Article by Orville Wright
Local lore – December 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
BEING TIED UP (down) by three surgeries this summer has left me with too much time on my hands. I still can’t exercise and I’m getting fed up with sitting in a lounger reading books and watching the idiot lantern. As a result, my mind is working overtime and the word processor is really catching it.
My wife’s high school class held their 45th reunion at the Salida Senior Center in September. Several of the guys in her class were good friends of mine, but my present state of confinement caused us to miss the event. With all of the idle time on my hands, however, I keep recalling my formative years in and around Salida.
Growing up in a small town during the 40s and 50s was an experience that many people today can only read about.
But this doesn’t imply that there are no more small towns left. It merely means that life is considerably different now than it was fifty years ago. There are exceptions, to be sure, but by and large, things just aren’t the same.
When I was young, a lot of older people still had ice-boxes instead of refrigerators. My grandmother had two of the things on her back porch and used them until the ice house went out of business in the early 50s. During the summer, it was always a treat to mooch a small piece of ice from Mr. Koch, the man who drove the ice wagon. Never mind that it often had dirt or pond grass in it; it was cold and wet, just the way ice was meant to be. (And for some reason, we never got sick.)
When was the last time you took off for the movies on a summer evening and left all of your doors and windows wide open so the house wouldn’t be hot and stuffy when you got home? We did that all of the time and never thought anything about it. Now, we fire up the air conditioner. Locking the door is simply an act of asset preservation.
Many times, we — the whole family — used to walk to the movies. If my folks met somebody they knew along the way, everybody stopped and had a face-to-face chat. In today’s world, it is a rare event when a family manages to get together at the same time in the same place. Also, it seems as though everybody’s legs fall off about the time they get their driver’s license.
Now, if the whole clan manages to go somewhere together, they usually drive to wherever it is. As a rule, one person in the car will probably have their face glued to a cell phone for at least part of the trip. If we happen to see somebody we know, we wave and/or honk the horn at them. Any wonder why our person-to-person social skills are a bit lacking at times?
THE CRIME SITUATION was entirely different back then, too. This isn’t to say that we didn’t have a few bad apples who provided job security for the Police Department. But everybody knew who the bad guys were and that was that. When something happened, the police could normally round up the usual suspects and solve the problem. (This was before the days of Miranda when the police could actually talk to the crooks.)
Kids usually didn’t get into too much trouble back then because they knew their old man would take care of things at home when he found out what had happened — and, for some reason, he ALWAYS managed to find out. Sometimes it took several days, but justice was eventually served. If there was no father in the family, somebody was usually around to take care of the situation.
This isn’t to say we didn’t raise our own particular brand of hell. It simply means most of us didn’t pull the malicious stuff you hear about in today’s society. Tipping over a privy was great fun (unless you fell into the hole). Believe it or not, there were a few outhouses in the Salida area in the 1950s, and some of them were still in use. That activity, combined with window soaping, was usually limited to the time frame around Halloween.
Tying a string of tin cans to the high school math teacher’s car bumper or putting a pop bottle over the end of his radio antenna was always fun. The gentleman lived in an apartment over Laws Print Shop on F Street and parked his car at the curb in front of the building. After dark, it was also possible to tie a string of cans or a trash can lid onto the rear bumper of Salida’s only police car when it was parked in its reserved spot by the bank at the corner of Second and F Streets.
BACK THEN, the police actually walked a beat downtown instead of just driving up and down the street. (That was why the car was parked by the bank.) If there was a police emergency and nobody was at the police station to answer the phone, or if the officers were out of the car, the telephone operator turned on a red light that hung in the middle of F Street midway between 1st and 2nd streets. Back then, officers didn’t carry a portable radio — they didn’t even exist.
After the movies, we could get a fountain Coke for a nickel at the Salida Candy Kitchen or Lewis soda fountain next door to the bank. If we were flush with cash, we could order a Tin Roof for a quarter. The bowl of peanuts was left on the counter so we could put as many nuts on top of the marshmallow creme as we wanted. We also used to get a glass of ice water with a paper-wrapped straw. (That is, until we got caught dipping the end of the straw wrapper into the marshmallow creme and blowing it up to the ceiling where it usually stuck.) Back then, the ceilings in most of the older business buildings were about 9 feet tall, so it meant climbing a ladder to clean the straws off of the ceiling.
If we were exceptionally daring, we could dump a can of engine cleaner down the carburetor intake of a 1946 Chevy, usually by the park at 4th and F Streets, then drive through the business district. If done properly, one could lay down a blanket of smoke that would obscure almost everything on F Street between 3rd and 1st Streets. It was most impressive when done during the daytime. However, because the risk of being apprehended and/or identified was relatively high, we usually reserved this performance for the evening hours. One of the individuals involved in this stunt was dating the daughter of a former member of the Salida City Council, who was a manager at KVRH. Another of the regular perpetrators was the son of someone on the school board. All of them were members of our local Boy Scout Explorer Post. So apprehension by the local Gendarmerie could have caused much anguish in several quarters.
The smoke screen stunt required a bit of prior planning, since a can of engine cleaner had to be immediately available. Depending upon the financial status of the persons involved, or the time of day, it was not always possible to obtain the required ingredients on a spur of the moment urge. When this happened, a less costly but equally impressive alternative was available:
THE STOCK MUFFLER on a 1946 Chevy contained a series of baffles designed to reduce engine exhaust noise. That same set of baffles was also capable of capturing a large quantity of unburned gasoline vapor if the vehicle’s ignition switch was turned off for a short time while the car was in motion. It seemed to be most effective when the transmission was in 2nd gear with the vehicle traveling on a slight downgrade.
When the ignition switch was turned on again, the gasoline vapor would ignite, resulting in a rather loud explosion, and a large ball of fire shot out of the tailpipe. To achieve the maximum auditory and visual effect, this stunt was normally performed at night on the main drag somewhere between 3rd and Front Streets. The buildings helped magnify the sound very nicely. But we limited ourselves to a single nightly performance, usually once or twice a month.
One performance, in particular, still comes to mind:
The father of an occasional participant in these acts of insanity owned a small liquor store on the west side of F Street, about midway between First Street and Front Street[a/k/a/ Sackette Avenue]. After dark during the summer, it was not unusual for him to sit in front of his store on a tall wooden stool, leaning back against the building.
One evening, while this gentleman was in his usual recumbent state — and at the specific request of his son — a ’46 Chevy was prompted to backfire directly in front of the liquor store. Because the tailpipe pointed toward that side of the street, the visual effect was rather dramatic. After turning around at the train depot, we observed the liquor store owner out in the street picking up his stool, and chose an alternate route back into the business district.
ALTHOUGH A NEW muffler had been installed shortly after that vehicle was purchased, it suffered a major structural failure early in its service life — probably hastened by the repeated episodes of violent over-pressure.
The stock muffler was replaced by a Hollywood muffler, which was little more than a hollow metal can with a pipe sticking out of each end. Consequently, it didn’t backfire very well, but produced a considerable amount of noise ALL of the time. The girl that is now the wife of the then owner of that vehicle says she could hear it coming from two blocks away when she was standing out in front of her house in the morning waiting for a ride to school.
In 1957, the driver of the ’46 Chevy managed to receive a Safe Driving Award from Salida Building & Loan at a high school awards assembly, and he subsequently spent 28 years as a traffic cop.
Somewhere along the line, we all finally got it together and settled down. One of those pranksters is now an attorney in Grand Junction. Another one lives in California.
Orville Wright, who grew up in Salida, is a retired state trooper now living in Broomfield
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Some things hereabouts haven’t changed very much. Salidans still walk to the movie theater. (We always walked with our daughters in the ’80s, and now we see our neighbors walking all over town with their toddlers.)
And although the local police strongly discourage such customs: many Salidans still don’t lock their homes or cars; in the summer many locals routinely leave screened doors and windows open (especially if they’re merely going to be gone a few hours or less); and some residents even leave their keys in their vehicles (or in cold weather leave their vehicles running in parking lots).
To be fair to local teens, we’d also like to point out that cigarette smoking, underage drinking, hanging out in groups, and making too much noise have been the foremost offenses for generations in Salida, and that hasn’t changed. But standards have.
WE’RE A TOURIST TOWN NOW. In the twenty-first century, it’s not all right to carve your initials on aspen trees; drink and drive; improperly dispose of chewing gum; or post graffiti on abandoned railroad buildings and the old water tower. Broken glass along the railroad tracks and river is a menace. Modern sound systems make for an untenable amount of noise, and crowds of teens standing on street corners scare people.
We don’t know whether small town teens are basically the same or different, but local controversies periodically develop regarding the behavior of local young people, and inevitably several parents (and occasionally even grandparents) say the same thing: “We did the same things when we were young, and we turned out fine.”
But times are different. Today, more of the people that kids annoy are strangers, rather than friends, neighbors and relatives. And due to highly publicized national cases, people are far more aware of what can go wrong.
Recently, a friend in his seventies told us he felt sorry for kids these days. When the police brought his son home from a drinking party in the ’60s, he grounded him and made him paint the house; but when his grandson was caught attending a similar party, there were charges, court appearances, fines, newspaper articles, and repercussions at school.
Such historic discrepancies have divided small communities, but there’s no going back — because even though kids may not have changed all that much, adults are not nearly as naive and trusting as they once were.
–Martha Quillen
