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Doing Good in the Neighborhood

Doing Good in the Neighborhood


Got the end-of-summer doldrums? Need a change of pace, maybe stepping up to a little challenge for some feelgood points? We might have just the ticket for you! Announcement by Miriam Wilch of Serve Spot Lakewood.


Volunteer in Lakewood! On September 23, Serve Spot Lakewood is hosting the first Love Lakewood Day, a city-wide day volunteer day. Serve Spot partnered with the city, schools, and other organizations to engage the community in service. This year, there are project sites at schools, nonprofits, parks, and a church.

Volunteers will be packing food, picking up litter, painting, delivering food, and more from 9am to noon! Go to servespotlakewood.com for more information or sign up here.


Serve Spot Lakewood is a nonprofit organization created to strengthen collaboration and leverage resources between three coalitions started by the mayor: the Lakewood Faith Coalition, the Lakewood Service Club Coalition, and the Coalition to End Hunger in Lakewood.


Are you a member? Join and support the neighborhood!

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Community Night at Carmody

Community Night at Carmody


Thursday, September 21, 5:00 PM – 7:30 PM — Chili Cook-off and Car Show at Carmody Middle School. The PTSA sponsors this annual event to create connections and build community. Money raised at this event supports students and staff throughout the year with school supplies, after school activities, and more. Have fun with food, games and giveaways! Game and raffle prizes include Airpods, Hoverboard, Squishmallow, PRIME Drinks, Takis, and gift cards to our favorite neighborhood hangout, Magill’s World of Ice Cream!

A chili pepper sitting in a pot of boiling hot chili holding a wooden spoon.

The Chili Cook-Off: Got a killer recipe that you want to show off? Four categories: Best Red, White, Green, and People’s Choice. It can be meat, vegetarian, or vegan. Entry fee $10. To enter the Cook-Off as a chili chef, Click here. To sample all the fabulous chili recipes at Carmody as a chili lover, Go there!

The Car Show: Come show off all the things that make your beloved car special and unique: the interior modifications, paint and body work, or engine bay that sets your vehicle apart from the rest. Entry $15. For the entry form to put your classic car, cool car, race car, truck, or motorcycle in the show, Click here.

Here’s all the information for attending the event. Admission is free, but as a school supporter of course you can make a donation. You can buy a wristband to play games for big prizes, sample all the chilis for free, and There’s something for everybody! You don’t have to be a chili chef but it helps if you’re a chili lover, and we’re sure you’ll love being a supporter of our Carmody Middle School! Even if you’re not up to sampling ALL those chili recipes, there will be food trucks there too.

PTSA needs your help! Lots of ways to get involved: Supply Shoppers, Donation Seekers, Day-of-Event Helpers, etc.
Sign up
to help with planning and coordination, and/or sign up to help at the event.
Email [email protected].


Shop local. Click to see our Selected Business Supporters.

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Musings on a Road Trip

Musings on a Road Trip


Way back in the early part of this century Judi and I used to make holiday pilgrimages to family gatherings in St. Louis, “Gateway to the West.” On one such trip I got to thinking about the even earlier days of earlier centuries, and some of the things we take for granted as the miles smoothly whiz by in our sleek metal-and-glass stagecoaches. 


By Harry Puncec

Three days after Christmas and it’s time to pack up for our drive back to Denver from St. Louis. Interstate 70 beckons and cannot be ignored. So an event of historical destiny must be re-enacted – migration westward with its manifest difficulties and triumphs relived.

The 850 or so miles from St. Louis to Denver reminds me of life itself; first there is the fertile countryside of youth as you travel the rolling hills and lush fields of Missouri, then you encounter the long, mind-numbing middle-ages stretch across Kansas and eastern Colorado, bringing you, at long last, to the happy view of the eons-old mountains of our fulfillment.

Nah, that won’t work, too simple and doesn’t take long enough. It’s just the kind of thinking your mind engages in when you are deprived of any visual sensory input. Driving the empty miles provides the brain with far too much time to think, leading to fantasies not experienced since the days of magic mushrooms and LSD. My own hallucination took the form of comparing pioneers of the 1860s to the traveler of 2005.

Wagon trainTraveling at 80 mph lets you cover within minutes the distance traveled by a wagon train in one day. They would walk – and the trip from St. Louis to any destination in the West was a walking trip – beside their wagon as it covered 15 to 20 miles on a really good day. The only sound they heard was the squeaking of wagon wheels, the soft murmur of other human voices muffled by the cathedral sky and windswept prairie grass, and the cry of circling birds waiting to feast on those who fell away. I, in turn, was listening to Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen on a CD turned up high to drown out the sound of wind buffeting the van.

The last view of St. Charles, Mo., seen by the departing pioneers may have been their last contact with family, friends and the land of their life forever. Years later, should they survive the trip and should the mail find them, they might receive a letter telling of the death of a beloved parent, the fire that consumed the barn where they used to play, and the factory going up over in Springfield that was rumored to be hiring 100 young girls to operate the spinning jennies. Communication was slow and unreliable if it made it across the miles at all. My reflections on this were interrupted by the ringing of my cell phone. It was our daughter back in St. Louis saying our grandson’s favorite toy had turned up missing and asking if we had seen it.

Back to dreamland, and waiting for me was the thought of death. If you ever walk the old pioneer trails leading west you encounter graves off to the side; most are unmarked and you can’t even be sure that bones still lie beneath the stacked stones.

Others may have a note affixed telling of a 3-day-old baby, a young mother taken in childbirth, or a father dying from gangrene after a fall. It wasn’t just old buckles and ribbons or used containers littering the trails; sometimes it was the remains of those too frail or too unlucky to make it. The modern equivalent is the shattered remains of blown tires on the shoulders of the highway and the occasional wreath propped up along the road to mark the site of a fatal accident. At least those deaths were known to family and marked by services. The pioneers could only pause the train for a brief time while words were spoken from an old family Bible. Perhaps they wondered what would befall the far-too-inadequate grave when they left, but they had to turn away and try to make a couple more miles before night fell.

We spent the night at the Comfort Inn in Hays, Kan., enjoyed a tasty breakfast the next morning, and rejoined the flow heading west. At the end of the road that afternoon stood home. The electric garage door opener operated to let us into our house where I found a full refrigerator and freezer, a VHS recorder that had saved all the missed Dr. Phil shows, and a toasty temperature assured by a computer-driven thermostat. But before I started to drag in the suitcases I paused to think one last time about those people who first came to create a fledgling Denver, and to silently salute.

—  This article was previously published in the Rocky Mountain News on January 2, 2006. 


Harry Puncec is a resident of Lakewood and a founding member of not only the Southern Gables Neighborhood Association but the Southern Gables neighborhood itself. Story: Memories of Early Southern Gables.


 

Are you a member? Join and support the neighborhood!