Sixty Years Ago This Week: Seventy-five thousand Coloradans arrived in Pueblo to join President John F. Kennedy as he marked the successful completion of a 30-year campaign for congressional approval of the FryingPan-Arkansas Project.

The $171 million project involved importing spring snowmelt and runoff from the Western Slope to the Arkansas River-Basin on the Eastern Slope, thereby supplying a yearly average of 56,000 acre-feet of water for irrigation and municipal use.

Kennedy was joined by several Colorado elected officials including Gov. Steve McNichols, U.S. Sen. John A. Carroll, U.S. Reps. Byron Rogers and Albert Tomsic. Kennedy told the crowd that Congress would complete approval of enough programs like the FryingPan-Ark to make 1962 the greatest year in reclamation history.

Later that week at the Monday meeting of the Denver Democratic Forum, Ben Stapleton Jr., vice-chairman of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, hailed McNichols as having been the key figure in the success of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project.

“Without the guiding hand of Steve McNichols and the cooperation of a Democratic controlled legislature, the spade work necessary for the Fry-Ark passage probably would not have been done,” Stapleton said. “Most revealing is a comparison of federal expenditures in Colorado prior to 1957 and after 1957.”

Stapleton added that prior to 1957, reclamation expenditures in Colorado rarely exceeded $2 million annually. In 1958, reclamation expenditures rose to $7 million and rose again every year, culminating in a projected $31 million for 1962.

“The development of our water resources is a long and costly process,” Stapleton said. “Such development, however, will return billions of dollars in benefits to the state and the nation.”

Thirty-Five Years Ago: Rep. Faye Flemming, R-Thornton, told The Colorado Statesman that she had no regrets about switching her party affiliation and said that the Denver media was short-sighted. 

“It makes all this wonderful emotional copy to say the Republican Party is far to the right,” Fleming said, “but it doesn’t happen to be accurate. There are still many voices of moderation in the Republican Party — perhaps their methods aren’t quite as newsworthy.”

All in all, Fleming said, she was pleased with her decision to become a Republican and said that she had found a good welcome.

“Furthermore, no one person in the Republican Party or the Republican Caucus has come to me and said, ‘You’d better vote this way or else.’ No one’s been coercing me,” Fleming said. 

She contrasted this warm welcome with the a “very heated discussion” in her first term in the House, with House Minority Leader Ruth Wright, D-Boulder.

“I was told that if I continued to support a particular measure, I might not get another vote out of Boulder County,” Fleming recalled. “Those were pretty harsh words. We patched it up later, but in the heat of the moment, a threat was leveled.”

Wright responded to Fleming’s comments stating that: “We did have a heated discussion — the only argument we had in two years. She was for [the bill], I was against it, and that was that. Why I would threaten not to support her in her reelection is beyond me. We were all so grateful that Faye had won a formerly Republican seat in 1982.”

Wright said that she was so devastated that Fleming lost her 1984 race that she organized a social event for Fleming and several other Democratic candidates who had lost their races, “to show our appreciation and to keep up their morale.”

In the interim, Wright said, Fleming was kept informed about what was happening in the legislature “so she would be encouraged to run again.”

“I am still hurting from her switch,” Wright said. “Maybe minority leaders are tested in this way …but I have one consolation: We got Martha Ezzard.”

Rachael Wright is the author of the Captain Savva Mystery series, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University and is a contributing writer to Colorado Politics and The Gazette.