My Brush with Nike by D. Ohmans 1998 Welcome, reader! I look out the window at South Table Mountain in Golden, Colorado. It gives me pleasure, I can tell you, that I had a hand in keeping Nike Corporation from building a satellite headquarters on the top. This is our great little story. January 1998 was a mild winter. El Nino was blowing in from the Pacific, and Denver had only had a week or two of snow. One morning I was skimming through the "Denver Post," and came across a tiny story buried deep within: Nike Inc. had perhaps set its sights on our local mountain for a giant facility with five thousand employees. I pointed it out to Judy. Incredible, we thought. An amazing success for citizen action unfolded, with the energy behind it of opposition to several mighty corporations, Nike and Coors, and that of a magnificent and god-like mountain, perhaps a magic mountain in Thomas Mann's sense. It had a dynamic of its own which gathered as citizen opposition built to a firestorm, then subsided to a mere threatening rumble. The core fact in this chronicle, I believe, is that the Nike Corporation has an advertising budget of 200 million dollars. So when one all of a sudden becomes an "anti-Nike activist," the jolt it bestows is overwhelming. Within a matter of weeks, some 75 Golden citizens were attending meetings, and the phone was ringing off the hook all day. It was a powerful and somehow disturbing brew. It began, as we said, early in 1998 with a story on a back page of the "Denver Post": the Nike Corporation was negotiating with a Mr. Leo Bradley, a major landowner and attorney for the Coors Brewery, to purchase 1,300 acres on what is called South Table Mountain for a satellite headquarters. This seemed amazing, since that mountain had almost made it to the new millenium in a pristine state, and everyone probably assumed that that was its permanent configuration. Noteworthy too was the villain of the piece, for Nike had gained notoriety with its abusive child labor practices in Indonesia and Vietnam. Indeed, that very week "Doonesbury" was running a satirical sequence on a visit to Nike factories in Vietnam by their advertising star, basketball great Michael Jordon. I pointed the article out to my live-in partner of 12 years, Judy Denison. The idea began to percolate that we should do something, something to protect our home turf from development. The stock market was booming, and had risen 95 percent in three years. Nike's gross revenues had risen from six billion dollars in 1996 to nine billion in 1997. They were awash in cash. Golden, a small town suburb of Denver nestled between North and South Table Mountains and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, had itself experienced nine percent growth in residential buildings during 1997, and had passed a one percent growth limitation ordinance which had apparently still not kicked in. It was time for the environmentalists to take action, and this was not without precedent. On the one hand a small group of us had successfully defeated a City plan to close down the outdoor pool several years previously. We called our group the STOP Coalition, for Save The Outdoor Pool. The main tactic was an informal petition, which obtained about 750 signatures, and persistent appearances at the weekly City Council meetings. And the community as a whole had been fighting the South Table Mountain issue for about 25 years. There had been a proposal 15 years previously by Leo Bradley to establish a gravel quarry on top of the mesa. The citizens fought it for over two years, bringing to bear hundreds of neighborhood groups and dozens of technical experts who found much to object to in the way of dust, noise and traffic. Bradley's quarry was finally defeated. The development issue is a constant at the critical juncture where the Denver metropolis of two million plus souls protrudes westward toward the spectacular mountains. For a thousand miles west from Chicago there is nothing but flat farmland, then flat ranchland, and then at Golden the giant mountain range begins. Just to the east of this Front Range runs the so-called hogback, a north-south protrusion of rocks and lava formations that yields geological shapes quite different from the rounded tree-covered--and in the winter, snow-covered-- mountains to their west. A mile or two from Golden is Red Rocks Amphitheatre, for example, carved into the hogback by Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration in the 1930's. 20 miles to the north is Boulder Colorado's famed Flatirons, a tipped monster plate of rock that fronts the ski country behind it. Coloradans are proud of all this beauty, but much of it is privately owned. The history of the place goes back little more than 100 to 150 years, when the first owners siezed huge tracts, whole mountains, as their own. Today that is a problem, since tens of thousands of individuals have made their homes around these scenic vistas, and have little tolerance for the money-making schemes of the early birds. Just five years ago, a man named Goltra had proposed another gravel quarry, this one just behind the first line of Front Range mountain peaks. I had joined in that struggle, by using my trade skills as a librarian to reveal that Mr. Goltra had received double OSHA violations in Illinois and had supplied defective steel bearings to the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City, thus delaying that project by six months. Goltra was furious, but I was exultant. The gravel quarry was finally quashed by an opinion from the Colorado state reclamation board, that the geologic damage would be too great. Much of the Goltra land was subsequently bought by the Jefferson County Open Space Program. Also purchased was land belonging to Bradley along both sides of Clear Creek, a mountain stream that runs right through Golden and actually carved the canyon between North and South Table Mountains, and is occupied by the Coors Brewery, a 5,000 employee plant which is the largest single-location brewery in the world. Jefferson County is a huge county, including many of Denver's bedroom suburbs. In 1972 it initiated its Open Space program, which in many respects has been a model for public environmental protection. Golden is ringed by numerous trails, parks, campgrounds and public ranches that belong to the County. Many residents, in fact, had simply assumed that South Table Mountain was also Jeffco Open Space. But it was not. Judy and I brought the matter up with our friends Don and Mary Parker. Don is an environmental attorney turned landlord, and Mary is a New Age artist. We decided that Don would compose a letter to Nike and I would start a petition campaign. Mary would design a leaflet and Judy, my FoxPro programming partner, a database. The letter to Phil Knight was adamant: Sir, we know how to oppose and we are prepared to do it, whether you propose to develop 500, 50 or just five acres. The petition simply read, "We oppose the Nike Corporation's plan to put a headquarters on South Table Mountain." Mary's leaflet, which I ran through Microsoft Word, announced the problem and suggested that the public call and write Nike, Coors, Bradley, the several City Councils around the mountain, the County Commissioners, the Governor. As Judy's database took shape, it had every bell and whistle known to the art in 1998. I headed down to the local Safeway grocery store with the petition blanks. It was gratifying to discover that one had no trouble whatsoever finding willing signers: sometimes the shoppers would be lined up three deep waiting their turn. Which mountain, they would ask. That one, right there, I would say. No, they would reply, are they crazy? Petition forms went out to our two coffee houses as well, from which about a third of the final thousand plus signers effortlessly appeared. We notified the local paper, the "Golden Transcript," of our activities. Our first meeting was scheduled for a Monday night at the Higher Grounds Cafe. We hoped for a sudden, strong reaction that would catch people's attention, and we got it. Within a week, I had 600 signatures, by working the store only about three hours a day. After ten days, we were within sight of a thousand, and a big push one early Thursday gave us that healthy round number for presentation to the Golden City Council, whose involvement in the controversy turned out to be more than casual. Some of the signers of the petition became core activists of "Just Don't Do It," as we began to call the group following Judy's idea. Later the less Nike- centered "Save The Mesas" designation was chosen, with its acronym nicely mirroring that of South Table Mountain. One was Jim Brown, a professor at Golden's other institution--other than Coors, that is--the Colorado School of Mines. Brown had actually been Mayor of Golden a decade previously. Others asked for petition and leaflet masters to themselves distribute. Just Don't Do It needed a phone number, so our computer phone was enlisted. U.S. West provided messaging, and fuel for the database began to pour in. Laura McCall signed on at the first opportunity. She is the women's studies professor from Golden who had recently pushed through the above-mentioned residential growth limitation for the community. Marcie Miller, the proprietor at Higher Grounds, was there from the first meeting. Professor Frank Schowengerdt, veteran of the previous Bradley controversy, soon joined. And so on. The first weekly meeting had ten attendees, the second 40, the third 75. The coffee house was crammed. A librarian from the mountain town of Evergreen set up a meeting with one of their local activists who had run a successful campaign to save, not South Table Mountain, but Noble Meadow. From his suggestions a postcard mail-in campaign was born, which (thanks to a local nurse named Wanda) yielded close to three thousand pieces of mail for our beleaguered decision-makers. No environmental campaign would be complete without buttons and bumper stickers, and it wasn't long before Save The Mesas had its own (and a new hero in Annie Hedberg). The database swelled to 250, then 500 entries: individuals, organizations, media. A coalition committee was formed to seek institutional endorsements. Judy kept verbatim notes of the meetings, which later came in very handy. She began to seek out coverage of each little development in print media as well as television. And these entities responded with their usual scorching but fast-shifting beam of attention. I put together a Web site, which the media presented as a high-tech twist on traditional activism. Instead, that is exactly what our email mailing list turned out to be. Throughout all this, I found myself in an odd central position. I was working at home, and my telephone was in effect the Coalition's telephone. It began to ring steadily, and as I fought to keep up with the barrage, I became by default a sort of spokesman for the group, though I tried to farm out the media's favors (as they seemed at the time) to Don and others. Don Parker meanwhile was beginning his bid for Golden's seat in the Colorado Legislature, so it seemed an added bonus for us to steer media coverage his way. Yet there was plenty to go around. If we fast forward through all the events which were to follow, whose explication nevertheless contains much of interest and many interesting lessons, two highlights stand out in my mind. First, the presentation of the petition to the County Commissioners, and second, catching the Mayor of Golden red-handed in hypocrisy. After the signatures had been duly digested by the media in reference to the City Council, we began to think about what else we could do with them. At that point, Just Don't Do It was itself little more than the petition. I drove down to Kinko's copy shop, and spiral bound up the petitions in green covers. We sent them to Beaverton, Oregon, and were rewarded with a letter from Lee Weinstein, Nike's public relations head, imploring the public to "Hold your horses - nothing has been decided." Encouraged, Mary Parker, a metallurgy consultant named Elliot Brown and myself prepared to deliver a similar copy to Jefferson County's three Commissioners. They were having a breakfast meeting with local Mayors and Councilpersons, and we simply walked in to interrupt them. Flashbulbs went off, they hesitated for a moment and then received us graciously. For me, it was a high point of the struggle, which revived for an instant the spirit of the 1960's. About mid-March, however, we all experienced the activist's dream come true. A local water attorney, Barney White (son of Colorado's famed Supreme Court judge Byron "Whizzer" White) had submitted a Freedom of Information request to Golden regarding the Nike question. He had been sent a packet of correspondence between Golden's Mayor, Jan Schenck, and a semi-public agency called the Jefferson Economic Council that proved Schenck had lied to everyone when he urged the Nike opposition to back off until there was a real proposal. It turned out that Schenck had overflowed with enthusiasm for a proposal so real that it even included a 50 percent property tax rebate from the County and the school district for four years, not to mention detailed access routes, sewage and water needs, and much more. The Mayor of Golden was duly crucified in the state-wide media this time, and the headline in the local paper was, "Schenck: I screwed up!" Nike pulled out. Coors agreed not to develop the land until after the results of a ballot initiative to raise money for Open Space purchase. New leadership appeared and took up the torch of our great little story.