All Entries in the "Lifestyles at Risk" Category
The Last Year of My Life
From the Journals of Patrick McGinty May, 1919
Travel this spring is different. I am not long for this world. That old sawbones in Denver should be able to tell me something next week. At least he’s honest, not like that croaker in Lamar. Sure, I’ll just get lots of rest and stay away from whiskey. Yeah, that’s a good idea. Did he have to go to medical school back east for both of those years to figure out that remedy? I think all these doctors should go off somewhere together and search for a cure for congenital stupidity and bad handwriting.
In just about an hour we’ll reach Gunnison and I can stretch my legs. This train is hell on my back and my kidneys. Maybe I’ve got that Chrome’s disease. It sure did a job on Harry Selig and he was no older than I am. He could have managed in the Majors but for his health. I can see Tomichi Creek. There’s a great hotel in this town called the LaVeta but one doesn’t stay there overnight on a baseball man’s salary. They say there are even tunnels right from the hotel to the houses of delight. Maybe someday, when one of my teams goes all the way, I’ll go all the way. I’ve always had a great time in Gunnison but I do miss my old third baseman Chuck Morganthau who caught a bullet in France. He had a pretty wife and a lot of ability but something tells me he’d never be able to support a family scooping up grounders and hitting line drives.
The train has finally stopped. My back feels better. I wonder if there’s a pharmacy in this town anymore. What with all the federal interference it’s hard for a fellow to get anything that works on pain. I hear there are a couple of fine pitching prospects working the mines in Crested Butte. Of course if they decide to give baseball a shot they could put their futures in jeopardy. The mines, although dangerous, pay a decent wage and one’s career can last longer. Nobody wants to pay for entertainment these days unless it’s Ziegfeld’s or neighborhood cock fights. Why that Rosencrantz kid might have gone all the way to the big leagues if his father didn’t insist on his going to the normal school. I suppose he’s teaching school somewhere in these mountains. At least he makes a decent salary. The Jews aren’t stupid.
The two boys that I heard about in Crested Butte can throw hard but one is married with three kids and the other can’t speak a lick of English. Maybe next year? It’s back on the damn train for me after a night of sleeplessness at Molly Duran’s Boarding House and a breakfast of biscuits and gravy at the Sodd House. Elmer Sodd told me he wants to sponsor a Fourth of July double-header between the Gunnison team and whatever heap of scrap I manage to put on the field. I say I’ll get back to him. What a pompous bastard he is sitting back in his kitchen, but he was quite a prize fighter in his day, even fought Dempsey down in Alamosa. He’d have whipped him too, from what I hear, but the ref called the fight due to Sodd’s broken ribs and an eye that refuses to go back into its socket, even to this day. The joke around here is that the thing will end up in someone’s pancake batter before it’s all said and done with.
The train barely pulls out of Gunnison and we’re already in Montrose. I must have nodded off despite this damn foot. Could be the gout. I wonder if that’s the trouble. Can somebody’s gout creep all the way up the legs and make mush out of the back. I wonder if I ruptured something last season and it’s just waiting around to line one past me when I’m not looking? Montrose has fielded some fine teams over the decade although the war took its toll. I was too old for that dance but I did spend a few feverish nights in Cuba at the turn-of-the-century.
According to the morning paper Babe Ruth hit a 587-foot homer against the Giants down in Florida. That boy has all the tools and he’s making a living. Other than the White Sox, and Joe Jackson, the Yankees seem to have an inside track on the pennant. The Reds look good in the National League. The rest of the paper is full of careful debates on Prohibition and updates on the peace conference at Versailles. It should be fun checking out the whiskey operations in the San Juans. I’ve got three kids signed from this part of the valley and all of them should show up at least until the sugar beets are ripe.
Continued tomorrow on www.sanjuanhhorseshoe.com
on “Featured Peeks” Page
Ed’s Liver and Onion Wagon Downsizing
(Gladstone, CO – Special to The Horseshoe – July 24, 2016)
The popular, albeit semi-nourishing, Ed’s Liver and Onion Wagon will not be stopping in Silverton this fall. The brightly colored Gitano cook carriage has been calling on the San Juan County Seat every month since 1953. People will surely miss the prairie schooner’s happy chimes, clattering kitchen curses and massive cow bells forged in the great halls of Petrograd off the Ballistic Isles of Romania.
The action comes as Ed celebrates his 88th birthday this month.
“Hell, I used to love working Silverton when the mines were running but things have changed a lot since them days,” said Ed. “Nowadays everyone’s too busy with smart phones and fast food to notice a fine piece of liver broiled to perfection, topped with mounds of caramelized onions and hickory bacon on the side. These folks spend more time trying to figure out the voting booth or which bathroom to use than they do perusing my menu or cultivating an original thought.”
Ed plans to sell his wagon and grow marijuana instead of pigs and onions.
“Sure he’s tired of the traveling,” said a close friend down in Colona where Ed maintains a sizeable herd of young steers and old-fashioned solutions. “The truth of the matter is that his old horses are afraid of the train and hesitate at the entrance to town. One actually ran off last summer and made it all the way back to St. Germaine before someone wrangled the bastard. Ed’s getting too old to be chasing spooked horses up and down these mountains.”
When asked about his team’s reluctance to visit Silverton Ed just stared, nodding occasionally, asking for a stick or gum or a ride to Durango, commenting on a pretty woman walking by the wagon. In no time we were sitting at the Brown Bear sipping on a beer.
Anyone wishing to procure foodstuffs from Ed is reminded to meet the wagon on the Silverton side of Ruby Wall Tuesdays and Thursdays until the snow falls. The Molas Lake Stand, operated by Ed’s two ravishing daughters, Marigold and Styx, will reopen for ski season in 2019.
– Finn McCool
Cattlemen’s Day’s Rodeo Starts tomorrow
The 116th Cattlemen’s Days PRCA Rodeo runs from July 14 – 16. Come on up or over to Gunnison and join in!
Blue Collar Force March Sends Shock Waves
(Bland Junction Peeper – July 11, 2016)
In 1880 the Tabeguache and the Northern Ute bands were removed to their reservation in Utah. It was affordable housing in the most primitive sense. Troublesome Utes, who had been silly enough to think they could maintain the nomadic lifestyle that they had enjoyed for centuries, were finally out of the hair of mining and development.
Today, due to a severe disparity of wealth, a shortage of land here in paradise and an overpopulation of the seasonal privileged, the local workforce is being evicted. Many have already been escorted across the Grand River for settlement on worker’s utopias in the Beehive State.
These destination retorts are not called reservations in 1997, nor are they referred to as relocation camps. The actual name for the centers has been thrown into the laps of several local realtors who promise to have concocted a workable term for the arcadias soon.
“We didn’t know the gov’ment could write a treaty on us,” said one of the uprooted workers. “We’re not even Indians.”
The wage slaves, who have been gradually pushed out of Western Colorado along with old ranching families and persons who do not fit the mold of the New West (cash only) will join others who have failed to cut the mustard.
“If you don’t show up with pockets stuffed with cash there’s no place for you here,” said Major McCook, the officer in charge of executing the controversial relocation orders. “Inheritance is popular, especially if you’ve got your eye on one of those cozy $500,000 cottages that dot the pristine landscape around these parts. We’re seeing more and more of the jeunesse doree’, fashionable, wealthy young people who have come to play in the Rockies. This whole enterprise is nothing personal and hardly political. It’s just business.”
Some of the more caring rich, a foggy minority group that gives to charities and drinks white wine before the fire, have expressed concern over the plight of their fellow citizens.
“We do so hope they have an enjoyable excursion and that they learn to love Utah,” said Muffy Hollandaise of Aspen. “We can’t imagine being poor or having to work all week long just to pay rent on a trailer…and it’s summer vacation and all. I remember reading about this kind of thing back in college…Charles Dickens, I think. But it all worked out in the end.”
Other fringe groups say the working class deserves to be removed since most never made the right investments and insisting on working for low wages so as to live in Western Colorado.
“Some of them even went so far as to spend every penny they made just surviving,” said Rex Montaleone, an unemployed millionaire living in Telluride. “How awful. I just hope it doesn’t affect our domestic labor pool. Maybe we should have waited until after ski season to send them packing.”
As of press time some 10,000 workers have been marched into Utah with many more scheduled for departure this month. Interested participants and students of history are encouraged to observe the massive exodus from points above the river where dinner and cocktails will be served.
A hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner, featuring a tongue-in-cheek presentation of lower middle class cuisine, will be held at the local Immigration and Naturalization Office here to determine how and when to begin construction of a mass transit system from the utopias to the workplace on this side of the river.
“We will not tolerate tardiness when it comes to employees,” said one proponent of the divine right theory.
– Kashmir Horseshoe
REAL AMERICANS
REAL AMERICANS don’t bully the weaker segments of society. Real Americans don’t pick on someone who is already down. Real Americans don’t blame others if their lives suck. Real Americans get it and take responsibility for their own lives and the lives of their families. Happy Fourth to all of the Real Patriots, men and women who know how and why we became a nation and what it takes to preserve our integrity. – Jingles Jingo
July 4, 2016
Do you have blue blood like out like our elected “leaders”?
photo by Jeff Brown in Juneau What?
