By Lynda LaRocca
From the moment I heard about it, I knew it was a grand idea (and by “grand,” I mean “wonderful” and “brilliant”). I also knew that if anyone could pull it off, it was Ed and Martha Quillen.
So when Ed telephoned one afternoon in late 1993 asking for reprints of articles I’d written that had anything to do with the Upper Arkansas River Valley for a regional magazine he and Martha were about to start up, I immediately complied.
Ed wanted to consider “a few” articles. But being the overly eager type, I sent him a dozen. He initially selected one – a reprint of a piece I’d written on Leadville’s 1896 Ice Palace titled “The Tourist Attraction That Melted,” an accurate description of the fate of this dazzling, albeit short-lived, spectacle.
Nearly twice the size of a football field and featuring solid ice walls five feet thick, the Ice Palace was fronted by two octagonal, 90-foot-high ice towers and a 19-foot-tall ice sculpture of Lady Leadville, her arm outstretched and one finger pointing toward the mountains and Leadville’s rich mines. The Ice Palace housed a ballroom, a restaurant and, not surprisingly, a skating rink. But less than three months after opening, it melted away during an unprecedented early-spring thaw.
Ed directed me to condense and rewrite this article to suit the new magazine’s style and space requirements. And when it appeared in Colorado Central No. 1 in March 1994, it marked the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Shortly after that issue was published, Ed and Martha threw a party for supporters and contributors, who gathered in the back room of what was then Salida’s 1st Street Café.
With a flourish or two involving a lighted cigarette and a raised beer mug, Ed proudly presented the first check ever cut to a Colorado Central writer.
It was made out to me.
Over the years, I was privileged to be a regular contributor to Colorado Central Magazine, writing about virtually anyone and anything that caught my eye in this most interesting little corner of our most interesting state. In exchange, envelopes arrived in the mail containing checks and contracts permeated with the odor of Ed’s cigarette smoke.
Only once during all that time did Ed decide against publishing something I’d written. It was a review of a book that I still maintain was so dreadful – from its abysmal writing style and complete absence of plot and character development to some truly and unnecessarily foul language – that I couldn’t find one positive thing to say about it.
Instead of anointing me Curmudgeon of the Year, Ed graciously mailed me a (tobacco-scented) check anyway. And then he shelved the piece.
After selling the magazine to current editor and publisher Mike Rosso, Ed and Martha bid farewell in the February 2009 issue of Colorado Central.
My swan song for the Quillens came a month earlier, when they’d published what had turned into my pretty-much-annual “Personal Favorites” column. This was a compendium of beloved books I’d read or reread the preceding year, an indulgence in which they kindly allowed me to step outside the regional box and write about whatever I chose.
The check for that piece came with a little sticky note attached. The first check I ever wrote to a Colorado Central contributor was to you, Ed had scrawled. And now, so is the last check.
I was proud then to have been part of this incredibly successful venture. And twenty years later, I’m still proud.
