Audio By Carbonatix
The patriarch of East Colfax Avenue has finally made it off the street. On August 5, James “Chico” Hamilton–“Papa Colfax” to those on Denver’s seediest stretch–died from complications of a handful of illnesses eating at his 58-year-old frame. For more than fifteen years, Hamilton, a homeless junk dealer and artist with a penchant for wearing hubcaps on his head, had been one of the more colorful characters on a street jammed with eccentrics.
But while the death of one more street person generally means little in Capitol Hill, that’s not the case with Hamilton. His death has left a crack in the heart of the neighborhood he called home. Since his passing, a steady stream of business owners, neighbors and address-free friends have stopped in to pay their respects at Hamilton’s shopping cart, which has become a shrine to his memory.
“There will never be another Papa Colfax, we love you and hope to see you in heaven,” reads an inscription in a makeshift guest book tucked beneath Hamilton’s flower-filled cart near the corner of Colfax and Emerson. “Much Love Baby,” reads another, from “the dingiest white girl around.” The list goes on. “We will miss your song, Denver Paramedics.” “You made us smile when we saw you in the neighborhood, thanks for adding color to it.” “Wish I would have known you.”
Dan Kohlman and his wife, Helen O’Grady, who own the Enigma statuary shop at Colfax and Emerson, are two of the locals who knew Hamilton well. Since opening their shop three years ago, they served as his benefactor and banker, giving him access to their doorstep and shelter in their parked car during foul weather and holding the Social Security monies Hamilton recently began receiving. Their relationship with Hamilton, which included dinners at their home and occasional drinks behind their shop, seemed perfectly natural to them.
“Even though he ran in the street with these guys, he was different, like a gilded light,” Kohlman adds. “That’s how he won his way into our hearts and our lives, because of who he was. He wasn’t crazy. He played with a full deck all the time, and he was so free in his thinking that he never saw boundaries in anything.”
Especially when it came to raising a few dollars. “He’d come around and want to borrow a few bucks,” Kohlman says, “and I’d tell him I couldn’t loan him any more money. Well, he’d start singing and tap dancing, and you’d start laughing, and you knew you were gonna give him something, because he’d just earned it. He’d never just take anything from you–he insisted on some sort of exchange, and if he borrowed a buck from you, he’d pay you back.”
Jeannette Wild, who manages the check-cashing store where Hamilton spent his last hours (he collapsed in the lobby on August 2 and died three days later in St. Joseph’s Hospital), also attests to Hamilton’s hustling skills. “He would come in and work us,” she says with a grin. “He’d dance and sing. He was a snake-oil salesman. He’d completely charm you and do whatever he thought was necessary to get you to give up your money.
“But he had style, and he always looked out for other people.”
Wild says Hamilton would walk employees to their cars at night and chase off drug dealers from the sidewalk in front of her store. “He’d sell stuff when he could–he wasn’t stupid,” she says, “but he gave away a lot of stuff to people that needed it, and he took care of people like they were relatives.”
Kohlman adds wistfully, “We’ll miss him. Every time we see someone pushing a shopping cart now, we think it’s Chico coming. After you’ve lived a few years and you get to know people, you know when you meet a real person. This guy was as real as you could get.”
According to Lucille Gatewood, Hamilton’s 79-year-old mother, her son’s concern for others was nothing new. “He was a good child, a precious child,” declares Gatewood, who still lives in her son’s hometown of Memphis. “He loved people, and everybody loved him. He was smart, too, and he was always ready to do something nice for people whenever he could.” In his twenties, she recalls, Hamilton played drums in bands at the famed Peabody Hotel, wrote songs and supplemented his income by painting portraits of local musicians.
“He may have known Elvis personally,” Gatewood reveals. “He got around pretty good when he was young. But I can’t remember too much, ’cause I been through all these head-on collisions and car accidents. I’ve been in about, oh, five of them. And I haven’t talked to him in years. I didn’t know he was even living on the streets. It really knocked me for a loop when I heard about it.”
On Capitol Hill, Hamilton’s death has had a similar effect. “He’s dead?” asks a man walking up to Hamilton’s cart. “That’s a trip. Everybody up and down Colfax knew him. Everybody. You know, somebody told me he wasn’t looking good these days.”
A doctor at St. Joseph’s says Hamilton knew he was suffering from bone cancer and a lung disease and also had a lesion on his brain. He died of “multi-system failure,” the doctor says. A cryptic guest-book inscription that mentions lives “going up in smoke” could shed some light on what may have contributed to Hamilton’s demise, according to one man who knew him.
“Do you know how many people in their fifties and sixties are smoking crack up and down Colfax?” the man asks. “Tons of ’em.”
Orville Springs, a Capitol Hill poet and longtime friend of Hamilton’s, admits that his friend had dabbled in the drug but says he’d been clean for the past year.
Besides, Hamilton’s spirit was more than enough to overshadow any illicit practices on a street rife with vice. “He practiced love,” Springs says before leading a memorial service in honor of his friend. “He was a great inspiration to me, and he touched a lot of people out here.”
A moment later Springs addresses a crowd of two dozen people, his voice fighting the drone of a band warming up at the Ogden Theatre and the noise pouring off of Colfax. Halfway through his sermon, three men drive up in a primer-gray sedan and step quickly through the crowd, each one placing a fist on a tabletop Bible as they strut through. A moment later they step out of the adjacent cash outlet; one of the men leaves a few dollars in a donation tin, raises his hand and shouts “Papa Colfax!” as he departs. A few feet away, a garbage bag holds the last of Hamilton’s possessions: plastic bags, water bottles, empty Sterno tins, a candle, an assortment of clothes and a can of applesauce.
Before the ceremony ends, Jody, who describes himself as Hamilton’s “pardner,” lectures the attentive crowd on the nature of the street and its hardships, recalling a frequent slogan of his deceased sidekick: “You can put me out of the alley, but you can’t put me off God’s land.”
According to Kohlman, Hamilton was ready for the promised land he dreamed of in the face of failing health. Just a few days before his death, Hamilton told him, “The other night I was over by the liquor store and I looked up in the sky–and this ain’t no joke, Mr. Dan–I saw the name ‘Jesus’ written right in the sky in big bright lights. That’s the second time that’s happened, and I feel real good about that.
