During the past 40 years, National Geographic magazine has taken me around the globe, from the summit of Mount Everest to the depths of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench.
Friday morning it took me to Bennett, a high-plains town 25 miles east of Denver. I don’t know the precise intersection of latitude and longitude, but it put me at a dining room table in a small frame house on Elm Street.
The house belongs to Mark Russell, and the reason I wound up on his doorstep was a newspaper ad he had run: Nat’l Geographic Collection, 1915-2007. $2,000. 303-644-4899
That’s a lot of glossy mags with canary-yellow bindings. We’re talking 1,100 copies spanning 92 years, all neatly shelved in old wooden milk crates.
He has built the collection over a quarter-century, but its roots go back much further.
Russell is 50, a burly man with an affable face and gray flecking his beard. He was an Air Force brat who grew up with four siblings, an alcoholic dad and a mother frayed at the edges.
“It was a furnace of a family,” he said.
The magazines were his escape. Today they are his time machine.
Take the August 1965 issue. It was dedicated to the career and state funeral of Winston Churchill, complete with an acetate 45-rpm insert of excerpts from his speeches. Thumbing through a copy transports Russell to his granddad’s Nebraska farm.
“It was so hot there in the summer that I’d just get me a stack of the magazines and sit in front of the swamp cooler in the kitchen, and my head would be somewhere else,” Russell said.
The magazines retain that hold.
Bennett is a pleasant community, but no one would call it bustling. The tallest buildings are the grain silos, which rise above the Union Pacific Railroad tracks.
Between the relative isolation and the train whistles that remind residents of the world beyond the town limits, it’s a perfect place for an armchair adventurer.
“As a single man, I’m not much on traveling,” Russell said. “But I can read these magazines and go anyplace. It’s a great way to learn about the world around me.”
Now he’s selling them. He’s been out of work, laid off from his tech job at an aircraft company.
“If I had my druthers, I’d keep them,” he said. “But they represent a couple of house payments. Even with the sentimental value, if I have to move for a new job I don’t want to haul them around.
“It was a hard decision.”
Russell is adamant about one thing: He won’t break up the collection. “I don’t want to separate them,” he said. “My desire is that it goes to someone who wants to improve their collection.”
His own start came when his granddad died, and he got the National Geographics. Trolling antique stores and want ads, he built his trove, which includes most of the bonus maps that arrived with the magazines.
The oldest issues, from 1915-1949, were purchased from an Aurora couple. The woman was a nurse during World War II, her husband a Navy frogman.
The couple was Jewish, and one day while flipping through a “Flags of the World” feature from the late 1930s, Russell found they had razored out the Nazi flag.
In his eyes, that merely enhanced the copy’s value. “I liked that,” he said.
He hopes a buyer will, too.
William Porter’s column runs twice a week. Reach him at 303-954-1977 or wporter@denverpost.com
