Just trying to tell stories and be round
When I returned to Colorado Community Media, I wrote the following column retelling briefly, some of my favorite stories. June 28, 2015
By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com
Certainly newspapering and telling stories is a circular process. Back in 2007, when I wrote (what I thought at the time) was probably my last column for a certain newspaper, I mentioned the basic truth that, in communities like these, a person never runs out of good stories to tell. Having spent so many years with the same newspaper company, many of them in the Teller County and Monument areas, I have even acquired a few stories of my own.
I recall spending more than $700 one week to clear snow from the parking lot in Monument (when we were in the building that now houses Expectations Salon) after the October 97 blizzard. Jeremy Bangs and I logged a lot of hours in those days addressing Tribunes by hand and prepping bags for the mail.
One of the funniest newspaper tales I have ever heard involved having to face the crazed meanness in the eyes of a publisher who had just figured out he only has flats for 34 pages of a 36-page paper when he arrived at the offsite printing facility. I guess that is what happens when rushed and, in haste, you throw completed flats in the back of the pickup where they can be sucked out a crack between the endgate and the topper latch on the way to the printer.
Not everyone knew of the secret escape hatch through the closet in the editor’s office (and out to the back door) in the stucco house on the corner. I never had an opportunity use it, but still found it comforting in case of an irate advertiser or an enraged reader. I also recall watching out the front window of the Ute Pass Courier newspaper office in Woodland Park, as the police, including local city and county officers, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, FBI and federal marshals, arrested members of the Texas Seven in the Coachlight mobile home park directly to the east of us.
“No information at this time,” from emergency personnel, was the only explanation offered for the six or seven ambulances and various police cars lined up in our parking lot for a full twenty minutes before they could tell us what was going on.
It was another media circus, but perhaps more dangerous one to staff and the community, when the Hayman Fire burned out of control for three intense weeks in June of 2002. For members of our staff at the newspaper, the weeks of stress related to intense long-term sustained coverage of a big story was compounded by whether or not their house, or place of employment, or both might burn. And all their friends and neighbors were in a similar predicament.
But among the “big stories,” was always that small but important thread that needed to be pulled for goodness sake. It seems to me like I followed around in Ernest Chapin Gard’s footsteps – just about 100 years after he first made his appearance in Colorado. I published the Cripple Creek Gold Rush, which was a direct decendent of Gard’s Cripple Creek Crusher. I managed the Tri-Lakes Tribune in Monument and the Palmer Lake area, a century after Gard’s Palmer Lake Herald and Monument Register. I had worked at papers that covered Mono County in California that had ties, and had a friend that edited the paper in Gardnerville, Nevada with links to Gard. All were temporary haunts of the bombastic journalist, newspaper publisher, and mining promoter. For a while there, I thought there was some sort of weird Ju-Ju between me and the guy, 100-years-displaced.
Then I figured out that this fellow started or promoted a paper in most every promising mining camp in the West. “E. Chapin Guard was at Palmer Lake much of the time between 1888 and 1895,” wrote my friend Daniel W. Edwards in a paper for the Palmer Lake Historical Society in July of 2010. Edwards recently retired from the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. and authored the book Dr. William Finely Thompson: Dental Surgeon and Founder of Palmer Lake.
“He published Palmer Lake’s first newspaper, served on the first town council, was town attorney, a justice of the peace, filed claims to local mining properties, and wrote a booklet boosting Palmer Lake. Yet, being a restless and ambitious man, Gard could not stay put for long. He established, published, or edited 11 Colorado newspapers during his career, and his articles appeared in at least six others.
As a roving journalist and newspaper editor in Colorado, Gard often resorted to poetry, humor, and sarcasm in his writings and fully exercised his right to freedom of the press. He did contribute to the dialog of democracy by criticizing public officials, but his unrestrained enthusiasm and often bombastic, intemperate rhetoric also provoked strong opposition. Many newspapers of that era practiced a similar style of journalism.”
The Mountain Democrat of Placerville, California, had this to say about E.C. Gard, near the end of his colorful career in its June 4, 1926 edition. “Thirty years ago, when new mining camps were constantly springing up in the state of Colorado, each new mining camp had a newspaper that boosted everything from the skies above to what was expected to be found thousands of feet underground, and in most cases the name of the editor was E. Chapin Gard.
There were two things that Gard could do more of and do better than anyone else in camp, one was write boost articles and the other was to drink good whiskey. He did both constantly and consistently, and helped many men become wealthy but never saved any money himself … E. Chapin Gard, still boosting, with more pep than half the men we meet every day, who has probably been compelled to forget his age in order not to become old, an example of what it means to always look on the bright side, to look for sunshine instead of clouds, to side-step gloom and cultivate happiness and contentment.”
Of course Gard made enemies, often with his own rhetoric. “Don’t send your pennies to India,” Gard is quoted in the Pagosa Springs News on July 1, 1898. “The Hottentot can get along for awhile without your contributions … We need missionaries and money and tornadoes of prayers and rivers of tears to civilize the heathens in darkest America. Turn your gospel machines loose on Denver’s gates of Hell. Batter down the stone walls of Capitol Hill and see Satan and his imps scamper. Go into the big department stores and offices, where physical serfdom cringes and moral ruin crouches and weeps, and rescue the perishing. Lift the mask from some of our courts and begin to get to your work of salvation as rapidly and vigorously as possible. Pry up a few boards under the altar in front of some of our pulpits and see if we don’t need several tons of saving grace right here in Colorado.”
E. Chapin Gard, was just getting warmed up. And Rob Carrigan is just circling around behind him.
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