In my younger years, I worked out in western Kansas and would purchase the local newspaper each week. It was fun to see life from a different perspective and their take was delightful. I waited with bated breath – or is that baited breath – each week for the next issue.
The local rag had the normal advertising all done up in 1950s images selling Bert’s Tonsil Formula and letting me know that Homers Lumber Yard— unchanged since the day they were created seven decades earlier – had a sale on lumber, left over from the Great Depression, I’m sure.
My favorite part of the paper, though, was the “Local Happenings.” There on Page 4 you could find all the news that was fit to print about local families and individuals who lived in the area.
Like this gem: “Bert and Mary Ellen Ross went to Leoti last night (for the uninitiated that is a long 22 miles from home) and enjoyed a visit with Bert Jr. and his wife Mildred. They had a nice supper consisting of roast beef, scalloped potatoes, green beans fresh from Mildred’s garden and iced tea. Mary Ellen brought one of her prize winning chocolate cakes to share. The cake arrived fresh and delightful thanks to the cake carrier loaned to Mary Ellen by longtime friend Tilly Merlman. Returning home after dark Bert said they had no problems and the county road appears to be in fine repair. He went on to say that they met 22 cars on the return trip and that ‘the highway is getting about too busy to travel safely after dark.’”
Now while I used to kind of snicker at such mundane news, of late I have found that a return to such simple times would be delightful.
This week finds me in Texas. And, unlike our sweet life in the San Luis Valley, the news near the big city is filled with meth arrests, murders, muggings, thefts, rapes, child molesters and suicides. Every day we are bombarded with the latest and maybe greatest of crimes that can be thought up by men and women lost in the pit of human despair and loathing.
One Texas Facebook site even gives it to you in instant format as it comes across the police scanner and a person knows of every motor vehicle accident almost instantly and if the helicopter has been dispatched to pick up some luckless motorist or passenger.
Couple that with the news from the entire U.S.A. and the world on an almost instant basis and you have the makings of some depressing kind of living.
Ol’ Dutch got to thinking about all that, a dangerous prospect at best, and came to realize that even back in the so called simpler days, people had their problems and society faced similar ills daily.
Jesse James and his cohorts rode a hard line robbing banks and railroads, Billy the Kid shot up several people, Bonnie and Clyde drove into infamy meeting their end in a hail of bullets, kids were beaten, women tormented, stores robbed, people kidnapped and politicians stole but we did not hear about it like we do now. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
Back then we used a phone to talk to people and only if necessary as it was not a toy to play games on like Blackberry Plunge, Doodle My World and the Farming Game, Calling long distance was reserved for once a week to Grandma and Grandpa and had to be limited to five minutes or less due to the rates imposed by Mrs. Bell. And she was the only game in town, too.
Ol’ Dutch has come to realize the reason the hokey local news worked was that people actually cared about their neighbors and were interested in their lives as well. That was called “friendship.”
I do appreciate this paper and all the local happenings Facebook pages in South Fork, Creede and the rest of the area sharing beautiful photos of the mountains, the blue plate special of the day and the whereabouts of found puppy dogs. It’s our own kind of Mayberry, isn’t it?
This guy for one really yearns for the day when the most note-worthy dirt was about the local 89-year-old widow woman Ms. Markle and her paramour from Bodark, Louisiana, sitting on the porch swing.

Kevin Kirkpatrick and his Yorkie, Cooper, fish, hunt, ATV or hike daily. His email is [email protected]. Additional news can be found at www.troutrepublic.com or on Twitter at TroutRepublic.