1968 Part 2

Across the street from the New Sheridan Hotel in Telluride in 1968 there was a jewelry shop run for the summer season by hippies from San Francisco, Doug Phillips, Jim Bess and their wives.  Jim was supposed to be the jeweler.  There was some fairly nice stuff in the shop but nothing brilliant.  Jim’s wife was nice enough, but not memorable.  Apart from long hair and somewhat unconventional dress, Jim didn’t seem like a hippie.  If he used drugs he never seemed to be high and was discreet about using if he did. 

 

Doug, however was unforgettable.  He’d grown up in River Forest, a wealthy suburb of Chicago.  His father, Canadian I think, made good money in advertising.  His mother had grown up in Oak Park, the town where Ernest Hemingway spent his youth, though I assume she was ten years or so younger than the famous author.  It’s probably fair to say that Doug grew up spoiled.  He went to Ft. Lauderdale for spring vacation twice in high school, and neither time returned to school.  Needless to say he didn’t graduate.

 

Doug was trying to be a writer.  He told me that he had submitted jokes to Playboy which were always rejected.  He said they stole one of his jokes – he saw one in an issue not a long time after he sent his in – but he didn’t seem overly distressed about the theft.  Doug played the guitar and sang a little which I really liked.  The two songs that I remember him introducing me to are “The New Frankie and Johnny” and “San Francisco Bay Blues.” 

 

Doug’s wife left him that summer, taking their young son Paulie.   Though I’ve forgotten her name she was much more interesting than Mrs. Bess.  I like to think she loved Doug for his wit and intelligence, but could no longer live with him.  I’m sure he was an uncertain provider.

 

Doug continued to be important in our lives after we left Telluride, but that’s getting ahead of the story.  Another person who wasn’t as important personally but more important in another way was John Hatfield who lived in the hotel though he wasn’t a miner and had no other apparent job.  He told us early on that his name wasn’t really John Hatfield.  He had seemed so much a friend so quickly that my wife Judy immediately asked him what his real name was.  He smiled and didn’t answer and as soon as she realized her mistake, Judy asked how he picked his name.  He said he got a phone book and opened it at random, closed his eyes and pointed to a line.  That gave him his new first name.  He repeated the process to get a new last name, always assuming that neither name was inappropriate or extremely unusual.

 

John went hiking with me once and I asked how old he was.  I was 27 in August of that year and I was pretty certain he was older.  He said sometimes he was 30 and sometimes 60, depending on how he felt.  It was a striking statement at the time, but makes more sense now.  Until about 15 years ago, I was 18 most mornings when I woke up.  On scary mornings I was 13 with that lost, helpless feeling.  Now I have good days when I feel 40 until I begin to do something strenuous.  The moments of feeling 18 are fewer each passing year.

 

John also told me that he spent a season selling his art work in New York City, grossing $40,000.  That’s when $10,000 a year was big money.  John said the expenses were astronomical.  He mentioned catered receptions and other things that I can’t remember.  He never offered to show me his etchings or any other kind of art though.

 

He took me with him one morning to look over a possible job felling aspen.  I don’t remember where we went but we went to the biggest aspen I’d ever seen.  Trees with a 20 inch diameter were common and 30 inchers weren’t rare.  I don’t know if he took the job.  If he did, it wasn’t for more than a few days.

 

John also played the guitar, much more skillfully than Doug, but always very softly.  He’d come into the bar in the morning when no one else was in there and play.  I suppose I should have pressed him to buy drinks, but I didn’t.  He might sip a soft drink and rarely he’d have a gin and tonic.  If another person came in he would stop though I think most would have liked to hear him keep playing.

 

Another time we walked up near the mill which was closed.  He said he didn’t want to go underground but said he’d work in the mill if it reopened.  He tried to explain the basics of how a mill worked.  I asked him how he knew.  He said “books.”  He told me that he could get any credentials he needed.  He’d fill out an application and list as reference a friend’s P.O. Box.  If a request for transcripts or letters of recommendation came in, the friend would send the requests to John who wrote up the appropriate material and sent it back to be remailed from the P.O. Box. 

 

I believed him at the time, but perhaps it was all a sad fantasy.  I spent the next twenty years or more trying to write a short story about John, to make him understandable to me.  I gave up several times.  Finally in the late 80’s I hit my stride.  I stayed after school and used the computer lab.  I remember very clearly pecking away at an extended passage and looking up expecting to see the back bar at the Sheridan.  For several nights words just flowed.  When it comes to fiction or poetry I’m not a planner.  I had no idea how to end it.  My John Hatfield was much more fictional than when I’d started.  Suddenly, and without conscious planning, it clicked.  I wrote an ending which surprised and pleased me.  I hope the “real John” would have laughed, but it didn’t really matter.  I was happy.          

Jeff Arnold

1968 Part 1

1968 was a year of turmoil in America. The Tet offensive in Vietnam turned the tide of popular opinion against the war there. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy made us wonder what kind of country we were. On a personal level however, 1968 was a very good year for me.

It was the first full year of my marriage, which was the best thing that had happened to me up till then. I was still a college student, five years after I should have graduated had I been normal, but I finally felt like I was in control of that. The first part of the year my wife and I lived in a basement apartment on “The Hill” in Boulder. Our landlady’s son Charlie had been a patient at the State Hospital in Pueblo for several years. I heard him say once that he’d had something like 40 electroshock treatments and 20 insulin comas. He had a kind of schizophrenia in which he sometimes heard things. He described it as like having twenty different radio stations playing at the same time and being unable to tune in on any one. He sometimes smelled strong odors in inappropriate places, like new-cut hay in downtown Boulder. He was once sitting on the sofa in our apartment next to a guy who was spouting some long-winded theory. “Don,” Charlie said, “change places with me. I’ve quit hearing things in the ear next to you.” Charlie’s mother was crazier than he was. I should have found a better place for my wife the first time Mrs. Wilson came down while we were out and washed our dishes.

Though I’d used up my eligibility, I worked part time for the CU Athletic Department. One of my jobs was preparing the football field for games and taking flags down afterwards. I could have seen every game free, but seldom did. I also did the football players’ laundry after they moved into the then new halftime building. They got to throw their sweaty practice clothes on the floor and their towels. Other student athletes thought it was demeaning to pick up after them. The boss paid me double time. The washing machine was a marvel. It was a tall, stacked machine and one could stuff as much into it as possible and it would still wash well. When it was spinning it shook the area even though it was securely bolted into the concrete floor. The clothes came out almost dry. Because of that job I had a key to the building. I sometime used the sauna, probably the first I ever saw. One evening a campus policeman came in and found me. My wife and I had been in the sauna, she still was, and when I told him about it, he tried not to smile and let me off with a warning.

The highlight of the year was when Judy and I got summer jobs in a “Resort Hotel” in Telluride. Judy was a waitress, I a bartender though I’d never mixed a drink before. 1968 was the summer that Telluride was trying to get positioned to take advantage of the coming new ski area. The new “owners” (they really had a lease with an option to buy) were trying to restore the long neglected hotel, but they lacked sufficient money or drive to do much, so the parts they were trying to refinish looked more torn up than rustic. There was some kind or rope tow skiing for locals, but the only reliable tourists had been a few University of New Mexico professors who came in the summer and rented a vacant house for a month or two. Before that summer, most of the landlords had agreed that no house would be rented for less than $100 a month. There weren’t many professors that summer.

The locals were good enough. There were only about 400 citizens, some of whom were miners at the Idarado. Several of those lived and ate in the hotel as we did. There was a woman who came into the bar most mornings for a drink or two and talked about her husband Albert who was out finding “another gold mine” for her. I thought she was delusional but harmless. Much later, I found that there really was an Albert, and he had fourteen working claims. Eino Pekkarine was a Finn bachelor who had a store directly across from the hotel with living quarters upstairs. He seldom came into the bar, but regularly moaned loudly enough to be heard above the noise in there. Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion has since made that moaning more understandable.

The back bar was a magnificent thing, brought in before William Jennings Bryan made his “Cross of Gold” speech in front of the hotel in 1892. The dining room once had booths that had thick curtains with a buzzer system to call for service so that a gentleman could dine in complete privacy with his lady. His lady was seldom his wife. The curtained booths had been sold a few years earlier to Knott’s Berry Farm in California.

The dining menu was impressive and included things that would have been almost impossible, like Dungeness Crab, except for the fact that they were really fancy TV dinners. There was a wine list that I’ve been told was equally impressive. The wine cellar was directly under the bar. One lifted a trap door in the floor and descended steep steps to a dirt floor which helped give the wine the proper dust covering. There were occasionally tourists who came in, and no doubt swayed by the upscale food and wine menus, ordered drinks I had never heard of like Sidecars, Singapore Slings, Grasshoppers. Luckily there was a Boston Bar Guide. That’s when I learned that I would probably never be a drinker. I always mixed a little extra of the exotic drinks and sampled them. I liked the ones made with ice cream, but not nearly as well as the ice cream alone.

Luckily for me most drink orders were simple, rum and coke, whiskey and seven, beer. We didn’t have beer on tap so that was simple; I just opened the bottle. Most of the miners who came in every evening after work were quiet drinkers. There was Double Drunk, however. I don’t think he was a miner. He was certainly a drinker. He’d come in seeming to be on the verge of passing out but after five or six drinks seemed almost sober, but meaner. I once tried to cause him to pass out by serving him doubles when he ordered singles. It didn’t work, and when closing time came, he cursed a great deal, but walked out without weaving. I later shuddered to think that I might have killed him.

For a week or two a surveyor was in town, laying out the town’s new sewage treatment plant. I talked to him for awhile and agreed to work as a rodman for him during the day on the strength of a summer surveying class I’d taken at the School of Mines eight years previously. Of course I had to arrange for the other bartender to work days so I could be working outside when it was light. When he figured out what I was doing, he raised hell until he got a few days of survey work in too.

There was one movie theater in town and they changed movies about twice a week. I think Judy and I saw nearly every movie shown that summer, but I can’t remember a single title.

Another very nice thing about Telluride was the natural setting. The town is set in a U-shaped valley with high mountain ridges on three sides. For some reason I never got oriented as to north and south. I can see from the map that road into town comes from the west and the main street runs mostly east to the head of the valley. The New Sheridan Hotel must be on the north side of the street and Eino’s store the south but somehow the far side of the street was in shadow until about 11 am in the summer while we basked in early light. The other side may be like Fairbanks, Alaska as far as sun goes in winter.

There is one way in and only one way out of Telluride unless you go in mine tunnels all the way through and come out on the Red Mountain side, or go on Jeep roads over Black Bear or Imogene Passes. At the head of the valley Bridal Veil Falls plunges hundreds of feet, farther than Niagara, to a pool below. Ingram Creek which feeds it is only a couple of feet wide and maybe a foot deep when it is running high. Both the pool and the stream are beautiful.

I had a 1956 Ford pickup which I had bought from Tom Perkins dad that we used only when we wanted to explore. The road to upper Ingram Creek was supposed to be a jeep road but the old pickup made it fairly easily. Once when friends came to visit we took them above the head of the falls. On a sharp, very rocky turn the truck stopped. I got out and noticed that the left wheel was pointing left and the right, right. We looked underneath and saw that a steering arm made out of a 1” iron or steel rod was bent like a bow. Ken and I pushed it as straight as we could. I backed to where I could turn around and drove gingerly back to town. I took the arm off later and took it to a local blacksmith who straightened it with a hammer an anvil. I put it back on and drove the truck for eight or nine more years.

Jeff Arnold

Lost Love

I’m a seventh-grader at Keating.  It’s spring, 1954.  I have been on the playground prior to first period and someone, I don’t remember who or how, has upset me.  Now I am at my locker, fuming, twirling the numbers on my combination lock, and someone has tapped me on my shoulder.  I must think it is the person who has just given me a hard time, and I jerk my elbow back in anger, but what it encounters is soft, like girl flesh.  Who…?

 

I don’t remember a lot about the Keating years.  It was a difficult transition for me from elementary school.  Without ever trying I had been popular, at least among the boys, at Carlile.  Now all of these kids had come together from different schools to form this large one, and, since I was quiet and shy, I was mostly unknown. Although I was nominated for a class office I wasn’t elected.  I had only a few close friends, some old and some new, and didn’t realize that this was true of most of the other students. 

 

Strangely, I have little recall of the teachers, the people who should have been influential in my life.  I remember Tom Keach, a no-nonsense guy if there ever was one.  Mr. Davidson, the music teacher, who I now suspect was gay even though, to my knowledge, he never wore yellow and green on Thursday.  He was a smart man who taught us much more than music.  Coach Slack was a typical coach.  He wore tight white t-shirts, sent us out to play football or basketball, and that, in my memory, is about all he did.  I remember him telling us, “Mothers call me and say, ‘why did you give my son a D?  He tries.’  I tell them, if he tries in math class but doesn’t know what 4 times 10 is, does he get an A?”

 

There was a tall, thin teacher, I think his name started with W, who took us on a field trip to the Molly Kathleen mine in Cripple Creek, where his father still worked as a miner.  Some of you remember that.  And another male teacher who had the unenviable task of being the “Health” teacher, to teach us boys about sex without really teaching us about sex.  I think a woman teacher had the duty of teaching the girls about sex without really teaching them about sex.  Once in that male class some anonymous boy let a toxic fart that could have caused asphyxiation at the other end of the hall.  Those of us in the room were holding our hands over our faces, gasping and laughing. Nothing is quite as crass as a fourteen-year-old boy.  I believed that the fart was an editorial comment on what that boy thought of the subject and the teacher.  The teacher, Geron?  Something like that, tore into us although obviously we were not all to blame.

 

And then there was Dorothy Wambaugh.  She was my seventh-grade homeroom teacher and taught  Colorado History.  Now, as something of a history buff, I can’t believe that I thought Colorado History was boring.  Perhaps it was because all I really wanted to do was look at Miss Wambaugh.  She was a young, pretty, short redhead with large breasts.  She had a warm personality that made us believe that she liked and cared about us, although she had a temper and occasionally ripped the entire class, causing us all to stare quietly at our desktops.  I was her teacher’s pet.

 

I don’t know what I did to deserve her favor; I only know that I enjoyed it.  I don’t remember what it was she did that made me think I was her pet, but a person can tell when he is a favorite.  Naturally, I had a huge crush on her.  So that morning when I jerked my elbow back hard into her breast, and she, surprised, asked me why I was so angry, I mumbled unintelligibly in great shame and embarrassment.  She wasn’t really hurt and she laughed it off, much to my relief, because the last thing I wanted to do was to harm our intimate relationship.

 

Not long after, just before school ended, Miss Wambaugh told us that she was getting married and leaving the state.  I didn’t even know she was dating!  She wouldn’t be back the next year.  I couldn’t understand how she could leave me after all we had meant to each other.  I never forgave her.  I wonder what became of her.

Jerry Miller

Worst Job?

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?  I’m sure that some of you are laughing, especially if you’re retired or no longer have the same job.  Some of you have said something like,  “That was a s****y job, let me tell ya.”

 

I spent the first day of 2008 out at the ranch.  You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the day started with my catching and saddling a horse.  Willy and I loaded the two horses in a trailer and were driven to the upper end of the ranch.  Our job was to bring all the cows in.  It was an adventure which I’d be pleased to recount but it was what we did after we got the cows penned that made the day unique.  I’d never done that before, but I’m sorry to say that I’ll probably have to do a bit more of it in the near future.

 

The basic story is that we were trying to collect samples of feces from every adult bovine on the place, just under 110 animals.  Since this is a ranch we’re talking about, feces isn’t the word we used.  Further the procedure is designed to keep each sample from contaminating any other.  The collector has to change gloves after each collection but before that he has to put some, but not too much, of his collected material in a small round metal can with a snap lid, similar to that used to hold a popular breath mint.

 

It was my job to write the ear tag number of each animal on a numbered recording sheet with a ball point pen, which didn’t write well in the literally freezing temperature until I learned to put it in my pants pocket after each use.  I also had to write the line number, animal number, and page number on the lid of the can with a Sharpie, and hold the can while the collector put the, well you know, in it.  I have to give the collector credit.  Only rarely did he get any on me.  Then I popped the lid on, wiped off any excess with a paper towel, and further sealed the can with strapping tape.  I had a young female assistant who cut the tape for me as well as calling out the animal number. 

 

There were three others involved in the process. There were five Farises and me.  My young female assistant was Wes’s fifth grade daughter Riley.  Wes and JJ were the brothers in charge of moving the animals into the squeeze chute.  Their dad, Willy, squeezed the animal’s neck while the collector, Willy Jr. reached into the, well you can guess the ranch word, to get a small handful, and put some into the can and sometimes a drop or two on my hand.  I didn’t get a glove.

 

Half a dozen cows, no problem.  110, it has to resemble an assembly line.  Towards the end, we were getting pretty efficient, and the ridiculousness of what we were doing almost stopped being humorous.  At first we cracked up whenever we looked at each other.  Too the jokes about guacamole, or sandwich spread had worn thin.  Then disaster of a sort struck. 

 

With fourteen cows to go we ran out of cans.  The scientists who devised this careful plan, who require the samples to be stored at 80 degrees below zero Fahrenheit if not shipped with 24 hours of collection, who caution about changing gloves after each collection, didn’t accurately count the cans they shipped.  So we’ll come back to finish when they ship more.  Not to worry, we’re a well-tuned s**t collection machine now.  If anyone asks how my New Year’s Day was, you know what I’d like to say.

 

 

Some background information.  There is some kind of cattle disease called Johnes, pronounced yonies.  It is apparently passed from cow to cow through contact with feces.  Because Willy, the collector, sells bull calves to a man who wants to be able to ship bulls to all states, we have to test.  

Jeff Arnold