Falcon Wing, 1974
Bear Creek High School's Morrison Centennial project, preserved as a downloadable PDF.
Rooted in History · Part One
The Building. The Town. The Family.
201 Bear Creek Avenue has stood since 1880. Morrison was founded in 1874. This family arrived in 1969.
← Rooted in History
Chapter One
The Building & The Town
201 Bear Creek Avenue has been part of Morrison since the town's earliest days — built around 1880 by Tom Morrison, son of the town's founder George Morrison, just six years after George established the town in 1874. As the postcard for the Morrison Country Store would later say: “Where a part of America's past is waiting for you.” Under this single roof, the building carried a remarkable share of local history: Tom Morrison ran a meat market here; it was the first home of The Bud, Morrison's first newspaper (1889–1899); Harry Gates — the future Denver architect — was born in the building; and after the 1916 fire, it served as Morrison's Post Office. The geological formation that bears the town's name is where Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus, and Diplodocus were first discovered in 1877. Red Rocks Amphitheatre rises in the backyard. The hogback separating the plains from the mountains runs directly through it.
Rolf Paul designed the Town of Morrison logo still on its signs today. He also fought — and won — the battle to keep C-470 east of the hogback, out of Morrison's heart. And when a historic log cabin stood in the highway's path, the town moved it instead, turning it into the Morrison Museum that still stands in the valley today.
The Morrison Country Store
The Morrison Country Store postcard and business card — featuring Rolf's logo he designed for Ginny's shop. The tagline on the postcard: “Where a part of America's past is waiting for you.” Built c. 1880 by Tom Morrison, son of the town's founder. Open 7 days a week, year round.
“Two Towns Tentatively Agree on Route of C-470” — the article covering Rolf's negotiation to keep the highway from running through Morrison. The town's character today owes much to that fight.
Denver Post, December 8, 1987 — “History gets a lift in Morrison.” The Town moved a historic log cabin that would have been demolished by C-470 construction. It became the Morrison Museum, which still stands today.
One Building, Many Coats
201 Bear Creek Avenue, across 145 years.
Three photographs of the same building — the same bones, the same corner lot — wearing very different lives. The first is the earliest photograph we have. The middle is Ginny's Morrison Country Store, one of the many color schemes she cycled it through over the years — red, gingerbread, tan, cream, black. The last is the building today, as Morrison Mercantile prepares to hand it on.
c. 1880s — under the MEAT MARKET sign, run by Tom Morrison. Children on the boardwalk, a lamp post out front. The earliest known photograph of the building. (Courtesy of Morrison History.)
c. 2000 — the Morrison Country Store in one of Ginny's many color schemes. Over the years she cycled the building through red, gingerbread, tan, cream, and black. She always had an opinion about what it needed next. (Courtesy of Morrison History.)
2025 — the building as Morrison Mercantile, which ran here from 2018 at Ginny's retirement until 2026. Claire and Q Franz, whom Ginny herself hand-selected, carried the space forward between then and now. (Photograph courtesy of Morrison History.)
Interlude
Falcon Wing · 1974
In the spring of 1974, a group of ninth-graders at Bear Creek High School set out to document the town of Morrison on its one-hundredth birthday. They called the project Falcon Wing. Bear Creek High sits on the other side of the hogback, in Lakewood — it drew its student body from a whole patchwork of Front Range neighborhoods, with Morrison contributing only a small handful of kids to each class. Which makes the project more remarkable, not less: a class of mostly non-Morrison kids decided to take this tiny town seriously for six weeks — hiking the valley, sitting in living rooms with the Rooneys and the Schneiders and the Peinzes, researching at the Denver Public Library and the Colorado Historical Society, writing up what they found in their own hands. The magazine includes a Rooney interview, a student-written history of the incline railway, the story of Red Rocks, original sketches by classmates, and a full bibliography citing Denver Post articles from 1938 through 1968 and Rocky Mountain News issues back to 1896.
The dedication, written by faculty advisor Tom Hodges, reads: “This magazine is dedicated to the people of Morrison, Colorado, on the anniversary of their 100th year, and to the people who so graciously helped us. May a portion of their wisdom and culture remain long after them to touch us all.”
Ten years later, Krista would make her way through the same Jeffco schools — Red Rocks Elementary, Carmody Middle, Bear Creek High. The handful of Morrison kids in any given class was always small. That this magazine exists at all — that someone outside the town cared enough to make it, and that Krista’s family cared enough to save it for her to discover in her family’s files fifty years later as she prepared to tell the story of her family’s love for this town — is part of what this page is about. Careful remembering, wherever it comes from, is how places like Morrison survive. We’re sharing the full magazine here.
The cover of Falcon Wing — Bear Creek High School’s 1974 Morrison Centennial magazine. Hand-lettered title, a student sketch of an ore wagon by classmate B. Marlow. The paper is yellowed now, the edges worn, but the care is obvious. Krista does not remember seeing it before 2026, when she found it in her dad’s carefully saved documents about the town.
1974
“May a portion of their wisdom remain.”
Bear Creek High School · Spring 1974
The cover of Falcon Wing — Bear Creek High School’s 1974 Morrison Centennial magazine. Hand-lettered title, a student sketch of an ore wagon by classmate B. Marlow. The paper is yellowed now, the edges worn, but the care is obvious.
Krista does not remember ever seeing this until 2026, when she found it in her dad’s carefully saved documents about the town.
Inside the project
Inside
A real piece of work.
Dedication and acknowledgements
The dedication and acknowledgements page. Named editors: Cindy Glover, Alice Laffoon, Dean Cronk. Named Morrison residents interviewed: the Rooneys, the Schneiders, the Peinzes, Mr. Frank Baker, Mrs. Mary B. Sawyer, and many more. The Foxfire-style approach — students going directly to the source, recording what was remembered, editing it into something that would last — is right there in Hodges' own words: “The idea grew out of the Foxfire concept, community involvement through historical research.” That is exactly what they did.
Read the full magazine.
Thirty-two pages of student-written Morrison history, scanned as we have it. Illustrations, interviews, bibliography, everything.
Download Falcon Wing, 1974 (PDF) →
Interlude
Before Morrison.
Rolf and Ginny arrived in Morrison in November of 1969 as a married couple of five months, from two almost comically different lives. Neither one of them was from Colorado. Neither one had family there. They found each other in a parking lot in Capitol Hill.
Ginny.
Virginia was born in Buffalo, New York. She became a teacher. In the way young women with a little nerve did in those years, she and two adventurous friends — skiers, travelers — made the move to Denver together, drawn west by the mountains and by the idea that life could be bigger than the one they had been raised into. She took a job teaching elementary school in the Denver Public Schools.
She had a quiet certainty about her even then. Some people make noise to find their life; Ginny simply went and found it.
Rolf.
Rolf Paul emigrated from Nuremberg, Germany, at nineteen. He came to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he had a relative willing to sponsor him — Fred Blume, a figure of genuine significance: a German-born American attorney and jurist who served on the Wyoming Supreme Court for forty-two years, from 1922 to 1963, and who single-handedly translated the Codex Justinianus and the Novellae Constitutiones from Latin into English, a work that still stands as the authoritative English edition. Rolf called him “the judge.”
Rolf was not, at nineteen, inclined to live under anyone's rules. He spent his Cheyenne years in something between mischief and open rebellion — the kind of young man the local sheriff came looking for more than occasionally. He joined the U.S. Army in part to learn English properly. The Army, finding him a native German speaker of excellent standing, promptly stationed him back in Germany. He was assigned as the driver for a high-ranking officer. He got lost constantly. The officer, who spoke no German and read no street signs, never knew.
He had, before leaving Nuremberg, trained at a prestigious art academy. That training would eventually be the thing that brought him out of Cheyenne — where he was, still, regularly trying to stay one step ahead of the sheriff — and into Denver, and into an advertising agency, and into a window overlooking a small parking lot in Capitol Hill.
The Parking Lot.
Ginny and her friends lived in the apartment building next to that parking lot. Ginny would come home from teaching, change her clothes, and go back out — dinner, friends, the life of a young Denver teacher in the late 1960s. The pattern was visible from Rolf’s office window.
One afternoon he stepped into the parking lot as she was coming out.
“Are you a model or something?” “No, why?” “Because you change your clothes all the time.”
He asked her out. She said yes.
Morrison.
They married in June of 1969. On November 21st of the same year, they closed on a small house in Morrison — a town neither of them had particular ties to, chosen in the way such places get chosen: they drove out, they looked, they found it.
What began as a house purchase became the place their family, their work, and their love for Morrison would take root.
Settlement Statement. November 21, 1969.
1969
A life begun on paper.
November 21, 1969
The settlement statement for the 1969 purchase of Rolf and Virginia Paul's Morrison home, showing a purchase price of $13,000, a $10,000 loan from the Denver Public School Employees Credit Union, and both Rolf's and Virginia Paul's signatures at the closing.
The $10,000 loan that made the purchase possible came from the Denver Public School Employees Credit Union — Ginny's access, through her teaching job. Both of them signed. They bought the house together. Ginny was the one with the credit union.
Rolf and Ginny Paul at their home in Morrison, May 1971 — one month before Krista was born — with a rainbow arcing over the red rock canyon behind them.
1971
This is where the family begins.
Morrison, Colorado
Rolf and Ginny Paul at their home in Morrison, May 1971 — one month before Krista was born — a young married couple on the deck of their house, with a rainbow arcing over the red rock canyon behind them.