Forty-Five Years Ago This Week: Vice President George H.W. Bush flew to Denver to address the annual meeting of the American Association of Petroleum Landmen, where he assured the audience that the Reagan administration’s strong belief was that the private marketplace — rather than “big government” — was best to handle the nation’s energy production.

Bush said that the administration had no trouble attracting enthusiastic support from landmen after the recent move to deregulate crude oil prices. 

Bush was greeted at Buckley Air Force base by a bevy of Colorado Republicans, including the state’s GOP chairman, Bo Callaway, party finance chair John Fuller, and Republican activist and president of the Petro-Lewis Corporation, Jerome Lewis.

Bush’s son, Neil, an employee of Amoco Co. in Denver, introduced the Vice President and joked that his father’s recent rise to national attention after the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan meant that Bush could now drive through the White House gates without having to show his American Express card.

In other news, members of the ecumenical Denver Area Justice and Peace Committee delivered to U.S. Sen. Gary Hart’s Denver office a mailbox full of letters and a petition with 7,000 signatures, urging Congress to stop all U.S. military and economic aid to the El Salvador government. The U.S. Senate was expected to vote an additional $26 million in military aid to El Salvador as part of the 1982 Foreign Assistance Authorization Bill.

Justice and Peace Committee spokesman Larry Egan said one thousand poverty-stricken El Salvadorians were being murdered each month by military and paramilitary forces, partially financed by the U.S. Government. Egan was a former Maryknoll missionary, spent seven years in El Salvador and had direct experience of the conditions in the country.

“Under the Reagan administration, this country is spending over $56,000 for each square mile of El Salvador,” Egan said, “just to prop up a military government that the people never elected and do not want.”

Egan charged that it was absurd for the U.S.government to send “$464 million in military and economic aid to an undemocratic country that was only one-thirteenth the size of Colorado.”

U.S. foreign policy, Egan argued, should be built on non-intervention, peaceful resolution of conflict and respect for self-determination.

Twenty-Five Years Ago: City of Denver Mayor Wellington Webb delivered his annual ‘State of the City’ address, marking 10 years since he was first elected mayor, reflecting on what had been described as “The Denver Decade.”

Webb reflected that this was an era of prosperity and economic progress in Denver unmatched in the city’s history. 

“Ten years ago,” Webb said, “Denver was a good city, much had been done. Now Denver is a great city and much more has been done.”

Webb announced that his priority for the upcoming November election as a new justice center, a $300 million facility that would cost taxpayers, on average, $4 more in property taxes over 30 years.

“Because we have financed our debt conservatively… many of the bonds we have issued over the past years will be paid off a few years from now,” Webb said. “A task force of the Denver residents is working hard to identify the best site… for a new Justice Center that will house courts and a jail.”

In the 10 years since Webb took office, he had increased officers and resources, added programs like community policing, and along with the Safe City Program and the underage curfew law, the overall crime rate had been reduced by 40%.

“As a city we are not an island unto ourselves,” Webb said. “No matter how much we accomplish, we are very much affected by what the federal and the state government do or fail to do for us.”

Rachael Wright is the author of several novels, including The Twins of Strathnaver, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University, and is a contributing columnist to Colorado Politics, the Colorado Springs Gazette, and the Denver Gazette.