CU’s popular “twins” were born on November 19, 1924, in Walsenburg, Colo., a small town of 3,100 people situated halfway between Pueblo and Trinidad in the state’s southeastern part. Peggy, the older twin, and Betty were born to Maple and Lester Fitzgerald, a meat cutter and amateur welterweight boxer.
The Fitzgerald family moved from Walsenburg to Haxtun when the twins were toddlers, then to Longmont before their sophomore year in high school in 1939, and a year later, to Boulder, where the twins enrolled at Boulder High School and made the cheerleading team.
“Boulder was really conservative then, practically a church on every corner,” Peggy recalled. “A very small town at the time, maybe 12,000 or so. It didn’t change until the 60s when all the hippies arrived.” (She was right; the 1940 census had Boulder’s population at 12,831.)
Her favorite places are either gone or relocated: Marie’s on Broadway, King’s, the Gondolier, and Turley’s (her favorites nowadays are BJ’s and Efrain’s). She wasn’t a fan when Pearl Street was converted into a mall back in 1976, as she felt it “lost the flavor of a good old-fashioned downtown.”
