” the city was a playground for the offspring of eastern financiers, penniless aristocrats, and miners who’d struck it rich in Cripple Creek. The town’s leading attractions were the Broadmoor Hotel and the Garden of the Gods, an assortment of large rock formations. During the Great Depression, tourism plummeted, people moved away, and about one-fifth of the city’s housing sat vacant. The outbreak of World War II provided a great economic opportunity. Like Los Angeles, Colorado Springs soon became dependent on military spending. The opening of Camp Carson and Peterson Army Air Base brought thou-sands of troops to the area, along with a direct capital investment of $30 million and an annual payroll of twice that amount. After the war, Colorado Springs gained a series of new military bases, thanks to its strategic location (midcontinent, beyond the range of Soviet bombers), its fine weather, and the friendships formed between local businessmen and air force officers at the Broadmoor. In 1951, the Air Defense Command moved to the city, eventually becoming the North American Aerospace Command, with its outpost deep within Cheyenne Mountain. Three years later, 18,000 acres north of town were chosen as the site of the new Air Force Academy. The number of army and air force personnel stationed in Colorado Springs subsequently grew to be larger than the city’s entire population before World War II.