The Highlander

Media Credit: Grada DeBell While interviewing Grada, Jennifer Ledford, who graduated this year, listens as Grada explains her memories through photographs.

Media Credit: Mary Beth Callie Grada and her cat.

Media Credit: Grada DeBell Grada with her horses Burtus and Kanezar, 1980.

89-year-old Grada DeBell still lives on the land where she was born in 1916. DeBell cherishes the stack of photos, and strong memories, that chronicle her history at 5119 Raleigh Street, in the Berkeley neighborhood.

Grada remembers when North Denver looked and felt entirely different. In the 1950s and 60s, she rode her horse, Beauty, around the neighborhood. Sharing photos taken from her property in the early 1900s, Grada pointed out the faded view of a train in the distance, the steam engine's smoke rising above the horizon. She described the view of the mountains from her hilltop home. She spoke of the area where the Handy Market now sits, on 52nd and Tennyson, and explains how she used to know the family of owners. "[Back then] there were no people, no houses, just a field," Grada described.

Grada's parents moved to Denver in 1903, after immigrating to the United States from Germany. George's diagnosis with tuberculosis provoked the couple to move the open, airy mountain atmosphere outside Denver. Berkeley and the Highlands boasted pure clean air which attracted tuberculars to the areas. A large tent colony located at 45th and Zenobia Street became the home for many patients who lived in tents consisting of wooden floors and walls up to about four feet and canvas sides and tops.

Until they built their own home in the 1920s, Grada and George Hess lived in a shack on the land. Grada, an only child, witnessed her father's construction of their new house when she was seven years old. One day, however, Grada stood watch while her father suffered from a terrible coughing fit. "He started coughing and he couldn't stop," she remembered. "I didn't know for years later what it was. It was his lungs. He coughed up his lungs."

"I was trying to get help," Grada said as she described the tragedy. Unfortunately, the advent of the telephone at the time, too premature for emergency calls, relied on the advice of the operator who told Grada to get a neighbor. George Hess passed away in 1923 as a result of this coughing spell.

In April 1938, Grada married the man she met while working in Cress' department store. Her husband made braces for the handicapped (he died in 1971 as a result of leukemia).

In 1958, Grada and her beloved horse, Beauty, were featured in Life Magazine. "It was the highlight of the neighborhood," said Helen Wieman, Grada's neighbor for almost 60 years. The horse could do several tricks and was great with the children. Weiman fondly remembered the young neighborhood.

There were about eight children on the block at the time, "and now there's none," she said.

Beauty's feature in Life presented her dressed in a lei of flowers, surrounded by neighborhood children, and pulling an old-fashioned buggy.

A loop in the zoning for the area has left Grada's property declared as agricultural due to its history, so she owns 10 cats, the maximum allowed for her property.

Grada also used to take her dog up to the mountains to explore Jeep trails, part of a group called Jeepers Creepers. The lure of the Colorado outdoors could not keep Grada inside, as most of her pictures illustrate.

"The animals have been here forever," Grada explained, "It's the people that came, and [they] think [the animals] should be gone."

"My grandkids like to go visit and see all the cats. [Grada's] so good to animals," Helen Wieman explained.


Neighbors

Helen and Gus Wieman live at 5195 Raleigh, where they have resided for the past 59 years. When the couple moved to the Berkeley neighborhood on August 1, 1947, their only neighbors consisted of the DeBell family up the street and one other house.

Gus, an east Denver native, and his wife Helen, raised in the northwest Denver area near 37th and Newton, have never had the urge to move away from the area. "I won't move because [this is where] I'm comfortable," Helen explained.

Gus's occupation in 1955 encouraged him to ask his wife about the possibility of moving to Aurora because the company was moving. Helen refused. North Denver, where Helen has spent all of her life, is her one and only home. The couple raised four children, all of whom still live in Denver today.

For neighbors like Grada, Gus and Helen, the Berkeley neighborhood is the only acceptable place to call home. They grew up here or near here, their families grew and thrived here. Even the more recent development of transient housing in the area cannot threaten the bond between our elderly neighbors and their homes, their history in this neighborhood.