By John Mattingly
The winter of 1992 was so brutal in the San Luis Valley that I bought the Palace Hotel as a place to come where it was warm. I really liked the Hotel basement. My son and I had our private hibernaculum down there with a pair of old hospital beds, a poker table, and a black-and- white TV that got one channel. Water ran in a stone-lined trough along the north wall of the basement. We sometimes snuck out through the coal chute to get sandwiches from Danny at Mama D’s. And, my son had the only 25-cent pop machine in Salida, stationed in the Hotel’s north entry, so when we needed a ginger ale, we took a quarter from our war chest, and bought one from ourselves.