Her horror when Joyce as a baby had been bitten on the cheek by a rat shortly after the family first moved to Denver never entirely left her, and the cleaning regimen she established when they moved to the projects continued until the day she died.
Ronnie's task that afternoon was to continue washing down the walls he had begun the Saturday before. Phillip (in the carrier) accompanied Ronnie on every step as he emptied the trash can in the bathroom, poured in a cup of bleach and a squirt of dish detergent, and filled the can with hot water from the kitchen sink. He then proceeded to the girls’ bedroom and easily moved the bed and dresser to the middle of the room. With the help of a small stool, he managed to reach all the way to the top of the walls, ending up on his knees as he followed the floorboard around the room. He talked to Phillip the whole time, rewarded by the baby babbling back.
At 5:15 p.m., he handed Phillip over to his mother, poured the dirty water down the toilet, and wiped out the trash can. The following week he would wash down the walls in his and Raymond's room, but in the meantime, he was free to head outside for an hour with Roy and Russ before supper.
“Family and friends. I had it good, you know?” Ron Lyle, like his brothers and sisters, remembers those days as sometimes chaotic, even stressful, but always loving. “I know it's hard for other people to imagine having that many kids, but we were together. We always had each other.” He adds, “And we still do.”
They didn't always get along, of course. The whole family remembers how Bill and Ronnie used to fight. Bill had the longer reach for many years, and Ron remembers his brother's hand on his forehead, holding him back while he swung wildly in the air. Sharon says that the only thing that made Nellie mad was any of her children fighting. “You should want to be together,” she would tell them.
Bill recalls that when he went to college, he felt alone. Even surrounded by other students in the dorm, he missed his family. “Even now, when my brothers and sisters are not around, it feels like something is lost.”
Donna, who lives near San Diego, thinks of her family every single day. “We're still together in our hearts, though, even when we haven't seen each other for a long time.” She still remembers those Saturday meetings, sitting on the floor listening to everyone tell about their week, as the happiest time in her life.
Whether it was William's raw energy, Nellie's loving patience, the example they set as a close family, or a combination of all three, by all accounts the Lyles were not only the spiritual but also the social heart of the community. And what a community it was.
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To many who lived in the outlying suburbs of Denver, the Curtis Park and Five Points districts were dangerous territory, a place you wouldn't want to be after dark. But to the inhabitants, the neighborhoods northeast of downtown were places of refuge, rich in history and a sanctuary for the African-American community.
Most residents of Five Points recall the story of how the area was named in the early 1900s. The city's tramway company used the nickname because the streetcar signs were not big enough to list all the street names at the end-of-the-line stop.
The history of the area is centered on Benny Hooper, the first African American drafted in Denver for World War I. He opened a hotel and club for black servicemen in 1920, and managed to attract the greatest jazz musicians of the time on their circuits, including Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. Later, he was also responsible for getting the city of Denver to allow black soldiers to be a part of the Veterans Day parade. “Coloreds” were not allowed to march with weapons, so he had wooden guns carved and painted, made sure every man's shoes were spit-polished, and led the men downtown. They were told to go last in the parade, but they did march, and Benny always maintained they were the best-dressed unit. The pride Benny Hooper engendered in Five Points residents, omnipresent through the decades, continues to this day.
While Five Points was beginning to be known as a cultural landmark in the 1950s, Curtis Park was labeled the so-called ghetto area of Denver, even though the small Victorian Queen Anne houses built in the 1870s and 1880s were already starting to be recognized as architectural treasures. Built around Denver's oldest park, developed in 1868 with donated land from Postmaster Samuel S. Curtis, the area has managed to retain its charm for well over a century. But during the time the Lyles lived there, the mere presence of a large African-American population somehow reflected danger to a significant portion of the population still mired in racial prejudice.
The Curtis Park district may be considered a microcosm of Denver's ethnic history. Settled mostly by Germans in the nineteenth century, the area saw a great influx of Hispanics, blacks, and Japanese after the first war, continuing into the 1950s. Today the area is about half Hispanic, a quarter African-American, and another quarter white. Finally celebrating the cultural diversity of the community, the park itself was recently renamed Mestizo-Curtis Park. Just a few blocks from Ron's gym, with an outdoor pool, tennis and basketball courts, horseshoe pits, a soccer field, and a new playground, the park is the focal point of the community.
The area may have been perceived in the 1950s as a slum by outsiders, but Russell Perron and Ron Lyle remember something else about Curtis Park. They remember that people there, whatever their race, had a chance to do what they wanted to do with their lives.
The Lyles settled in at 34th and Arapaho, in the core of the district right across the street from Curtis Park. All the units in the projects were red-brick duplexes of varying size and depth. No fences broke the continuity of the neighborhood, just as no racial barriers existed in that part of Denver. And the people who grew up there remember how difficult it was to get away with anything.
“You couldn't so much as throw a rock that somebody in the neighborhood wouldn't call your folks about it. And if they weren't home, the neighbor would do the whuppin’,” Kenneth Lyle remembers.
Keeping an eye on their kids might have been the neighbors’ way of paying the Lyles back for their many kindnesses. Almost from the very beginning, the families in the Curtis Park projects knew they could call on William and Nellie to help. Whether a family was short of food, in trouble with the law, or in need of spiritual guidance, they counted on the Lyles for support.
By the time Ronnie had started his paper route, Nellie was known in Curtis Park as a missionary, not only for her tireless efforts at collecting money and goods for foreign missions, but for her charity. Donna recalls, “Mom was a jewel. She loved everyone in the neighborhood and would feed anybody who was hungry.” If the recipients of her altruistic efforts found God in the process, so much the better, but she didn't discriminate in her many acts of kindness.
Pastor Sharon Lyle Dempsey, who has inherited her mother's missionary mantle, remembers her family as the center of the neighborhood. “It didn't matter if they belonged to the church. My mom and dad were there to help. Anybody who was sick or hungry or in trouble came to my parents, and they would figure out a way to make things better for everyone.” She continues, “Another thing you should know about Mom and Daddy: Their best friends were Jews, Hispanics, whoever they cared about. Race didn't matter to our family.”
If Nellie was the missionary, William was the undisputed head of the family, the neighborhood, and the church he founded in Curtis Park. He was not only a minister, he held three other jobs the entire time his children were at home. One of his jobs was always custodial, though employers varied through the years. The best paying was as a vulcanizer at Gates Rubber, a skilled position in which he “made space on the tires for the tread.” And he always had a maintenance job at Burt Chevrolet, the dealership that evolved into the Burt Automotive Group where Bill, the oldest, was employed for decades before he retired as Burt Lincoln-Mercury sales manager.
However many hours William put in at his jobs, he would spring into action when anyone in the
