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A column in Sunday's Post raised an issue that deserves
further exploration: How long do you have to live somewhere
to be considered a local.
The writer of that piece lived in Summit County. When I worked there editing the Summit County Journal in 1977-78, the population was rather transient, and we used to joke that if you managed to stay six months, you could join the Pioneer Society.
I didn't last that long, so I cannot confirm that. But in some parts of Colorado, local status is more a matter of attitude than of nativity or investment.
For instance, I was born in Greeley and grew up in nearby Evans. I went to college in Greeley, where I was editor of the student newspaper, the Mirror, in 1970-71. One day I ran some scathing editorial about the Nixon administration.
I got a call from an angry Greeley resident who finally
asked Why don't you radicals from the East just go back
where you came from?
This hurt my feelings. I pointed out that I lived one house down the street from my birthplace, a nursing home that had been Weld County General Hospital in 1950. I had gone to local public schools. At the time, I had never ventured east of Springview, Neb., where my sister-in-law taught school.
You don't think like somebody from Weld County, so
don't you try to fool me,
I was told.
Similarly, when we lived in Kremmling from 1974-77, I was in the office of the weekly Middle Park Times one day when a woman came in and asked how I presumed to write editorials about how the town and school district should conduct their business when I was such an outsider.
I told her that I owned a house and business in Kremmling, and that our daughter (we had only one at the time) had been born there.
Just because a cat has kittens in the oven doesn't
make 'em biscuits,
the irate woman told me before
canceling her subscription and stomping out the door.
So it can be hard to become a local, and further, I'm
not sure it matters to the kittens. My daughters referred
to Salida locals as lifers,
not meant as a
compliment, and neither lives in Colorado now.
But if you want to play this game, there are a couple of tricks you can use to build local status even if you are a recent arrival.
One is to badger the phone company to get the right
prefix. When my parents moved to Longmont in 1968, they got
a 772 prefix when for years, Longmont had been a 776 town
where residents recited four-digit phone numbers. Having a
776 number then, like a 356 in Greeley then, or a 530 in
Salida now instead of a 539, is like having I'm a
newcomer
tattooed across your forehead.
You can also pay heed to the place names used by
old-timers, and employ those yourself. In Leadville, call
it the new courthouse,
since it's been there only 50
years. In Cañon City, refer to River Street
instead of Royal Gorge Boulevard.
I can generally
determine a Salidan's length of residency by what he calls
one building. Where Downtown Market used to be
means
at least a decade. Superfoods
will put him here at
least 15 years, and Boyes Market
means about 40
years, which can be confirmed if another spot is across
the street from Cady Hardware, by Monkey Ward's and
Woolworth's
which will be mispronounced
Woolsworth's.
This matter came up once in a conversation with Allen Nossaman, who then owned the weekly Silverton Standard & Miner. He died earlier this month in Durango after a long and worthy career that covered everything from newspaper publisher to county judge, courthouse janitor and local historian. Colorado is a lesser place without him.
He was once a newcomer in Silverton, he recalled, and
I asked a woman who had lived there for decades how long it
would take to become a local. She told me that you attain
that status when nobody around can remember when you came
to town.
Another approach comes from my friend Jeanne Englert of
Lafayette: It's not how long you've been somewhere that
matters. It's how long you plan to stay.
I never planned to stay in Salida for 28 years. The
original notion was to move on when I could afford to. And
that never happened, so I must be getting pretty close to
true local status. Recently, a woman down the street said
she now refers to our place as the Quillen house
rather than the Sanderson house
or the Marquardt
house.
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