Agnes Wilhelmina Thornton III, who has been looking for a parking spot for at UCCS since 1974, is still looking.
“If this goes on much longer, I won’t make it to my 9:25 a.m. class,” Thornton said.
Thornton left for school on April 12, 1974 at 9 a.m., believing that there was adequate time to get to school and find a spot. When she arrived at the school, she was greeted with “pure parking carnage.”
“There were cars everywhere,” she said.
Thornton is going on her 50th year at UCCS, but her advisor says she can still finish in good time if she picks up a few summer classes. After some quick math, Thornton found that, accounting for inflation, she will only be in debt for the next two thousand and forty-seven years.
“My husband will take care of it,” she said.
Thornton fell in love with Joel Thornton in 1998, about halfway through her parking journey. After getting married in the roundabout by the Ent Center, Thornton continued her crusade.
“This car ain’t gonna park itself!” she famously said before driving around campus for another twenty-six years.
Thornton took another rolling stop in 2002 to drop her newborn son off at The Gallogly Rec Center before speeding off to what she thought was an open spot, but what ended up being another hallucination.
Thornton’s son, Billy, graduated from UCCS in 2023, but has never met his mother. He lives with his father in Manitou Springs, where he walked to school every day.
“Daddy said its dangerous work parkin’ a car,” he said. His father never purchased him a car of his own but said that he would teach him how to drive when his mom got home.
“She runs like a dream!” Thornton said of her 1960 Ford Station wagon, which has accumulated 120,000 miles on the UCCS campus.
Thornton has hope that 2024 is her year, and that she will find a parking spot before she turns into a ghost.
Agnes looking for a parking spot. Photo courtesy of Billy.