Defense Articles

When Helen Hunt Jackson moved to Colorado Springs in 1873, the town was 3 years old.

According to Jackson’s travel journal, the two biggest buildings were the Deaf and Dumb Asylum and a stone schoolhouse. Manitou Springs had three large hotels and several boarding houses in poor condition. There were plenty of bakeries and a billiard hall.

Her travel journal, published in 1878 and titled “Bits of Travel at Home,” describes her first impressions of the town of 3,000.

“It was a grey day in November,” she wrote. “There stretched before me to the east, a . . . desolate plain. There rose behind me to the west a dark range of mountains. Between lay the town - small, straight, new, treeless. One might die of such a place. Death by disease would be more natural.”
But Jackson changed her outlook, soon referring to the area as the town west of the sun.

“Colorado Springs is not rich,” she wrote.

“There are no big houses; there is no fast living; its ways are country ways; showy clothes and ostentatious entertainment would be ridiculous.”

The East Coast widow had grown to love the West.

Jackson was born Helen Fiske in Amherst, Mass., on Oct. 15, 1830. In 1852, she married Edward Hunt, captain of the U.S. Corps of Engineers. They had two sons, neither of whom lived through childhood. Edward Hunt died in 1863 in a military accident with a submachine gun he invented.

Heartbroken, Helen turned to writing poetry and short editorials for such periodicals as the New York Evening Post before heading west to Colorado.
“Her coming here was an escape to get away from death,” says Matt Mayberry, Pioneers Museum public programs coordinator.

“She was surrounded by death, and that has lots of impact on her work.”

Like many people of the time, Jackson moved to the Springs under doctor’s instruction; she had bronchitis. Here, she fell in love with Col. William S. Jackson and the two were married in 1875. Together, they made their mark on the region.

William Jackson was an officer of the Denver and Rio Grande Railway and founder of the El Paso County Bank.

But Helen Hunt Jackson made an impression that has endured for decades.

“Lots of places in town have a connection to Helen Hunt Jackson,” Mayberry says. “She was an integral part of the Pikes Peak region.”

Jackson’s home, for example, was at the corner of Kiowa and Weber streets, at 230 E. Kiowa. It was torn down in 1961 to build the city police headquarters; the Municipal Court Building sits there now.

Jackson’s novel, “Ramona,” also is seen all over town. Ramona Avenue is in the Ivywild neighborhood. At the turn of the century, there was a Ramona Hotel on Ute Pass. In 1913, saloons opened north of 24th Street at the outskirts of present-day Old Colorado City. That small area was called Ramona.

“Ramona is everywhere,” Mayberry says. “The town Ramona started as a place to drink because Colorado Springs was dry. People wanted to drink and opened their own town.”

Today, the small town of Ramona has been incorporated into Colorado Springs.

Jackson’s favorite place in the region was Cheyenne Mountain.

“She went on carriage rides almost every day to Cheyenne Mountain when it wasn’t raining,” says Ginny Kiefer, curator of special collections and an archivist at Colorado College’s Tutt Library, home to many of the writer’s journals and manuscripts.

Jackson dedicated one chapter in “Bits of Travel at Home” to Cheyenne Canyon.

“There are nine places of divine worship in Colorado Springs,” she wrote. “Presbyterian, Cumberland Presbyterian, Methodist, Sineth, Episcopalian, Congregationalist, Baptist, Unitarian, and Cheyenne Canyon.”

Kiefer says Jackson never went to church, but on Sundays she would sit on Cheyenne Mountain and wave at worshipers leaving church.

“The people didn’t like that too much,” Kiefer says.

Jackson wrote several poems about Cheyenne Canyon and its scenery, so it’s appropriate that the waterfall there is named for her.

Before Jackson died of cancer in 1885, she asked to be buried in Cheyenne Canyon.

However, so many people flocked to her gravesite that in 1892, to prevent them from destroying the canyon’s natural beauty, her body was moved to Evergreen Cemetery.

“I’ve just had lunch with Dennis the Menace,” I told my wife after staggering home from the first of many uproarious meals with Michael VerMeulen. The year was 1989, and VerMeulen - a native Chicagoan who had been living in London for the previous few years - had invited me out to discuss writing something for a new magazine called GQ, where he had just been appointed deputy editor.

“You drink martinis?” were his first words to me. When I nodded, he said, “Great - maybe I’ll be your friend. Waiter! Two very dry martinis, straight up, heavy on the olives. So, you gonna write for the magazine? You want to know what GQ is all about? It’s a real simple formula. A men’s magazine with an IQ. In other words, great journalism in between neat shit to buy.”
It was love at first sight. Here was a fellow expatriate who didn’t try to Anglicise his vowels, who talked with tommy-gun rapidity (as befits a son of Al Capone’s city), who was larger than life, and who - with his shock of red hair and freckled face - really did look like a big overgrown kid with a penchant for mischief.

VerMeulen was a true original - a first-rate editor who, before “switching to the other side of the desk” (as he called it) had been an astonishingly successful young freelance writer in New York (where he wrote celebrity profiles and cultural essays for periodicals such as Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and American GQ).
It was American GQ which brought him to Britain (he was their first London correspondent). And within a very short time, just about everyone in the small internecine village called Media London had a favourite Michael VerMeulen story to tell. “You know what I call a three-martini lunch?” he once told a friend. “Dinner”. And then there was his post-coital remark to one of the many women who shared his bed over the years. When she noted that their lovemaking had been more than satisfactory, he shot back: “Don’t tell me - tell your friends.”

But perhaps one anecdote best sums up the complex underside of his personality that he rarely allowed people to see. After he was appointed editor of GQ, in 1992, he eschewed the offers of a sleek company car and continued to knock around London in the most battered 2CV imaginable. And he delighted in telling how, while driving somewhere with Martin Amis, the Great Writer suddenly said: “What’s the editor of GQ doing in a piece of junk like this?” Then, raising his eyebrows with sly delight, he noted: “Amis never gets the joke, does he?”

The fact is, most people never “got the joke” about Michael VerMeulen - the joke being that, though he enjoyed playing the loud, brash Yank in public, he was anything but loud or brash in private. More tellingly - and this is something that everyone who ever worked or played with him will confirm - he was a man without malice. Never did he engage in the backstabbing and malevolent gamesmanship that so characterises media life. Never did I hear him utter a word of malignant gossip - and the only time he ever spoke disparagingly of anyone was if they had let him down or hurt a friend.

“Oh, her,” he said recently when a journalist’s name came up in conversation. “She calls me up anytime she’s looking to write something for easy money. But since I’m not in the I’m gonna give you easy money game, I tell her: ‘To hell with the commission, let’s have a drink.’ ”

Given his lack of rancour, it is not at all surprising that GQ was one of the happiest media offices in London. Or that his staff were intensely loyal to him. Or that his publishers - Conde Nast - hugely admired his brilliant eye; his ability to mix gloss with substance and turn out a superbly slick, yet brainy magazine month after month. And if sales figures are anything to go by, he certainly was doing something right; GQ was a phenomenal commercial success under his stewardship, its circulation rising by over 40 per cent since his appointment three years ago (and always maintaining its first-place standing in the now ultra- competitive marketplace of men’s magazines).

But while many will probably remember Michael VerMeulen as an ebullient showman - propping up a stool at the Groucho Club, always full of bonhomie - the private man was more difficult to know. There had been a failed early marriage, there had been an engagement that had been called off, there had been a “sort of” girlfriend over the years - but, at heart, VerMeulen was a curious loner. Though he was the most loyal and compassionate of friends - a man who navigated so many of us through assorted personal crises - he found it difficult to turn to his friends when he found himself grappling with his own demons.

Indeed, I often felt that VerMeulen erected a cordon sanitaire around that dark room we all have within ourselves, wherein lie our vulnerabilities, our doubts. But instead of trying to reach a concord with those doubts, he indulged his enormous appetites. His weight skyrocketed, he had a cigarette permanently embedded between his teeth, he could drink just about everyone under the table. And though he knew he was pushing back the frontiers of epicureanism, he kept on indulging.

Early on a Sunday morning, the threat remains far distant. A cloud no bigger than a woman’s fist. I know I’m safe until 11.15am because Mrs Weasel is consumed by the omnibus edition of The Archers, “Can’t talk now,” this gentle creature barked at her mother, who made the mistake of telephoning during the holy hour. “Debbie’s going to be beaten up by Simon Pemberton.” But once the folk of Ambridge have finished their shenanigans, I’m plumb in the danger zone. Last Sunday, the blow fell during the seagull chatter at the start of Desert Island Discs. “Even you can’t put it off any longer,” intoned the chatelaine of Weasel Villas. “We’ve got to go to Homebase.”
Despite my protests that the sitting room had only lacked an operative curtain for a little over a month (well, call it six weeks), we were soon nosing round that innermost circle of hell populated by DIY devotees and their incessantly squawking offspring. Not that I was exactly squawk-free myself, while Madame spent aeons probing among the curtain accessories. “I can’t find a cording set,” she wittered. “I want overlapping arms and they haven’t got those.” My helpful suggestion that she should instead settle for a pair of heavy-duty tile nibblers or a hot-melt glue-gun did not go down too well. “Why don’t you belt up?” she hollered.