On the surface, Littleton was a prosperous, happily homogenous community. There was a Main Street with breakfast restaurants, a library, a stationer's store and a place where you could get your shoes fixed. Littleton was the home of the famous Little Britches Rodeo, and we all went once a year to see how long the cowboys could last on the bucking broncos. The independent town newspaper listed all the local marriages and deaths, along with pie recipes and high school basketball scores. Littleton was a town to itself -- still mainly agricultural, not yet a sprawling suburb -- that regarded Denver as a distant big-city cousin.

Yet for all its perfect lawns and happy high school marching bands, even then Littleton had its dark side. This is a conservative, Republican town, with an underbelly of suspicion. Until this week, its most notorious citizen was frontiersman Alferd Packer, Colorado's only cannibal. He ate four out of the five Democrats in Pitkin, Colo., an act many of the local residents did not regret. He's buried in the Littleton graveyard, with a splendid view of the mountains.

My parents moved to Littleton in 1959, lured by the high peaks nearby and the promise of a tightly knit community with perpetual open space. From the house where I lived, we had a clear view south to Pike's Peak, and straight west to Long's Peak, both 14,000-foot mountains that kept the prairie and the people living there in perspective. My parents fit in easily with the landscape, but not so well with the neighbors. The people who lived in Littleton tended to be politically conservative and favored development of the vast tracts of Littleton land. My parents were Democrats. It was the Frasers and the few Jews who were the Democrats in town, and everyone knew it.

In the 1960s, my mother realized that none of the local realtors would rent or sell houses to blacks (there was only one black student in my high school). She became involved in the fair housing movement, trying to pass legislation making such discrimination impossible. The town quickly snubbed her for her views. I remember coming home from kindergarten when she was all shaken up, having received scrawled notes in the mail: "Nigger-lover. Jew." Littleton was not such a happy suburb when people broke rank.

It was a town so homogenous that complete alienation was the only alternative to fitting in. At school, you had to wear your hair in Farrah Fawcett wings or you were uncool. You had to be a jock or a cheerleader or you were a brain or a freak, which meant you were an outcast, a target. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren't the first alienated kids to crack. I remember a guy in high school who didn't quite fit in. He was quiet, unathletic and unfriendly. You didn't dislike him because you didn't notice him. He was a cipher. He had the locker two doors down from mine and never spoke up in my Spanish class. One day he murdered his brother. He tried to chop up the body in pieces to push it down the garbage disposal, but bones and flesh were a little too much for the machine to handle. This was the '70s, so he did it with an ax; he didn't have automatic weapons, bombs or a Web site. We all pretended it never happened.

Next page | Where everybody knows your name.