Review by Hal Walter
New magazine – November 1994 – Colorado Central Magazine
Focus on Colorado
Bi-monthly magazine
ORIGINALLY THE EDITOR asked me to review a new magazine available free in Custer County called Focus on Colorado.
Here’s all you need to know. A good deal of the advertising among the 28 pages of the glossy publication’s latest issue has to do with the local real-estate industry — land-sellers or builders. The pictures are bright, but the reading is dull. Plus, it’s printed on stock too heavy to be of much use in starting a fire in your woodstove.
Enough said about Focus.
This leaves me plenty of spare words to discuss our annual cultural event — the Gold Rush Road Rally, which is more representative of the local populace than the annual jazz festival, in that the road-warrior-style vehicles used by the motorhead entrants resemble the ones driven everyday by most of us who don’t advertise in Focus.
However, I’m not sure what the point of the car rally is, other than to corduroy the country roads, keep people who enjoy crisp autumn evenings up all night while the cars buzz by, and cover everything within a five-mile radius with a layer of fine dust. That is, unless it has to do with selling a lot of gasoline, caffeinated beverages, and Hostess Ding-Dongs to the entrants, few, if any, of whom are from these parts.
I don’t think the event should be abolished. Instead, I propose that local merchants who sponsor the rally be locked in their homes, unable to do business while the cars buzz up and down their driveways all the night long. The other stages can be held during the day, but merchants should be required to pay the county to water the roads down before, and regrade them after, the rally.
Most important, these same merchants should be required to have a helicopter available to residents who live on the courses should they have an emergency, or the urge to make a run to town for whiskey, while the roads to their homes are closed off for the event.
— Hal Walter
