Park Place

To many who live at 37th Avenue and Lipan Street, Bernabe “Indio” Franco is little more than a name on a sign, someone who lived in the neighborhood many years, then died. Yet there are times when people who live in this corner of north Denver step into the park that bears Indio’s name and, whether they realize it or not, continue his quiet legacy.

Georgia Vega is Indio’s oldest daughter. For thirty years, she has kept three spiral notebooks on her dining-room shelf. In them, in a script that’s becoming harder for her 71-year-old eyes to decipher, lies a short history of her family.

Indio was born in Jalisco, Mexico, the oldest of three boys. His father worked as a schoolteacher and his mother stayed home with the kids. When he was four, his family headed north to the United States looking for work. They found it in the fields of Texas and later Colorado, where they picked beets, onions, beans, cherries and whatever the season demanded.

As he grew up and made his own way toward Denver, Indio worked as a coal miner, steelworker, truck driver and railroad man. By the time he was married with eight children, there was no job Indio couldn’t — or wouldn’t — handle. “He would do anything,” Georgia recalls. “Anything. And he never missed a day of work. Even if he was sick. We were never hungry, and we never went on relief.”

Indio — a nickname he might have picked up because of his jet-black hair and sunburned skin — was the kind of man who made friends “with everybody and anybody,” his daughter remembers. When he moved his family to a north Denver neighborhood dominated by Italians, Indio strolled among the brick and stucco bungalows with an easy smile and a quick hello.

“He’d speak Spanish to them and they’d speak Italian to him, and somehow they communicated,” Georgia says. “I don’t know how he did it, but he got to the point where he could carry on conversations with the Italian people in Italian.”

Indio had also taught himself to read and write English. He never made it past the seventh grade, but each evening, he’d sit on the porch with the newspaper and sound out the words.

“He just figured it out,” Georgia says. “It wasn’t perfect, but you could understand it.”

He was like that with many things. If a carburetor clogged or a switch blew, he’d sit and tinker until things worked. It might not have been a factory-approved repair job, but as often as not, it held together. If a neighbor’s car broke down, he showed up with a toolbox. If a group needed help building a shed, he arrived with a hammer and saw. And when parishioners built four churches in north Denver, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, Indio pulled his flatbed Ford up to the curb.

“He’d volunteer for anything,” Georgia says. “If he saw someone struggling with a package, he’d go over and say, ‘Let me help you.’ That’s just the way he was.”

Eventually, Indio started a small construction business with his sons and built a string of houses and apartments in north and southwest Denver. After every job, he returned home with leftovers. Nails, scrap lumber — it all showed up at home.

“He picked up anything and everything,” Georgia recalls. “And everything he brought home, he’d use. He had a hard life as a young man, so nothing went to waste.”

That was one of the values Indio taught his children. He also demanded that they say please, thank you, good morning and good night. He made sure they knew the value of hard work and the importance of family. And he made sure they were proud of who they were.

“My father never denied being Mexican,” Georgia says. “And there were a lot of people who did. In those days — and it seems funny to say it now — we weren’t allowed to go past Navajo Street. We lived in the lower part, down by the tracks, and we were supposed to stay there. But my dad always told us to never be ashamed of being Mexican. Not Spanish, either, but Mexican. He was proud of who he was.”

All this is not to say that Indio was perfect. He drank too much, and that cost him. At age 63, he died from cirrhosis of the liver. Not long afterward, his family signed over to the city a dirt lot at 37th and Lipan, where Indio once had planned to build a bowling alley. Instead, it became a park. In 1971 the city erected a small wooden sign on the corner. It reads: “Bernabe ‘Indio’ Franco.”

Twenty-five years later, Diane Vullmer took her daughters for a walk. What she saw at Franco Park turned her stomach. The evergreens had become overgrown nests for drunken vagrants. The playground equipment had become public outhouses. The fence had become a catch-all for trash. The sandbox had become a pit of cigarette butts and broken glass.

“It was a hellhole,” she says bluntly.

Diane had grown up in north Denver. She didn’t know much about Indio, other than he was a hardworking man who’d built homes in the neighborhood, but she knew this much: His park was a dump.

So she and her neighbors decided to do something about it. They contacted community leaders, nonprofit groups and city officials. They printed fliers, held meetings and organized. They talked with the owner of a bar near the park, who built a fence around his property and installed an enclosed dumpster. They painted over graffiti. They found new trash cans. They trimmed the evergreens. They received grants to plant a garden and craft mosaics on picnic-table tops. They pestered the city to install new sidewalks, handicapped ramps, playground equipment, a basketball court and lighting. And every step of the way, members of the Franco family worked beside them.

Little by little, year by year, a new park took shape — one with a bright red-and-blue jungle gym, a baby swing set, a children’s swing set, two sets of musical bells, a bouncing seahorse and a bouncing duck. This past September, four years after they began their work, Diane and 75 of her neighbors dedicated the refurbished park, which even featured a brand-new sign.

More work lies ahead. One of the lights is broken, and the park could use a few more trees. Men still gather in the back corner with six-packs and marijuana. Still, there’s much to be proud of.

“It’s everything a park should be,” says artist Bob Luna, who has lived in the neighborhood for twenty years. “It was worth the wait.”

One recent sunny afternoon, a toddler in overalls lifts a basketball to his shoulder and heaves it toward the backboard again and again. Two sisters wearing pink pants and leopard-print turtlenecks scramble through the sandbox screaming, “Ducky! Ducky!” A young couple sits back in the autumn sun watching maple leaves skitter across the sidewalk. In the shade of a trimmed and healthy evergreen, five workmen in baseball caps and paint-spattered jeans carefully unpack their lunches.

Diane sits atop a picnic table, watching it all. The park wasn’t the biggest project in the city, she says. It wasn’t the best example of neighborhood involvement, and it’s not the most beautiful thing around. But it’s a testament to hard work and quiet determination.

“We’re not trying to save the world,” she says. “Just our little corner.”

And that, says Georgia Vega, would have made her father proud.