Letter from Tom Elliott
Guffey – August 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Ed,
Reading through the June edition I couldn’t help but notice the very interesting Letter from the Editors (What America do you live in), a commentary on the media’s need to simplify, and in so doing thereby miss the reality on the ground.
It was also quite thoughtful of you to provide a wonderful example of that very thing in the pages of your own magazine. You and I had a very nice conversation a few weeks back concerning small town mayors and most specifically the “political” situation (such as it is) here in Guffey. So imagine my surprise to find myself (name misspelled) being quoted in an article with Ken Jessen’s by-line.
I’m really impressed at just how much was wrong or just a bit skewed. For example, in all my dealings with Park County officials I’ve found that a good many of them know little or nothing about Guffey and care even less, if they can even find us on a map (I must say I differentiate here between “officials,” as in elected types and bureaucrats, and County workers themselves). I don’t know how Mr. Jessen can say that “Park County officials wanted some sort of central government in this outpost” because I suspect that what Park County officials want mostly is for us to just go away and leave them alone. I don’t think we’ve seen a County Commissioner in these parts more than once or twice in the last decade.
I actually dealt once with an official in Fairplay who thought we were a real incorporated town complete with our own government, of which there are only two in all of Park County (Fairplay and Alma), and who insisted I needed to go to the town government to get what was really a county road right-of-way vacated. It took a month to get that one straightened out.
Any suggestion that County officials want some sort of central government here is hilarious.
The “mayor” of this town has historically been whatever animal happened to own the humans who ran the general store, which for a long time was about the only gathering place in town. That has generally meant, over the years, either a cat or a dog but the best known was Bruce Buffington’s Golden Retriever Shanda, who achieved a certain measure of international fame, which Bruce encouraged at every opportunity.
But then Bruce turned the General Store into a Saloon and it became a question as to whether the resident animal of a Saloon fit the traditional requirements for the mayoralty, a sentiment to which Bruce objected strenuously. Bill Soux stepped in to offer up Monster as a substitute mayor and after five or ten minutes and no little amount of shrugging, people pretty much accepted that we had a mayor for the North End of Town (not “West Guffey”), Monster, and one for the South End of Town, Shanda. It stayed that way until Shanda died and then this year Bruce sold the Saloon.
I do remember telling you in our phone conversation that I didn’t know if the new owners of the Saloon even had a pet, much less a dog (it turns out they do) so I hope that Mr. Jessen got the information about their pet situation from someone else, because it didn’t come from me. But maybe the South End of Town will have a mayor again.
So, you can imagine how interesting I found your Letter from the Editors saying that trying to simplify the electorate in this country by defining them as Red or Blue America, or Hard and Soft America could never accurately describe the true nature of the electorate as it seems that trying to define even local electorates as either Cat or Dog doesn’t really do it either.
Yours with great affection,
Tom Elliot
Guffey
P.S.: You folks are essential to sanity in these parts. The Letter from the Editors ought to be required reading everywhere and you have a great and entertaining group of writers, publishers included.
Mea Culpa from Ed
We’ve received considerable critical correspondence about that piece (not all of it for publication), and I deserve it all. The errors that got published are a textbook example of why you shouldn’t get in a hurry when you’re a page short and a deadline looms. But the fault lies not with Ken Jessen, but with my attempt to write a quick update on his paragraphs, which were written last year. Any details I provided on how I messed this up would only sound like excuses, and there is no excuse. I can only offer apologies to our readers.
Ed Quillen
