Article by Ed Quillen
Politics – November 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
It was one of those September days that make you wonder how you ever lived anywhere else, or even ventured outside of Chaffee county. A couple of days of off-and-on autumn rain had greened the valley floor, temporarily hiding the stark brown of the worst drought since Colorado’s first town was founded in 1851. Slate-edged clouds swirled just below the freshly frosted summits of the highest range in all 3,000 miles of Rocky Mountains. Below the cloud layer, changing aspen reflected golden sunshine.
My old Blazer was running fine despite its rattles, and the Internet had provided a map and driving directions to my destination. I’d been there before, but I wasn’t sure I could remember the right course through the maze of roads in the mountains northwest of Buena Vista.
That’s where Curtis Imrie lives, and he’s once again running for Congress as a Democrat. He tried it two years ago, back when Chaffee County was in the Third District with the Western Slope and the San Luis Valley. That was a somewhat competitive district, and he got beaten like a gong by the Republican incumbent, Scott McInnis.
Thanks to the census of 2000 and the consequent drawing of new congressional districts to accommodate Colorado’s population changes, Chaffee County is now in the Fifth District, along with Lake, Park, Teller, and Frémont counties.
Taken altogether, our tiny counties are like fleas on the back of the big dog of El Paso County, home of Colorado Springs. We’re more of an annoyance than a political factor.
The Fifth has been around since Colorado got a new seat in the 1970 census, and it has never elected a Democrat. The incumbent, Joel Hefley, has held the seat since 1987. So Curtis has about as much chance of getting elected to Congress from this district as George W. Bush has of getting elected mayor of Baghdad.
Curtis Imrie’s political campaigns go back a decade, to a write-in independent run for the state legislature in 1992. I can’t recall when I first met Curtis, but I do remember when I first heard of him.
We covered some of the pack-burro races back when I worked at the Mountain Mail from 1978 to 1983. Back then, Curtis raced with a burro named Hayduke, as in George Washington Hayduke, one of the principal characters in Edward Abbey’s notorious novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The monkeywrenchers in the novel felled billboards, and in 1978, the billboard for the Meadow Lakes Mountain Estates real-estate development was a regular on the sheriff’s blotter. Somebody kept chopping it down, just as the fictional G.W. Hayduke did, and Curtis, who lived nearby, had a burro named Hayduke.
Well, nobody’s going to accuse me of being too gracious to a friend when I’m practicing journalism, so I started this interview by trying to confirm my suspicions from years ago; I asked Curtis whether he had anything to do with how that billboard kept falling.
“Until I find out just how the statute of limitations applies here, I’d better not answer that question,” he replied.
Then before I could ask the next obnoxious question about his past, he answered it: “I inhaled. I pretty much did it all. No needles, though.”
Curtis ran for the state house of representatives in 1994 as a certified Democrat. The incumbent Republican was Ken Chlouber of Leadville, another pack-burro racer. That novelty — in the whole world, there are fewer than 100 pack-burro racers — attracted some major-league media attention, including a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal.
Both of them have kept running. Chlouber won a state senate seat in 1996, and easily won re-election in 2000. He’s now running for Congress from Denver.
Curtis tried for the Democratic nomination for the Third Congressional District in 1996 and 1998, and got it in 2000. Now he’s in the Fifth District, and running for congress against a Republican incumbent.
If Curtis somehow managed to get elected to Congress, he would be returning to his birthplace: Washington, D.C., where he entered the world 56 years ago. A few years later, his family moved to Marietta, Georgia, where his father, Walter Curtis Imrie Sr., sold corporate jets.
“Basically, I was raised in the South,” Curtis recalled. “My brothers and I spent a lot of time outdoors,” and when it came to organized sports, Curtis took up wrestling. He was good enough at it to get a partial athletic scholarship to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
He was at Northwestern from 1964 to 1968, “and it really did broaden my horizons,” he said. “For instance, growing up in Georgia just as segregation was ending, I’d never wrestled against a black kid, or had a black teammate.” But it wasn’t just wrestling that attracted him to Northwestern. “I’d developed an interest in drama and film, and Northwestern was strong there.”
That interest got him a job as a gofer when a film was being shot in Galesberg, Ill., shortly after his graduation. “I met some people, who of course told me to come on out to Hollywood, and so I went,” he said. He picked up some acting work, mostly in commercials, and he’s been at that ever sense. He’s also made some short films, and “I suppose you could say that one of my main ambitions is to make the Great American Documentary.”
Curtis sees film — and cinematic techniques in general — as the major communication form of the modern world. “It’s something you have to understand if you’re going to understand how and why things happen, how they’re presented, how we respond.”
His move to Colorado didn’t happen overnight. The Imrie family bought a few acres above Buena Vista and built a cabin in 1967. It might have remained a vacation spot, except for a family tragedy in 1969 when his younger brother, John, drowned in the Arkansas River.
“Remember, we were from the South. Down there, you just got in an inner tube and floated down the Chattahoochee. You couldn’t do that in the Numbers. He got tangled up in a rope that was tied to the tube.”
The cabin was just a reminder of the loss for the rest of the family, “but I didn’t want us to sell it, so I became a sort of caretaker.” In the early 1970s, he wintered on the West Coast and began spending summers at the cabin, and he’s extended his time in Colorado ever since. “There isn’t a lot of acting or film work in Colorado,” he observed, “but over the years, I’ve been able to spend more and more time here, so now I’m here almost all the time.”
In the early 1970s, “I thought this area would be settled by back-to-the-land Mother Earth News types, but it’s sure turned out differently.”
His involvement in pack-burro racing — the only sport indigenous to Colorado — started in 1973. In his wrestling days, he had trained by running, “and I got to like the road work, especially on our back roads.” He was at the cabin for a weekend, taking a break from editing a film in Aspen, and part of the break was a run in the woods.
Oscar Chapa was driving his old pickup along the same road that day. Chapa kept a few racing burros at his place just south of Buena Vista, and told Curtis “You got the legs, I got the ass.”
Chapa also had the burros, and he partnered with runners, each party getting half the winnings from a race. Over the years, Curtis won each of the Triple Crown races (Buena Vista once, Leadville once, Fairplay three times), but never got them all in the same year, so he never won the Triple Crown.
Since he had some land, Curtis got some burros of his own, starting with a BLM adoptee; rather than shoot the feral burros that were devastating vegetation in Arizona, the BLM offered them for adoption. That was the start of a livestock business. Until recently, Curtis had as many as 50 burros, but now he’s down to 20.
“It’s one thing to throw hay over the fence when it’s $2 a bale,” he said. “But it’s up to $8 or $9 on account of the drought, so I had to sell off some of the herd.”
The big jacks usually go to breeders, who mate them with mares to produce saddle mules (like those the Shriners ride at the Salida Fib-Ark parade), “which are popular in some parts of the country.” Some burros turn into running mates for fellow pack-burro racers, and “the jennies and culls are sold as pets.”
There’s some money in burro ranching, “but not enough to make a living,” Curtis said. “It’s more like a hobby that turns a profit some years.”
I’d often wondered: what’s a baby burro called. A burrito? I sort of liked assling, by analogy with gosling. But Curtis informed me that a newborn was a foal, just as with horses.
In his promotional material, Curtis often employs the slogan “Donkeys, Drama, and Democracy,” and during our conversation, he said there are a lot of parallels among those pursuits. “There’s so much of campaigning that is pure theater. Unfortunately, there’s some truth in that old saying that ‘Politics is show business for ugly people.'”
Since he’s enjoyed a little success in show business, why take up politics — especially races where his chances of winning are infinitesimal?
“Part of it’s a family heritage, I suppose.” His mother’s family was from New England, “and my Grandmother Brookings ran for Congress. And I’ve been active in some citizen groups, like Western Colorado Congress.”
But why start by running for the state legislature or the federal congress, rather than school board or the county commission?
“That’s a fair question, I suppose. But it’s not like I want to make a career out of politics, working my way up some ladder. The issues that are important to me are the issues that are addressed at the legislature and in congress, and I’d like to believe that a citizen can run and serve for a couple of terms.”
It hasn’t worked that way for Curtis, whose politics could be characterized as idealistic liberal Democratic.
He’d like to see national health insurance, for instance — something Harry Truman advocated in his 1948 campaign, and something that still hasn’t happened. “If government health care is good enough for the Congressmen who have it, then it should be good enough for the rest of us,” Curtis said, “and I think it would provide more freedom for Americans and we’d be more productive people. Think of how many people stay in jobs they hate, just to keep their health insurance, and how much more productive they’d be if they could easily move to do work they love.”
Environmental and land-use laws need to be stronger, which sounds like a liberal, “but I’d say this is fundamentally conservative,” Curtis said. “We’ve got to conserve what we’ve got, and then work to improve our air and water quality.”
The War on Drugs “is a disaster that just wastes money and resources, and puts people in prison. It’s past time to end it.”
Campaign finance reform “is an absolute necessity if we’re going to call ourselves a democracy. What we’ve got now is a plutocracy, where the rich can just buy their candidates. The little guy hasn’t got a chance in this political environment, and won’t until elections are about something besides who can attract the most campaign contributions.”
Issues like these “are really important, and they need to be on the table, out there for public discussion. So if I can get them out there, I’m accomplishing something good for our political system, even if I never get elected.”
If he did win, “I’d be shocked, but I could do the job.”
And it’s not entirely beyond possibility. Down in the Springs, Libertarian Biff Baker is running a hard campaign against Hefley, and he could get a significant percentage of the votes that might have otherwise gone Republican.
And even in a Republican district like the Fifth, a Democrat might get 40% of the vote — enough to win the election if the Libertarian runs well.
“Sure, I’d like that scenario,” Curtis said. “But politics is a lot like donkey racing — you’d better enjoy the race, because that’s all you can be sure of getting. Winning is great, but it’s nothing you can count on.”
Ed Quillen has never run for anything since failing to get a student council seat in 10th grade.