April 24, 2000

Dear Bea:

Everyone who knows you has a Bea Branscombe story. Ours began shortly after we moved into Park Hill in 1960. Art Branscombe and I had worked together on the copydesk at the Rocky Mountain News. You called to tell us about the organization formed by church groups to present a voice that would welcome an integrated society and be strong enough to withstand threats of those "professionals" who lived on the panic sales of homeowners.

After a number of phone calls, I said "okay, okay". We went to our first meeting of the Park Hill Action Committee and caught that bug called "neighborhood activist".

Your influence on Dolores and me was important. Whatever good we did as members of PHAC and what I did later as a state legislator can be traced back to that influence.

You spent so many hours working on Park Hill projects that any list, single spaced, would run many, many pages. You and Art are the historians of the neighborhood and I hope your book about Park Hill and what happened here, is finally finished. Certainly your documents, letters, and news clippings belong in the Western History section of the Denver Public Library, where all can share in the exciting, turbulent, disappointing, uplifting, victorious times of the 1960's, 70's, 80's and 90's.

When people get older, they often look back on what has happened, sort of adding up the lists of pluses and minuses. You are wife, mother to your family, and in some ways, a mother and sister to a lot of Park Hill people who needed a sense of direction, a motivation for belonging to a community.

Dolores and I have lived in Park Hill for forty years. If we were asked to name the person who best typifies all that is good and decent in our community, it would be you, Bea Branscombe.

With love and deep respect,