Happy birthday Colorado Springs!

As we officially celebrate our city’s 150th, the Gazette concludes a month’s worth of backwards travels through our city’s forward progress.

Daily history pieces by our reporters have shone a revelatory light on our continual reinvention: how we first became Little London, then grew into a national military hub, transformed briefly into Silicon Mountain, eventually evolved into Olympic City and now are headed to infinity and beyond.

Our writers have recounted how spas, churches, the Broadmoor and Space itself have all shaped the city. The histories have explored a wide range of foundational happenings such as how the Springs became a city of parks; how the town’s political leaders drove out the Ku Klux Klan; and how a WWI battery of soldiers plotted our military transformation. They’ve told us colorful tales about the architect who defined our skyline; about the town’s historical buildings that have been both lost and saved; the wildfire that reshaped the city; and five crimes that rocked and shocked the region.

One thing is very clear from all these stories: We’ve had really good ancestors here.

Brig. Gen. William Jackson Palmer, Spencer and Julie Penrose, The Tutt family, which still plays a dynamic role in our city, Helen Hunt Jackson, Tuskegee airman Frank Macon, Nikola Tesla, Winfield Scott Stratton, Fannie Mae Duncan and Lon Chaney, just to name a handful.

Ask our current mayor, John Suthers, and he’ll tell you that the key to a great city is great ancestors.

“For a community of people to succeed and prosper through successive generations, it must have a predominance of good ancestors,” the mayor writes. “It is only in our community role that we can become a good ancestor.”

Which begs a big wonderful question as we present inhabitants celebrate today: How can we current Springsians be great ancestors of the future Colorado Springs?

What will it take for our descendants 150 years from now to look back at our decisions today and judge us good ancestors?

Mayor Suthers has some thoughts on the matter, compiled in a book he’s written called, fittingly, “Becoming a Good Ancestor.”

“Very few of us will do something of such importance that future generations will acclaim us a good ancestor on the basis of well documented achievements,” the mayor points out. “For most of us, the only path to becoming a good ancestor will be through our relationships with those close to us.

“When it comes to being a good ancestor, it’s usually the little things that count as much as the big. It’s human relationships that count more than intellectual, physical appearance and personality. It’s usually about how you live your life day to day as opposed to how you impact significant events.”

Which means of course, all of us can be good ancestors of our future descendants, and our future city.

“It all starts with individuals,” the mayor writes. “A community is virtuous when the individuals who comprise it are virtuous. The solution to a community’s problems begins with each of us doing everything we can in our own life, in our own jobs, in our own schools, in our own churches, and most importantly, in our own families, to promote civic virtue and obedience to the unenforceable.”

That phrase jumped out at me, obedience to the unenforceable.

It comes from an English judge, John Fletcher Moulton, and his early 20th Century writings about character.

Obedience to the unenforceable is obedience imposed by a man or woman upon themselves, and not by external authority.

It’s that moral compass that all real community contributors have within them. Moulton believed that good laws are important for a good community, certainly, but the greater the voluntary respect of people for laws, civil order and each other, the more civilized and enlightened a community of people are, and the more a community flourishes.

Good ancestors do right by their city not for fear of the law or fear of what others will think of them. They contribute to their community because it is the right thing to do, and doing so elevates all around them, including themselves.

A city is the ultimate reflection of the personal, in other words.

In his book, Suthers makes reference to Peggy Noonan, who in a book called “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” wrote about all the parents of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s who worked hard at jobs that were not always stimulating, worked hard at marriages that were less than perfect, and lived lives with little material reward. They derived their happiness largely through social relationships and their role, however humble, in building a country and in raising children to have opportunities such as a college education they didn’t have.

We now call those folks “the greatest generation.”

I’d like to think they are only one of many greatest generations to come, and that 150 years from now, the citizens of Colorado Springs might look back at this dynamic time in our city, and think of us as a pretty great generation of ancestors, too.

So would our mayor.

Said Suthers: “If each and every one of us focused on becoming a good ancestor, the world would be a better place.”