Brian Powers, For the Camera

Claude Walton, an All-American discus thrower at the University of Colorado, competed in national meets with athletes such as Jesse Owens.

Camera file photo

Claude Walton, an All-American discus thrower at the University of Colorado, competed in national meets with athletes such as Jesse Owens.

On a day he would remember the rest of his life, Claude Walton walked into the drugstore on University Hill.

The All-American discus thrower had finished track practice at the University of Colorado, and his teammates were going for a soda. They asked him to come. When the team entered the store, Walton was told he wouldn't be served. His teammates proclaimed the entire team -- including its only black member -- would be served or no one would be served.

It was the first and only time Walton would eat in a Boulder establishment as a CU student.

"That's just the way it was," said Walton, now 94 and living in suburban Chicago. "I didn't think anything of it."

That was life in the early 1930s for CU's first black varsity athlete, who came to Boulder to earn a better life. He didn't know it then, but Walton set the stage for thousands of black athletes at CU by enduring racism to become one of the best athletes in America.

Seventy-five years after his arrival at CU, his legacy exists in today's black student-athletes.

"I can't really imagine what that was like for him," said Marcus King-Stockton, an African-American senior on CU's basketball team whose father is Walton's godson. "I admire people like him who opened the door."

"A struggle to go to school"

As he was finishing school at Denver's West High School, Walton told his parents he wanted to go to college. That was an ambitious statement considering there were only a handful of black students on the CU campus. But Walton wasn't thinking about the black students on the campus. He was thinking about the black people in his neighborhood.

"In Denver, we did not have one male teacher in the school system. We had three policemen, a half-dozen postal workers and someone who worked at the state Capitol. That was it," he said. "That's one of the jobs I would have had if I didn't go to CU."

And there certainly wasn't a way to make a good living as an athlete. But it did give Walton a chance to represent his university.

At 160 pounds, he wasn't very big -- "If I turned sideways, you couldn't see me," Walton says -- but he could throw a disc a long way. So CU track coach Frank Potts approached the music major and asked if he'd try out for the track team. Walton agreed, and, at 6 feet 3 inches tall, he also played basketball.

Financial aid didn't exist when Walton arrived on the campus in 1933. There also was no campus housing, so in the heart of the Great Depression, Walton found a job as a hasher at the Chi Psi fraternity house.

He also found work sewing and restuffing mats for the track team, spreading sawdust in jumping pits and watering the football fields.

At night, he played music wherever he could in Denver and Boulder. His first love, after all, was the piano -- he quit football because his fingers were stepped on the second day of practice.

Walton played in house bands at Denver clubs. He played in the orchestra at the Airport Ballroom, on west Colfax Avenue. And when sororities and fraternities would host dances in Boulder, Walton would play for $3 an hour.

"I would play all night and drive back to Boulder and serve breakfast, and then I would go to school," Walton said. "It was a real struggle to go to school. There was no one giving room and board or anything like that."

All-American athlete, second-class citizen

In between jobs and school, Walton somehow found enough time to be a standout athlete.

He threw the discus, and he played basketball -- briefly. But he spent enough time on the court to befriend a smart, athletic kid with a peculiar nickname. That friend, Byron "Whizzer" White, would become a Supreme Court Justice. The two were close friends until White's death in 2002.

While White made his athletic name on the football field, Walton made his in track. He earned All-American honors at CU, which piqued the interest of promoters around the country. He traveled to meets around the nation, or at least where black men could compete. At one national meet in Berkeley, Calif., Walton competed alongside world-famous sprinter Jesse Owens.

"After the meet, the Navy sponsored a meet in San Diego and invited the medal winners to go down there," Walton said. "We drove late into the night, and when we got to Los Angeles there was not a single place we could find accommodations. We were national heroes, and there wasn't a single place to rest our heads."

California wasn't the first place Walton had faced racism. He faced plenty of it back in Boulder. And it wasn't just being turned away at soda shops. If Walton had dated a white girl, he could have been arrested. On Sundays, when the Chi Psi house didn't serve meals, he had to go to Goss Street -- Boulder's black neighborhood -- so he could eat with families there.

"To me, it's incredible what he did," said Bill Harris, a black former football star for the Buffaloes and current director of the alumni club. "I can't believe what that was like to be the only one."

Walton also dealt with racism on his own team. When the Buffs went to the Kansas Relays in Lawrence, Kan., the entire team was set to eat at a Lawrence hotel. As he was sitting down with his team, a hostess stopped him and said he had to eat in the kitchen. When he turned to Potts, Walton said the coach told him, "That's OK. You go in the kitchen. You'll eat the same things we do."

And, despite his prowess with the disc, Walton was left off the teams for the American Athletic Union -- once the nation's leading organizer for amateur events -- during his entire time at CU. The Colorado athletes for those teams were picked by Potts.

"And I went up to Potts and told him one day," said Walton, who also skied until he was 80, "'I realize that if I was not the best discus thrower in school, I would not be on the track team.'"

Growing up, Walton would get mad at the discrimination. Coaches told him he couldn't wear his emotions on his sleeve. So he developed a self-described "coat of armor, and didn't let anybody poke me." That would cause some critics later in life, during the fight for civil rights, to say athletic stars like Walton and Owens took racism too easily.

"Had it not been in those days how we conducted ourselves, you wouldn't be where you are today," he said. "We proved we were human beings and that we deserved to be treated with moral standards, and that we weren't barbarians and we weren't animals. That was the beginning of the door opening. And that was because we accepted our positions with dignity."

Opportunities lost and a living gained

Despite the foundation he laid for black student-athletes and the culture as a whole at CU, Walton is not in the CU Hall of Fame. Members of the Hall of Fame have to be graduates, and Walton didn't graduate.

Instead, with a few credit hours left to complete his degree, he jumped at a job offer in Chicago. A friend, whom he met at a national meet there, had a job in the Chicago Parks Department.

"This was the Depression, and if someone offered you a good job, you took it," he said.

While at that meet in Chicago in 1936, Walton was told by his coaches to stay out of trouble. The meet was just a stopover on the way to New York to qualify for the Olympics. While trying to obey his coaches, Walton joined a softball game in a Chicago park. He slid into third and broke his ankle.

If he had competed in New York and qualified for the Olympics, he would have competed with Owens in Germany in front of Adolf Hitler.

Instead, he returned to CU for the 1936-37 school year and then went to work on the South Side of Chicago. He worked in the parks department for 48 years, eventually becoming a trustee for the department.

In 1975, he returned to Boulder as a "distinguished alumnus" and was a fixture at alumni functions until a few years ago, when his legs began to weaken.

He is forgiving. He is proud to be a Buffalo. It has been 75 years since he came to Boulder searching for a better life, and he says he has accomplished that.

"I have no grudge against CU or Boulder," he said. "I received a tremendous opportunity."