Fort Collins history nerds, rejoice. Here are 35 binge-worthy 'podpast' episodes.

Have you ever seen Fort Collins' beloved Birney Car 21 chug down Mountain Avenue and wondered how long it's been one of Old Town's summer staples?

Does the annual adornment of Old Town's holiday lights have you thinking back to the people who started the tradition?

Has the old town sign posted near Horsetooth Reservoir — curiously reading "Stout, Population: 47½" — always intrigued you?

As the Coloradoan's resident history nerd, I once wondered about these little pieces of Fort Collins' past, too. Thankfully, for my curious mind, I have a local podcast that lets me dig into the stories and events that made Northern Colorado what it is today.

Travel back in time with all 35 episodes of my Coloradoan history "podpast" podcast: "The Way it Was."

Here's every episode of 'The Way it Was":

Episode 1 | Stout: A town under water

Horsetooth Reservoir is a summertime haven for boaters, kayakers, campers and sunbathers. But before there was Horsetooth Reservoir, there was Stout. The old quarry town was founded in the late 1800s but was later dismantled in the 1940s to make way for Horsetooth Reservoir — part of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project. In this episode, dive back into the history of Stout, our area's little-known underwater town.

Episode 2 | Vanished: The case of Chris Vigil

On April 30, 1978, 9-year-old Chris Vigil set off to hike Greyrock trail will his mom and little brother. But after hiking ahead, Chris disappeared. An extensive search ensued, but a spring snowstorm hampered searchers' efforts, and to this day — more than 40 years later — no trace of Chris has ever been found.

Episode 3 | The fight for Fort Collins' trolley

Birney Car 21 started chugging along Fort Collins' streets more than a century ago when the streetcar system was a part of everyday life in the small city. In the 1980s, more than 30 years after the system stopped, a group of volunteers started working to restore Car 21, which now proudly chugs along Mountain Avenue on summer weekends. It's a beloved and oh-so-Fort Collins tradition. So why did people protest it?

Episode 4 | Hell or high water: The Spring Creek Flood of 1997

Twenty years after Fort Collins' little Spring Creek swelled into a deadly flood, we revisit that harrowing night and how it changed Fort Collins.

Episode 5 | Fort Collins and its famed Disneyland connection

A little boy with a big imagination came to California by way of Colorado. Years later, he was an artist and trusted friend of Walt Disney. So when Disney came to him with the idea of creating the perfect slice of small-town America, he drew on his own idyllic childhood along the Fort Collins foothills. Now it's one of the most beloved attractions at Disneyland.

Episode 6 | Disappearance of Chris Vigil: The family speaks

In this special update on the Chris Vigil case, the Coloradoan sits down with Chris Vigil's mom and brother as they recall the early days of the search and memories of Chris.

Episode 7 | The scorched history of Windsor's mill

On July 4, 1899, the townspeople of tiny Windsor watched as their beloved flour mill burned. More than a century later, in August 2017, they had to again. Only this time, they were faced with a new question. Who set it on fire?

Episode 8 | Cold: The Sorenson murders

For almost three decades, Doris and Allen Sorenson were jewelers in Windsor. In the decades since early November 1984, they've become its biggest mystery. In this episode, we dig into the Sorenson murders, Windsor's oldest unsolved homicide case.

Episode 9 | Harmony: A paved-over pioneer community

Before the big-box stores of Harmony Road, a tiny farming community spanned the desolate stretches of what was once Northern Colorado's no man's land. In this episode, we step back in time to when Harmony Road was simply Harmony.

Episode 10 | Back at the crossing

On Dec. 14, 1961, a passenger train collided with a school bus, killing 20 children just outside Greeley. Their lives ended that cold morning. Their stories, however, did not.

Episode 11 | Fort Collins' forgotten Manson family victim

Gary Hinman wasn't a celebrity. He wasn't a young Hollywood type. He was a boy from Fort Collins. And in the summer of 1969, he became the Manson family's first victim.

Episode 12 | Inside Loveland's sweetheart history

Hearts are strewn from its light poles, businesses build their brands around its "sweet" nickname and, every February, valentines pour into the city from all around the world. So what, or who, made Loveland the nation's "Sweetheart City"?

Episode 13 | The tale of Annie the railroad dog

In 1934, a group of railroad workers found a pregnant border collie mix shivering outside a blacksmith shop. More than 80 years later, her legacy remains as Annie the railroad dog, an entire town's adopted pet.

Episode 14 & 15 | Inside the Mata murders: Parts 1 & 2

On April 29, 1978, hunters driving along a rural Colorado canyon road came across the bodies of two young women. Forty years later, we revisited the case, known for its twists, turns and — to this day — questions.

Episode 16 | Odell not O'Doul's: 30 years of local brewing history

The Coloradoan sits down with Odell Brewing founders Doug, Wynne and Corkie Odell for this special guest episode about the history of one of Fort Collins' first breweries.

Episode 17 | A 50-year holdout: The Holiday Twin Drive-In

As drive-in movie theaters shuttered across the country, one held fast in a desolate field on the edge of Fort Collins. And it's all thanks to a plane and the movie "Top Gun."

Episode 18 | The bitter side to Colorado's sugar beet boom

As the nation's demand for sugar beets grew, so did the need for more labor in Northern Colorado's vast beet fields. But what did that mean for the children of the poor, hardworking, migrant families willing to take on the backbreaking work? Well, life was far from sweet.

Episode 19 | Into thin air: The curious disappearance of Joe Halpern

On Aug. 15, 1933, a 22-year-old graduate student went for a hike in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park. He was never seen again. More than eight decades later, the disappearance nags at Joe's nephew, who's still trying to figure out if Joe's remains rest somewhere in Rocky or if the family rumors are true.

Episode 20 | The Legend of Lubick

When you hear Sonny Lubick's name, you think Colorado State University football. So more than 10 years after the longtime coach's tenure ended, the Coloradoan sat down with Lubick for a behind-the-scenes chat on football, life and becoming a local legend.

Episode 21 | 20 years later: The murder of Matthew Shepard

In October 1998, the hate crime murder of a gay Wyoming student shook the world. After 20 years, we revisited the life and tragic death of Matthew Shepard.

Episode 22 | Hitler's last soldier

On a moonlit night in late September 1945, Nazi prisoner of war Georg Gaertner slipped out of his New Mexico prison camp and into American life. As the years ticked by, he would become the last fugitive German POW hunted by U.S. authorities. Or, as he'd put it in his memoir more four decades later, "Hitler's last soldier in America."

Episode 22 | The colonel who saved Christmas

In December 1955, the menacing red phone on Air Force Col. Harry Shoup’s desk rang. But it wasn’t the Pentagon — no four-star general either. It was a tiny voice asking for Santa Claus. What happened next would kick off one of Colorado’s most-beloved Christmas traditions.

Episode 24 | The unusual life and trying times of Polly Brinkhoff

For more than 40 years — until 1999 — Colorado mountain woman Polly Brinkhoff lived without running water, electricity or plumbing. She had a pet mountain lion, kept her food in a cave and once nearly sliced her bunion off with a chainsaw. More than 20 years after her death, Polly's grandson recalls what exactly made her the last of a dying breed and larger than the no-frills life she so proudly clung to.

Episode 25 | The mother of all pandemics

In fall 1918, a mysterious and deadly flu arrived in Fort Collins. The small college town battled the virus with makeshift hospitals, school and business closures and social distancing. But the flu still targeted its young students and soldiers. More than a century later, here's what Colorado learned from the Spanish flu.

Episode 26 | The Life of Lee Martinez

You've probably heard of Lee Martinez Community Park, but do you know who Lee Martinez was? Before he was the namesake for one of our most popular city parks, he was a family man, political activist and pillar of Fort Collins' Hispanic community.

Episode 27 | From first lady to first lady governor

In the span of three months in the fall of 1924, Nellie Tayloe Ross went from a wife to a widow, from a mother to a single mother and from a politician's wife to a politician. After the sudden death of her husband, Wyoming Gov. William Bradford Ross, Nellie stepped up — winning a special election to finish out the final years of William's term and become the first woman elected governor in the United States.

Western suffragettes: How Colorado, Wyoming women won voting rights decades ahead of nation

Episode 28 | Hope and Faith

On Aug. 24, 1996, the bodies of two unidentified newborn girls were separately pulled from a river in Pueblo and a reservoir near Fort Collins — several hours and about 180 miles apart. Their identities unknown, both girls were given names by their respective communities. Pueblo's newborn became Baby Hope, Larimer County's became Baby Faith. In the more than two decades since they were found, their homicide cases remained oddly in step with each other — all the way to the very end.

Episode 29 | The history of Old Town's holiday lights

Sparkling lights go up around Old Town Fort Collins every holiday season like clockwork. But when did that tradition start? It can be traced back to as early as the 1920s, when "colorful streamers" of electric lights were blanketed in fresh snow the night before Thanksgiving in downtown Fort Collins, according to an article in the Fort Collins Express-Courier. Over the decades, Old Town's holiday lights offerings would evolve and change, going from an evergreen canopy of fresh garland that draped over College Avenue to tinsel-decked street light poles to an ill-fated attempt at dangling a replica of Santa and his sleigh over Old Town.

Episode 30 | Unearthing the invisible Black history of old Fort Collins

The hat box of old photographs sat in a closet in Mattie Lyle's Seattle home for decades. When she died in 1995, Lyle left the box to her granddaughter, Sharon, and Sharon's husband, David. The newlyweds stuck it on a shelf in their garage. It would be years before they pulled it down to take a good, hard look at the black-and-white snapshots. And it would take even longer — until 2020 — for a historic preservation planner in Fort Collins to find the couple and uncover the little-known stories, like Lyle's, of Fort Collins' early Black history.

Speaking of Fort Collins history-makers: Inside the decades-old mystery of Hattie McDaniel's missing Oscar

Episode 31 | 'Fort Collins didn't start with Fort Collins'

From the Ice Age-old spear points pulled from the earth on a ranch north of Fort Collins nearly a century ago to an early 19th-century Native American and fur trapper campsite found among the crimson rocks of Wellington's Red Mountain Open spaceto a gnarled Arapaho "council" tree that stood along the banks of the Poudre River into the 1950s, signs of Indigenous cultures and life have lingered in Northern Colorado. "Fort Collins didn't begin with Fort Collins," according to CSU professor and archaeologist Jason LaBelle. "It didn't begin with the establishment of Camp Collins or the military camp everybody associates it (with). This place has been used 13,000 years."

Episode 32 | The crash on Crystal Mountain

More than 70 years after tragedy struck Crystal Mountain, history still lingers on its western-facing rocky slope. There's not quite as much as there used to be — you can thank scavenging hikers for that — but twists of aluminum, rusty steel panels and a smattering of shattered plates, bowls and mugs remain. All these odds and ends were once a plane — a grand, four-engine luxury airliner, to be exact. Now they're a somber reminder of United Air Lines Flight 610, which flew off course en route to Denver and crashed into Crystal Mountain on June 30, 1951. More than 70 years later, Flight 610 remains the deadliest commercial airplane disaster in Colorado history.

The balloon bombing of Swetsville Zoo: Decades before spy balloon saga, Northern Colorado had balloon drama of its own

Episode 33 | The Swetsville Zoo story

Sitting in a Quonset hut on his property, Bill Swets talked about his future. For the first time in 80 years, it didn’t involve Timnath. The retired farmer, who spent nearly all his life on his family’s 120-acre farm on the western edge of the small Colorado town, was finally selling its last 36 acres. But after making his career in farming, that's not quite what Swets had become known for. In the 1980s — unable to sleep after a particularly hard volunteer firefighting call — he welded together a little bird sculpture out of odds and ends from the farm. That would kick off a decades-old hobby and Swets' next chapter: one that filled his property with quirky metal sculptures and made him the keeper of Northern Colorado's beloved Swetsville Zoo.

Episode 34 | 150 years of The Coloradoan

On a blustery March day in 1873, a wagon loaded with a hand-run printing press pulled into Fort Collins. The next month the first edition of the city's first newspaper would roll off it, setting into motion a century and a half of advancements, change and local journalism.

Episode 35 | What about Gertrude?

For 135 years, the murder of Eva Howe and lynching of her husband, James, has captivated Fort Collins. But whatever happened to their daughter, Gertrude — the little girl who became an orphan and footnote in one of Fort Collins' most infamous crimes overnight? After more than a century, there are plenty of rumors. She went to Kansas. No, Canada. She became a nun. Wait, she got married. In this episode, we wade through the theories and try to finally unspool the enduring mystery of Gertie Howe.

For subscribers: 135 years after one of Fort Collins' most infamous crimes, we unravel its final mystery

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Here are all 35 episodes of Coloradoan's binge-worthy history podcast