A week of newspaper humorists -- today me!

I once was the resident humor columnist for the Douglas County News-Press. You’ve heard of it, right? We were a tri-weekly newspaper. We tried to come out three times a week, Monday and Thursday in Castle Rock, Colorado, and Wednesday in our sister city of Parker.

Editor Jeanie Adkins hired me in 1978 to be a news reporter and photographer. After I was there a couple months, I wrote what I thought was a funny column. Jeanie liked it and ran it. She may have been desperate to fill space in that issue.

But publication is encouragement for a writer, almost as good as money, so I wrote another column and another and another. Jeanie’s dad, Jim Adkins – the publisher – snickered when he read them. Sometimes he laughed out loud. So I had an in-house audience.

At the time, Sallie and I lived outside of the teeny-tiny town of Sedalia, so I made Sedalia the locus for many of my columns. When I ran out of contemporary issues to spoof, I created a history for the town that I said I had found in a coffee can that had been buried, like a time capsule, by the railroad tracks. Three-Toed Jack Sedalia was the first character to appear in The Sedalia Chronicles. Jack, the town’s marshal, was the fastest draw in the West, so fast that he shot off two of his toes. I claimed the town fathers were so appreciative of Jack for cleaning up frontier crime in their town that they named the town in his honor.

Jack’s adventures entertained readers for the better part of two years.

Sedalia in all its history always was an insignificant town, so once I had Three-Toed Jack and the town fathers steal the Castle Rock from Castle Rock, the county seat, and transport the rock in the dark of the night to Sedalia – so Sedalia would have a tourist attraction, so Sedalia would at last be a town of note.

Now the Castle Rock is huge. It covers several acres and may be 150 feet high. I climbed it with a friend who liked to go up to the top with his paints and canvas, and paint scenics. There is no way anyone could steal the rock, but we did – well, Jack and his buddies did.

Several readers called in after the column ran, incensed that “those wild hairs up in Sedalia stole our rock.” When Jim told me about the calls, he shook his head. “Some people just don’t understand humor,” he said.

At one time while I was with the newspaper, a public ruckus arose over the cemeteries in and around Denver – we were running out of room for the dead. Jack Nicholas had just been hired to design a championship golf course to be built in our county – our county was the first south of Denver, so we were a bedroom community for a lot of people who worked in Denver, people who liked to play golf . . . people who eventually would die.

Well, it occurred to me that a golf course could do double-duty. It could be both a golf course and a cemetery. Golfers get the fairways and the greens, and the dead get the roughs, at least those who can afford such a splendid final resting place. So, in the column I wrote laying all this out, I buried Jim in one of the roughs.

He loved it.

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Comment by Jerry Peterson on June 6, 2010 at 9:26am
Our circulation area was Douglas County. If you lived in Douglas County and worked in Denver, you subscribed to the Denver Post for the big news . . . and you subscribed to our paper for news of your children's schools, county government, water and sewer issues, all that local stuff that the Post didn't cover. My column was the bonus.
Comment by Edith Glass on June 6, 2010 at 2:20am
Too funny. Never saw the Douglas County News-Press but then I suspect it didn't make it to Denver from what you said. Wish it had, I'd have loved to follow The Sedalia Chronicles

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