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It was a happy occasion that took me to civilization last weekend -- my parents, Dorothy and Ed Quillen of Longmont, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on Feb. 5. Joining them at the head of the reception was my nephew, Andrew Quillen, and his new wife, Heather.
All was well on that front, and then Sunday morning I saw the front page of the Longmont Times-Call. One of its reporters had gone skiing Saturday at Eldora, and had hit a tree near an expert run and died.
The reporter was Ted Nelson, who would have turned 51 this week. He was a Navy veteran of Vietnam who then went to Adams State College in Alamosa. After his graduation, he edited the Center Post-Dispatch, a weekly in the San Luis Valley, and in 1978 came to work as a reporter at the Salida Mountain Mail, just after I had hired on as managing editor.
Ted and I knew each other pretty well, but I wouldn't say we were close friends. He was the most accurate reporter I ever worked with, but he was far from being the fastest writer. Impending deadlines make editors yell at reporters, and then the profanity gathers steam -- or it did in those days, when newspaper offices were befogged by tobacco smoke and unclouded by political correctness.
During Ted's time at the Mountain Mail, we were sued for libel in 1980 by a county commissioner. The suit concerned commentary written by me and by the publisher, Merle Baranczyk.
In all of the filings by the plaintiff, who had obviously gone over everything published about him with a fine-toothed comb, there was not one complaint about the accuracy of Ted's coverage of the county government. That's how solid his reporting was.
(As for the libel suit, it was summarily dismissed by the district judge. That dismissal was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and was upheld at every level. In other words, it was totally baseless.)
Journalism is a strange business. Its major rewards, like pundit status (which I may have reached) and big money (which I haven't attained and probably never will), go to opinionated cranks (here I am again) or attractive television personalities.
But the real grunt work gets done in the trenches, by the reporters who sit through the interminable tedious meetings, track down somebody who might know something in a world that relies on voice mail to insure that reporters seldom reach the people they need to reach, and work horrible hours under tremendous pressure.
Most reporters aspire to a novel, or at least an editorship, which makes the hours more regular, and puts you in a chair that's at least half-comfortable, as opposed to the contraptions you get at most public meetings.
Not Ted -- he loved reporting and that's all he wanted to do. After his three years in Salida, he worked for some papers in northern Idaho, and landed in Longmont about five years ago.
His other passion was skiing. I guess there's the consolation that he was doing exactly what he loved to do when the time came.
On our way back to Salida from Longmont, we stopped in
Denver. I'd seen an ad on TV for a big electronics show at
Currigan Hall which offered Pentium laptops for $399 and
up.
That sounded worth checking into. The first thing I discovered was the promoters of downtown Denver have been so successful that finding a place to park -- an easy task on Sundays of yore -- was a major challenge.
Then there was the show. They wanted $7 a head to get in, and there was a long line, and when I peeked through the windows, all I saw was apparel. If there was any computer gear, they had it well hidden.
None of this was mentioned in the advertising, and I've never seen a reason to pay $7 for the privilege of spending more money. We decided coffee and pastries were in order instead, and our daughters directed us to a place on Larimer Square.
The weather was so nice we could sit outside. The downside was that a score or so of Harley drivers insisted on circling the block to demonstrate how noisy their machines were.
Since even Salida has a noise ordinance, I was surprised that draconian Denver tolerated such anti-social behavior. But that evening I learned that Denver's top cops, when they want to sit around and discuss matters outdoors, do so at poolside in Hawaii.
And who could blame them, when Denver is so full of needlessly noisy hogs?
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