Letap start with the eye. For most of his 78 years, Bob Saile had only one eye that worked worth a darn. But Saile saw twice as much as most of us, whether looking for a way to gently caress the 8-ball into a corner pocket or scoping out a stretch of river filled with fish.
“Bob was the child all mothers worry about,” Carol Saile said, with the bluntly irreverent honesty her husband of 54 years would certainly appreciate.
Saile was a hunter. His job was to track down everything that makes living in Colorado better than living anywhere else. Maybe one eye sharpened his focus. If you’re lucky, there’s a 20-inch trout you hooked, thanks to the secrets Saile revealed during nearly three decades (1970-97) as the outdoors editor at The Denver Post.
I don’t think it was entirely by accident the newspaper sat a raw, scrawny, young sportswriter at a desk within shouting distance of Saile way back in 1983, because he scared me into believing a grammatical error in my copy was one of the seven deadly sins. So after all these years, I had never worked up the nerve to ask why Saile was blind in one eye until Tuesday, 24 hours after he passed away.
“Bob was the 10-year-old kid who got his eye put out with a slingshot. He got hit, and several days later, he was blind in one eye,” said Carol Saile, who fell in love with a writer deft handling either a pool stick or a tough story. “Bob was the boy who started mothers saying: ‘Put that thing down, you could put somebody’s eye out.’ ”
But man, oh man, did Saile see some stuff during his time roaming this earth, from dark taverns choked with cigar smoke to crystal clear Rocky Mountain vistas like John Denver used to sing about.
Despite wrestling most of his life with the chronic pain of spinal arthritis, Saile laughed on a bar stool next to astronaut Wally Schirra, talked civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr. and raised three kids. Colorado ranchers and government bureaucrats alike got nothing except straight talk from Saile. In his mind, feisty conservative and staunch environmentalist need not be mutually exclusive. Born at the tail end of the Great Depression to an engineer on the Hoover Dam, Saile grew into an activist who shouted down construction of the Two Forks Dam in order to keep the South Platte River running wild and free.
Whether raising his voice to call a turkey in the field or call attention to the dangers of whirling disease, itap the passion that rang true. Saile was always thirsty for more. He liked to tell a story of stopping for a burger in rural Colorado, and asking the waitress where a fisherman could buy some alcohol.
“You want whiskey?” the waitress replied. “Thatap the Road to Ruin.”
Saile flinched, expecting to get nailed by a teetotaler’s sermon.
“No,” the waitress sweetly explained. “Itap just two blocks down the street, on the left. The name of the liquor store is The Road to Ruin.”
Saile often wore a beat-up cowboy hat, the perfect cover for being sneaky funny and stealthy smart. He understood a mentor could be any old Texas A&M Aggie with a little knowledge and a heart big enough to share it. What did Saile teach me? Well, it was really no different from the encouragement he gladly offered to countless other Coloradans:
In this state, there’s no bad road to take. Around the next corner, there’s probably something beautiful, and even if the big fish gets away, itap a great day, because we are blessed to live here.
