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.”
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
