Posted September 24, 2024
Announcing the 2024 North High Homecoming Parade Grand Marshal – Ms. Rhoda Krasner! Congratulations Ms. Krasner! Please see below and learn more about this valuable citizen of Lakeside and North Denver.
We all know Rhoda Krasner. How many of you have been going to Lakeside since you were kids? Rhoda’s legacy is our wonderful amusement park and the memories we all have of spending summer days and evenings there.
Rhoda attended Boulevard and Brown Elementary schools. She was Head Girl at Lake Junior and graduated from North in 1959, with a deep love for modern dance, thanks Miriam Wiser, who taught dance at the school. To Rhoda, being at North then was a great time of life.
Miriam Wiser also affected the choice that Rhoda made for her college career. Ms. Wiser went to Mills College in Oakland, California and so did Rhoda.
After receiving her BA at Mills, Rhoda returned to Denver and had been accepted to NYU for graduate school, but her father was not well and she stayed in town to look after him and Lakeside along with other family members and friends. She went to graduate school at CU Denver and worked with her father until he passed away that next year, and she’s been the energy behind Lakeside since then.
Of course her life at Lakeside started when she was much younger. She grew up at Lakeside. She bagged peanuts and popcorn when she was just a girl. She was so small that she’d be hidden in the back room. She remembers the ballroom at Lakeside, El Patio then, remodeled to Moonlight Gardens in the 1950s. She recalled how everyone would dress up for the ballroom, women in long dresses, wearing corsages, listening to those popular bands that toured the American ballrooms and competition between Lakeside and Elitch’s Trocadero.
One of Rhoda’s interests is dance performance. She was involved with Colorado Contemporary Dance which was the inspiration of Joan Brown, another modern dance teacher at North High. Rhoda also enjoys traveling to other amusement parks around the world.
In the 70s and 80s she served on the Board of Denver Kids, formerly Denver Girls, which helps kids with problems and for close to 40 years she has hosted kids to a night at Lakeside. She also sponsors Lakeside visits for the “I Have a Dream Foundation.”
