PHOTO OF THE DAY: A WET MOUNTAIN THANKS

This week’s Publisher’s Desk by Jeremy Waltner

A Wet Mountain ‘thanks’

Family vacations were the rule, not the exception, when I was growing up. My mom and dad placed high value on travel — they still do — and told my sister and I during our childhood that taking us to places outside of our own, small world was an investment worth making.

Much of our travel included two frequent destinations: Bluffton, Ohio, where my mom spent most of her growing-up years; and Westcliffe, Colo., a mountain town located about 150 miles south of Denver. Our relationship with Westcliffe was through a small lot located in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that my grandfather — my mom’s dad — acquired in the 1940s.

And it was through that connection with south central Colorado that my family learned about the Wet Mountain Tribune, Westcliffe’s newspaper. It made sense that we would take interest in the weekly publication; my dad’s newspaper career began in the 1970s, when he was in his 20s, and was just beginning to flourish in the early 1980s, when I was a boy.

I was reminded of the Wet Mountain Tribune last week when paging through the Nov. 23, 1983 edition of the Freeman Courier published one year before my dad would take over the operation. In it was a reprint of a beautiful editorial piece the Tribune had carried the year before titled, simply, “Thanks.”

Save for several Colorado-specific details, it could have been written about our own towns.

“Thanks for everything,” it reads. “Thanks for letting us live in one of the most beautiful places in the whole world. A place where everyone takes time, makes time, to stop and say what’s new. Thanks for all the merchants who make you feel like you’re the most important customer around, and for the doctor and nurses who do the same. Thanks for all the bartenders who make sure the beer’s kept cold and the welcome warm, and for the waitresses who keep your coffee cup full.

“Thanks for the seasons. For the smell of fresh cut hay, and winds blowing through the pines. For the sound of swollen creeks in spring and the rustling aspen groves in fall. For early summer days and quiet winter nights when the snow piles deep. For the fourth of July in the park and the Stampede at the rodeo grounds …

“Thanks for pickups and tractors, hay wagons and hiking boots. For winter evenings around a fire, and rowdy dances under the summer sky …

“Thanks for all the people. The cowboys and the truckers, the hippies and the red necks, the teachers and the tourists, the little old ladies and all the pre-school kids. For the small town gossip over coffee and the worldly problems over beers. For church bells on Sundays and quitting time on Fridays.

“And thanks for Thanksgiving, which reminds us how much we really have to be thankful for.”