Loren and Andrea have lived in Goss-Grove for 36 years.
Loren bought the house at 1616 18th Street in 1975 when he came to Boulder as an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado. He remembers a neighborhood of small single-family homes (his was built in 1900), apple and peach orchards, and an unpaved Grove Street. There was only one house per lot where now there are two and there were only a few small apartment houses on Canyon Boulevard, which was just a regular street then. People’s backyards were full of fruit trees. In the 80s developers discovered the lucrative potential in the neighborhood, and all that changed.
Loren met the love of his life, Andrea Montoya, at the university. They soon married and raised two beautiful daughters in our neighborhood.
Loren grew up in the Washington, DC area, which was then a segregated and very southern place. In 1960, inspired by the sit-ins in Greensborough, North Carolina, the students at Howard University decided to picket the nearby amusement park, demanding it be integrated. Loren, 17 and still in high school, was inspired to join them. He spent the three months of his summer picketing until finally the park was integrated. Having achieved that goal, the students, including Loren, picketed the neighboring movie theater. That took just a few weeks to integrate. Thus started Loren’s life-long activism in civil rights and the peace movement, including the closing of Rocky Flats, and his endeavor to inspire many generations of students. Although now retired, when not walking and contemplating, Loren still reads a lot and can’t stop being interested in politics.
Andrea grew up in a large family in an impoverished Hispanic neighborhood in Denver. Her older brother was the first one in the family to finish high school, and Andrea followed his example and then came to CU. She became an activist in her own right doing gorilla theater in high school and bringing movement and art to the streets. Her life-long interest in the body, and in integrating body, mind, and soul, led her to become a dancer with Cleo Parker Robinson and work in dance therapy.
She discovered her love for science when she breastfed her first baby. Eventually she enrolled in a three-year Physician’s Assistant program at the CU Medical School. Andrea now works at the Community Hospital Cancer Center.
Their daughters were always the center of Loren and Andrea’s lives, and now they delight in their two granddaughters, who live in Centennial. They enjoy that from Goss-Grove they can walk just about anywhere, and Andrea bicycles or takes the bus to the hospital’s Foothills Campus.
Their hope for the neighborhood is that more young families will move in, that owner-occupied homes will increase to make it a real neighborhood. They are against age-ghettos, be it of 20-year-old or of old people. A true neighborhood needs to be balanced.
