Alfred Dietrich Kleyhauer III and the “Mile High Underground”: Poetry, Love, and Creative Endeavor in 1960s to 1990s Denver

Will Neer, Research Assistant, Merrill C. Berman Collection

Alfred Dietrich Kleyhauer III (1944–1994) was a writer, artist, and musician from Denver, Colorado, and an active part of the city’s bohemian poetry, music, and performing arts scene for many decades. Thousands of miles from America’s major cities, Denver and its so-called “Mile High Underground” (a wordplay on Denver’s identity as the “Mile High City,” due to its elevation) was a vibrant hub existing on the periphery of the country’s counterculture as it changed and grew nationally. The city was at various points home to notable figures such as filmmaker Stan Brakhage, collage artist Steve Wilson, painter Saul White, and writer Jimmy Ryan Morris. Alfred Dietrich Kleyhauer III found community among this network of individuals and their artistic pursuits, collaborating frequently with fellow Denver writers, theater directors, and musicians, and living and creating art as an out gay man in the American Southwest. With the assistance of Kleyhauer’s sister, Debra Kleyhauer, and Ed Ward, a Denver-area poet, organizer, and cultural historian, the Merrill C. Berman Collection has amassed a collection of Kleyhauer’s literary and artistic work, as well as archival material documenting his life and legacy. Holdings include drawings and paintings, books and periodicals, vinyl records, comic strips, and collages produced and contributed to by Kleyhauer, as well as written correspondence, photographs, and family scrapbooks. At the core of the collection is a group of six bound journals containing Kleyhauer’s writing, illustration, and collage work spanning over three decades.

Kleyhauer’s work can be viewed through myriad lenses: from the existentialist rebellion of the 1960s Beat scene, to the psychedelic, New Age spiritualism of the following decades. Kleyhauer was a student of these worlds and many others, also gleaning inspiration from areas as disparate as Western art history, Buddhism, and contemporary folk music. Yet his work suggests that he explored this amalgamation of influences with an earnest curiosity, at his own pace and discretion. Perhaps most of all, Kleyhauer’s art and writing are a product of the thriving underground network that existed in Denver during his lifetime, characterized by politically radical, idiosyncratic approaches to the visual, written, and performing arts that we might today characterize as “do-it-yourself.” Kleyhauer’s art and archives also provide insight into gay subcultures active throughout the American Southwest in the 1970s and 1980s. They serve as profound and transgressive statements and documents concerning individual LGBTQ+ histories.

Research and interest into the insular, little-known world of Kleyhauer perhaps exemplifies a recent phenomenon, wherein a relatively unknown artist’s body of work is reappraised and reconsidered, sometimes long after their death. Recent exhibitions such as Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton at the Morgan Library and Museum or the inclusion of N. H. Pritchard’s technicolor writings in the 2022 Whitney Biennial may serve as comparative examples, demonstrating new approaches to previously unappreciated or misunderstood, uniquely American artists and their practices. Additionally, art historical and museological treatments of artists of this caliber and curiosity appear to be increasingly less oriented around inadequate binaries of “outsider” or self-trained art versus fine art. When presented anew, modern audiences have an opportunity to examine and contextualize on their own terms the work of an artist such as Kleyhauer, which he so effortlessly, intimately, and prolifically produced. At the Merrill C. Berman Collection, the archives and artwork of Alfred Dietrich Kleyhauer III might serve as a valuable resource for understanding Denver as a case study of sorts; a city serving as one of many countercultural, microcosmic locales containing individual, artistic stories with broader universal implications.

Kleyhauer was the son of Dorothy Kleyhauer (née Smith) and Alfred Kleyhauer Jr., his father the second in a line of Denver optometrists. The Kleyhauer family first emigrated from Germany to the American Midwest in the 19th century, initially finding themselves in Nebraska and Kansas before settling in Denver. Kleyhauer’s only sibling and younger sister by ten years, Debra, has been instrumental in researching and preserving his art and legacy. She has collaborated closely with Ed Ward to collect artworks, materials, and documentation relating to her brother. The Kleyhauers were a household that celebrated and encouraged the pursuit of art, academia, and creativity. Among the Merrill C. Berman Collection’s Kleyhauer-related holdings are family scrapbooks that were carefully compiled by the artist’s parents. These include programs from school plays and science fairs; newspaper clippings detailing local art contests; and photos of Kleyhauer’s early childhood endeavors into artmaking, which took the form of graphite sketches, watercolors, and homemade rubber monster masks created alongside his father.

Kleyhauer excelled as a student. His academic and extracurricular pursuits were documented and celebrated unfailingly by his parents. Both he and his father were card-carrying members of Mensa, an organization restricted to those boasting high IQs. Upon graduating from high school in 1962, Kleyhauer’s interests had seemingly shifted from the academic to the countercultural, in particular towards art, travel, and writing. Despite receiving a scholarship to study art at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, Kleyhauer did not pursue higher education beyond more than a few weeks. He promptly dropped out of college and, between 1962 and 1963, traveled between New Brunswick, Canada, New York City, San Francisco, and back in Denver, engrossing himself in each city’s theater, literary, and party scenes.

In 1964, both his poetry and illustrations appeared in Les Tarots, a publication produced by the Denver coffee shop “Sign of the Tarot,” marking the first instance of Kleyhauer’s contribution to a Denver artistic undertaking outside of sanctioned after-school activities. That same year, and into 1965, would see the artist visiting Tangiers, Paris, Spain, and London, writing poetry and letters home to friends and his parents, the latter the financiers of his travels. By 1966, Kleyhauer returned to Denver and published perhaps his most well-known and only solo volume: Black, a collection of poetry and illustrations distributed in an edition of five thousand copies by Swallow Press. Operated by Alan Swallow, a Denver University professor of English, Swallow Press had also published work by writers such as Anaïs Nin and Larry McMurtry.

In 1967, writing and illustrations by Kleyhauer would appear in two issues of The Mile High Underground, a short-lived Denver periodical self-published by Jimmy Ryan Morris and other contributors that discussed topics ranging from art and theater in the city to global antiwar and anticolonialist movements. The publication’s name has since served as a way of referring, colloquially, to the network of artists and creatives working in Denver in and around Kleyhauer’s lifetime, connected via the city’s performing arts venues, galleries, and coffee houses.

Kleyhauer continued creating art into the 1970s, and by the end of the decade would form two important relationships with fellow Denver residents. The first was a friendship with Ed Ward (b. 1948), a poet by way of Pittsburgh, who, along with his wife, photographer Marcia Ward (b. 1956), supported the arts in Denver through their small Passion Press publishing house, regular poetry readings, and the operation of a communal art storage facility. Kleyhauer and the Wards would remain close until the artist’s passing, with the Ward’s space later serving as a repository for much of Kleyhauer’s artistic output. The second relationship was a romantic and artistic partnership with Michael Parker Trego (1949–1990), an actor and artist originally from Carlisle, Pennsylvania who would produce work alongside Kleyhauer for the next decade before passing away from complications due to AIDS in 1990. By the early 1980s, Kleyhauer had moved into an apartment above his father’s optometry office on Tremont Place in Denver’s Civic Center, close to the Denver Art Museum and the Colorado State Capitol, which functioned as a space for him and Michael to make art and to cohabitate for over a decade.

While Kleyhauer wrote poetry, made music, and created art for most of his life, he rarely expressed interest in pursuing a career in these areas, or in seeking monetary gain with these practices. Aside from the occasional gallery exhibition, paid performance, or stint designing theater sets, his art was not one professionally practiced, but was nevertheless constantly being produced. Kleyhauer did, however, have an entrepreneurial spirit that served him well when it came to making ends meet. As a gifted, curious, and proficient writer and reader, Kleyhauer regularly offered his services to local students at the University of Denver, illicitly writing term papers, theses, and even whole dissertations on their behalf. His sister, Debra, recalls her brother retaining copies of these papers for himself, which eventually began to pile up in the artist’s hallway.

Between the 1960s and 1980s, poetry, writing, and illustrations by Kleyhauer regularly appeared in periodicals, journals, and collections published by a network of small presses in Denver, among them Swallow Press, Passion Press, and Bowery Press, the latter operated by bookstore owner and poet Larry Lake. Moravagine, a literary magazine produced by writer John Macker, would feature illustrations and poetry by Kleyhauer on numerous occasions into the late 1980s. This proclivity for self-publication in Denver’s underground appears to have influenced Kleyhauer’s own work, most notably his Bumpo’s Bunny Ball Book, a children’s storybook produced alongside Trego in 1987. The book, written by Kleyhauer with illustrations by Trego, featured photocopied pages collated with a binding spine and was distributed to friends and family. Beginning in 1983, Kleyhauer and Trego would also collaborate on comic strips using a mixture of illustration, calligraphy, and photomontage techniques. The comics, of which the Merrill C. Berman Collection has twenty-one examples, typically feature Trumble and Ding, two cartoon animals bearing witness to a range of spiritual, political, and sometimes completely nonsensical scenarios appearing around them in the form of written text and images or phrases cut from the pages of newspapers and magazines. According to Ward, Kleyhauer and Trego’s comics were shown and sold in a gallery exhibition in Denver on at least one occasion.

However, for every instance of Kleyhauer’s words and images published in limited runs and via small presses, there are also altogether unpublished works. Within the Merrill C. Berman Collection are two notable examples of these: White, a companion of sorts to 1966’s Black, filled with poetry and illustrations completed while Kleyhauer was visiting Paris and later given to Ward, and The Silent Ones (Vaudeville Reaches Escape Velocity), a 1984 play written by Kleyhauer and musical and term paper co-conspirator Max Montier.

Perhaps the most compelling, potent component of Kleyhauer’s production in the Berman Collection is the series of six bound journals compiled by the artist, likely in the late 1980s and early 1990s, though their individual contents date as far back as the 1960s. Kleyhauer would assemble stacks of his papers—rarely uniform in size, material, or chronology—and take them to a local bookbinder, typically Denver Bookbinding Company on the city’s northwest side. Using this method, Kleyhauer produced numerous large volumes in black hardcover, each about two and a half inches thick. Printed on their spines are Kleyhauer’s poetic, psychedelic titles, and on their top, bottom, and fore edges repeating, refrains hand-inscribed in bright colors. The total number of these volumes produced is unknown. Ward retained some as direct gifts from Kleyhauer, while others changed hands among Denver’s aging bohemians before being reunited in recent years through the joint collecting efforts of Ward and Debra Kleyhauer, and, most recently, the Merrill C. Berman Collection.

The journals’ contents vary wildly. Kleyhauer, a devotee of literature, music, and philosophy alike, filled the pages with quotes and lyrics, as well as musings on spiritualism, romance, and drugs (see journal spread at lower right of the above grid, where the artist begins to detail “chemicals I’ve taken”). Poetry appears alongside illustrations and short reviews of films and books. There are instances of Kleyhauer working in collage, watercolor, ink and pencil, and experimenting with devices from typewriters to Xerox machines. Words are transcribed to almost dizzying effect, applied in colorful felt-tip markers and ballpoint pens, occasionally layered atop painted surfaces, or even preexisting written and typed text. The proliferation and lack of constraint in the rendering of words and images evokes a simultaneous teenage self-involvement and artistic introspection. Kleyhauer’s journals also provide a palpable sense of the artist’s life as a comfortably self-identified gay man living and traveling throughout the American Southwest and West in the 1970s and 1980s. Within the journals’ pages are firsthand accounts of romantic and sexual encounters, classified “hookup” ads cut from newspapers, and a bevy of homoerotic imagery clipped from books and magazines. These elements of Kleyhauer’s journals feel intimate and revelatory, representing not only details about the artist’s life but, more generally, hidden histories from a critical era in the development of American LGBTQ+ art and writing. Despite their personal and diaristic nature, Kleyhauer in fact anticipated publication of these journals, as evidenced by inscriptions on their inside covers. “Here’s permission to publish any or all of these as you see fit anytime,” he writes in an August 1986 note to publisher and friend John Macker. While not a political artist outright, Kleyhauer’s robust sense of self and healthy sense of pride constitutes an embodiment of the idea that the personal is political.

Kleyhauer was perhaps most known among Denver residents as a musician and songwriter. Live music and poetry flourished in Denver during the artist’s lifetime, and included among the artist’s archives are flyers for live poetry readings and performances by Kleyhauer’s band, The Whatnots, dating from throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The Whatnots, a band comprised of Kleyhauer, local guitarist Bob Peek, and with occasional accompaniment by Max Montier, were active for about a decade from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. Ward recalls recording the band’s first demo in his basement in 1984. The Whatnots would play local shows, with Kleyhauer donning capes and other theatrical accessories, and would release a small number of vinyl records. The Berman Collection contains two 12” LPs and one 45 rpm single, released between 1988 and 1989 and featuring songs credited to Kleyhauer and Peek. One song in particular: “Grave of War,” embedded above, was especially impactful for Ed Ward. He recalls how he found Kleyhauer’s lyricism to be unique and refreshing, and in stark contrast to the often fatalistic themes of Denver poets and songwriters of the Beat generation.

On October 20, 1994, Alfred Dietrich Kleyhauer III was tragically struck by a light rail train in Denver and killed just blocks from his apartment on Tremont Place. He was the first casualty of the rail line, opened only earlier that month, and his death was an immediate impetus for improved safety conditions by the Regional Transportation District. A memorial service was held and attended by the artist’s family and friends alike, complete with a silent auction that saw some fifty of Kleyhauer’s artworks distributed into the hands of guests. Kleyhauer’s remaining artworks then entered the possession of Ed and Marcia Ward, where they would remain until being acquired by the Merrill C. Berman Collection in early 2022.

Berman’s interest in Kleyhauer’s work was sparked by an exhibition of photomontages by the Denver artist Steve Wilson (1945–2013) presented at the Nailya Alexander Gallery in 2022. The history of photomontage is one of the great strengths of the collection, prompting Berman’s interest in works by both Wilson as well as collaborator and romantic partner Michelle White. Wilson and White shared an intimate letter-writing and photomontage practice, visible in the form of forty postcards exchanged between one another that are now retained in the Berman Collection. From there, Berman learned of Ed Ward and Kleyhauer and began to build a broader artistic and archival representation of the Denver scene, which touches upon key themes such as self-empowerment and political activism, that undergird the collection more broadly. It is our hope that this resource will prompt further interest, inquiry, and research into both Kleyhauer and the “Mile High Underground” that fostered him.

Key Sources and Further Reading

Kleyhauer, Debra. In discussion with the author and Lisa Berman. August 22, 2022.
Debra Kleyhauer offered insight into her experience growing up in Denver, her relationship with her brother and parents, and her understanding of her brother’s life, art, and cultural environment decades later. Our sincere thanks to her for her time and thoughtfulness.

Ward, Edwin Forrest. In discussion with the author and Lisa Berman. June 3, 2022 and June 6, 2022.
Ed Ward provided perspective not only on Kleyhauer, a close friend to him and Marcia Ward, but the whole of Denver’s bohemian underground from the 1960s onward. Among other things, he spoke frankly about Kleyhauer and other Denver artists’ struggles with alcohol and drug usage. We are grateful for Ward’s encyclopedic knowledge of the city and his appreciation of the creative forces that have made an impact there.

Ward, Edwin Forrest. “A Mile High and Underground.” Postbeat Poets Activist Scholarship Project, The Museum of American Poetics. http://www.poetspath.com/Scholarship_Project/ward.htm.
This anecdotal piece of writing from Ward provides useful information and images regarding Kleyhauer, The Mile High Underground, and a plethora of other Denver artists and writers.

Kopp, Zach. The Denver Beat Scene: The Mile-High Legacy of Kerouac, Cassady & Ginsberg. Charleston: The History Press, 2015.
A small publication that focuses on the major poets and writers of the Beat movement and their connections with Denver, and also touches upon lesser-known bohemian figures and artistic collaborators from Kleyhauer’s generation.

Steve Wilson. Denver: Emmanuel Gallery, University of Denver, 2009. Forward and acknowledgements by Shannon K. Corrigan. Essays by David H. Tippit, John Macker, and Edwin Forrest Ward.
A useful text accompanying an exhibition at the University of Denver’s Emmanuel Gallery. Complete with photo reproductions and essays providing insight into Steve Wilson, an integral artist in the Berman Collection’s introduction to Denver as a cultural hub. Presented in conjunction with Mile High and Underground, a concurrent exhibition at Denver’s Byers-Evans House Gallery.

Ward, Edwin Forrest, ed. Alfred Dietrich Kleyhauer III: Bohemian Extraordinaire. Denver: The Image Maker, 2020.
Contains an introductory essay and photo reproductions of works by Kleyhauer, some of which are now in the Berman Collection and others which exist in private collections of the artist’s friends and family.

Left: Photographer unknown, Kleyhauer, c. 1960s–1970s
Photocopy of a photograph, 9 x 7 3/4” (22.9 x 19.7 cm)
Right: The artist’s palette
Paint and ink on wood, 16 x 12” (40.6 x 30 cm) 

Left: Photographer unknown, Kleyhauer with his submission to the Denver Art Museum’s First Colorado Biennial (1971): The Last Judgement.
Color photograph on textured Kodak paper, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2” (6.3 x 8.9 cm)
Right: Jury Report, The First Colorado Biennial (1971)
confirming acceptance of Kleyhauer’s The Last Judgement and rejection of After the Hunter.
Ink on paper, 3 x 5 1/4” (7.6 x 13.3 cm)

Left: Kleyhauer family scrapbook featuring ribbons and programs from the Metropolitan Denver Science Fair
and Smiley Junior High School Mid-Year Conference (1959)
Cut-and-pasted printed papers and fabric on bound paper, 15 1/4 x 23 1/2” (38.7 x 59.7 cm), open
Right: Mensa Membership Card issued to Kleyhauer (February 28, 1966)
Lithograph on cardstock, 2 1/4 x 3 1/4” (5.7 x 8.2 cm)

Left: Book cover, Black (Denver: Swallow Press, 1966)
Lithograph, 8 1/4 x 5 1/2” (21 x 14 cm), 64 pages
Right: Unused illustration for Black, 1966
Watercolor and ink, 10 x 7” (25.4 x 17.8 cm)

A selection of comic pages by Kleyhauer and Michael Trego, c. 1983-1987
Each: Ink and cut-and-pasted papers on paper, 17 1/2 x 14 1/2" (44.4 x 36.9 cm)

A selection of six of the artist’s bound journals. Top to bottom: Tapestries of Noin Ula, The 14th Saint, Gordian Knots United, Spirit Guys, Great Bodies Move Slowly,
and Transcendence of Paradigms, Paradoxes & Proverbs, c. 1960s-1990s
Papers of various dimensions with adhered materials, professionally bound
Sizes vary between: 11 x 8 1/2 x 2 1/4 (27.9 x 21.6 x 5.7) and 14 x 11 1/8 x 2 1/4” (35.6 x 28.2 x 5.7 cm)

Spreads from the artist’s bound journals, ca. 1960s-1990s
Ink, cut-and-pasted papers, watercolor, and gelatin silver prints on paper

The Whatnots LP, 1988, vinyl record, diameter 12” (30.5 cm)

Left: Photographer unknown, Kleyhauer, c. 1980s-1990s
Polaroid, 4 1/4 x 3 1/2” (10.8 x 8.9 cm)
Right: Photographer unknown, Kleyhauer, c. 1980s-1990s
Color photograph with printed cardstock frame, 3 1/2 x 2 1/2” (8.9 x 6.3 cm)

Recto (left) and verso (right): Steve Wilson, Untitled, March 26, 2001
Cut-and-pasted paper on paper, 6 3/4 x 5 1/2” (17.1 x 14 cm)

Recto (left) and verso (right): Michelle White, Untitled, n.d.,
Cut-and-pasted paper on paper, 7 1/4 x 6 1/4" (18.4 x 15.9 cm)

Photographer Marcia Ward, Kleyhauer, c. 1980s-1990s
Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10” (20.3 x 25.4 cm).

Consecutive portraits of the artist (likely a photo strip or cut from contact sheet), c. 1970s-1980s
Gelatin silver print (this Kodak paper manufactured from 1972-1989), 4 x 1 5/8” (10.2 x 4.1 cm)