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Memories of Chester Miles
by James Burke
I
met Chet Miles in 1969 San Francisco.
Chet opined that I wouldn’t know his old hometown.
When he said Ridgway,
Colorado, I smiled knowingly.
Chet grew up in Ridgway in the Twenties—
before I was born.
He told of fishing trips with his father—on the trains—
north to Montrose—then east to Sapinero
and south to a favorite spot on the Lake Fork.
Each day they’d pack rainbows in ice from the shadows
and hand the package up to the train from Lake City.
The train men would transfer it to the Ridgway train
at Sapinero
and that night there’d be fresh trout on his mother’s table.
Chet went to college in Boulder in the Thirties
which took him many times
on the plush if narrow coaches
through the Black Canyon and over Marshall Pass.
The flavor of an untainted high country lifestyle,
which has been ripped up and paved over and lost,
was rich in his stories of San Juan Adventures
and as fragrant as the smoke from old Three-forty.
I “photo’d” her rolling into Ridgway with ore from Ouray
in the summer of ‘49—twenty years after Chet saw her
and twenty years before Chet and I met.
Today on this spot I would be standing on tennis courts.
The 340 is hauling kids in circles at Knott’s Berry Farm.
Only the old creamery building has stood its ground.
But I have returned
in search of the memories of Chester Miles.
James
Burke, railroad historian and
photographer is the associate publisher of the "San Juan Silver Stage."
His railroad photographs and writings have appeared in a variety of
publications
throughout the United States.
WARNING.
If
this story appears on any other internet site, the publisher, domain
registrant
and web host WILL BE PERSECUTED AND PROSECUTED.
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