By Slim Wolfe
Back in the mid-nineties, when Colorado Central was fairly young, I was approached by a singer-songwriter to provide hammered-dulcimer backup for the guitar-and-vocal repertoire she wanted to record. On the strength of our recording, we were booked at the Steam Plant but unfortunately our live show didn’t live up to the promise of the recording and most of the audience departed early. The Mountain Mail review described her as inebriated and expressed some sympathy for me. Gentleman that I aspired to be, I wrote a letter excusing her on the grounds of neurological ailments (being drunk could be called that) but I hesitated to submit the letter to the Mail since the publisher had a tendency to edit letters and alter the context (my opinion) On impulse, I sent the letter to Ed. I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me, and he might well have rejected the letter as nothing more than some disgruntled musician’s dirty laundry, but it promptly appeared and I was encouraged to submit a series of letters over many years.
The magazine had a decidedly low-budget, homespun sensibility, but most of the writing was well conceived and considered. Only later did I learn that Ed had been a longtime columnist for the Denver Post. The more informal Colorado Central seemed a suitable outlet for my informal and often ironic scribblings and off-the-wall adverts, which probably would have been rejected out-of-hand by a mainstream paper like the Post. Ed and Martha had done a good job of capturing the local essence, and providing serious coverage of regional issues. Ed was also fond of indulging in irony, as were the crew of cartoonists.
I did a couple of odd jobs for Ed, and we had a couple of conversations, He once told me he was a capitalist, maybe to differentiate himself from some of my more left-leaning opinions. I thought he must have been joking. Maybe he approved of American economic structure, but he was quick enough to jump on its problems. Personally, he was just a down-home guy in a plain house on a plain street in a plain town (okay, a unique mountain town) with a family and car problems and overstuffed bookshelves. An unlikely capitalist but, as a writer and a publisher, a bastion of democratic thought and analysis, a model of the determined and principled “little guy” whose shoulders bear whatever greatness we can claim.
Slim Wolfe sells rural-chic furniture and other items made from Uncle Sam’s firewood allotments, bakes bread and gardens a lot.
