Runaways at The Rack

Like mute metal newsboys on the corner, newspaper racks are the slot machines of journalism. You put your money in and take your chances that there’s news you want to peruse.

Slot machines, and piggy banks. When you own a newspaper with racks you have little cash stashes all over town. Run short in the video store because the girls forgot to bring back the DVD for a week … Take some change out of the rack out front.

I pay for lots of things in quarters.

When we bought the paper, I put a big red Folgers coffee can in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet next to my desk. I would put that week’s haul of coins from the racks into the can; the idea to save money for my oldest daughter Riley’s college.

We soon realized it was going to cost a lot more than a fistful of quarters each week to put a kid through college, and started putting money into college fund investments, which the three-piece-suited Wall Street Peg Boys lost half of just about the time we were getting ready to put her through school.

So instead, over the years, the Folgers can has become my own personal company slush fund.

I’ve bought weed with it. For two summers, I sponsored a late model stock car driven by a local woman. One time, when Riley wanted to buy a camera, I told her she could have whatever was in the can to put toward it.

I once gave it to a kid just because I was in a good mood and he walked into the office with his mom, and I used it once to buy a new boom box for a teen-ager in Milliken who had his stolen that I did a story about.

When we first bought the paper, I called down to the Rocky Mountain News and asked about buying one of their used racks. After we got the paper out one Thursday I drove down to Denver to their warehouse.

A guy led me into a vast room where hundreds of Rocky racks sat in rows like blue Chinese terra cotta warriors.

“Look at the shit people do to these things,” he said, pointing to one that was riddled with bullet holes, sitting next to another that looked like it had been ripped open with a giant can opener. “If your town will let you, fucking bolt them to the sidewalk. You’ll still have people who drive pickups into them and shit to knock them over, but it’ll stop the ones who cut the chain around the street sign.”

The Rocky guy was adamant that I repaint the rack, apparently concerned that somehow people would confuse my small town weekly cow-rag for the then largest circulation daily newspaper in the state. I took it up to the local high school and gave it to the art class. I wanted artistic, I told them. They came back with a collage of images … for some reason a shark on one side, which was a bit weird for a landlocked paper in northern Colorado, but … and we took a picture of the students and the newly-painted rack and ran it in color on the front page.

Just recently, I tried to buy some more Rocky racks. In the intervening years the News has gone out of business, all its hardware swallowed up by The Denver Post, which won the newspaper war. I was always a Rocky man myself. The Breeze is a tabloid format, like the Rocky was, and I’ve never been fond of the inky-fingered origami mind-fuck that comes with reading broadsheet newspapers.

At first the guy at the Post told me that was fine. Later, he emailed and said that he had thought they still had some Rocky racks, but apparently they were all gone. Did I want some Post racks?

Who knows, maybe they shipped all the old Rocky racks to China and melted them down for Toyota fenders. Maybe my shit-talk about the Post over the years, and my obvious siding with the Rocky, hadn’t gone unnoticed by my daily Post brethren in Denver, but I honestly had to think about it for a moment. The vibe of it all. My papers in the Evil Empire’s racks…

Finally, I decided to buy the Post racks and just smudge them with pot smoke for a good cleansing after I got them painted … again by a new generation of teenage artists in the Roosevelt High School art program.

This time I said the only constraints were that somewhere on the rack, in whatever typeface they wanted, it needed to say “The Breeze.” I specifically wanted them to leave out the word “Johnstown” as part of our on-going campaign to convince Milliken, a town we cover just two miles to the east which does not have its own paper, that the Breeze is their paper too. Back when we used to put mailing labels on the paper, I used to have the crew put the Milliken address labels right across the word “Johnstown” in the nameplate on the front page.

I put that original rack out at Johnson’s Corner, a world-famous truck stop that sits several miles west of Johnstown along Interstate 25, a major north/south travel route across the country. About a year or so after we put it out there, the interior coin mechanism broke. You could now open the rack without putting money in. I was baffled how to fix it, and hesitated removing it lest I lose my position, so it became a de-facto test of the type of person people are: The kind who pulls the door before they put in the money, thinking they might get something for nothing, or the honest citizen consumer, who puts in their money and then takes out your newsprint wisdom.

My peeling paint barometer of human honesty. With a shark on the side.

Every week, I pull a handful of quarters out of the rack. And this past summer, I also pulled more than a weird share of runaways out of the parking lot in front of it.

The scene at the interstate truck stop at early morning is probably an every day scene. Truckers and other travelers pick up hitch-hikers somewhere in the state in the middle of the night, and if they’re heading north along the Front Range, it’s likely they may stop at Johnson’s Corner. Perfect place to leave or be shed of someone for the next part of their journey.

The all-night truck stop restaurant crew usually takes pity and lets them nurse a meal, and three or four cups of coffee, through the night, but when the sun comes up they start to run them off.

And that’s where I find them: standing in front of the rack when I show up on Thursday morning to put in papers.

It used to be, right after the economic crash, it was older guys. Construction workers, oil workers, laborer-types who couldn’t find something else when the lay-offs came so they hit the road. Gruff and grungy, grumbling like old dogs with arthritis, I’d usually give them a ride to the next interstate exit, and my next stop. As we’d talk in front of the rack, me trying to scope out whether they were going stick a knife in my liver and steal my truck, I’d unload the quarters from the vending box. As we’d shake hands when they got out, I’d hand them to them and wish them well.

One I didn’t give money or a ride to was The Zodiac Killer’s grandson.

Here’s what I posted on the paper’s Facebook page after I got back to the office that morning … I was so jangled.

We're not sure, but we think we met The Zodiac Killer, or his grandson, this morning when delivering papers to the rack at Johnson's Corner.

He was standing next to it. Late 40s or early 50s maybe … Hair slicked back with the toast he'd just eaten inside. Teeth browner than George Hamilton. 3-day growth. One-size-too-small leather jacket. Big Buddy Holly style glasses. He started the conversation by admiring us for not being part of the "consumer culture" for driving a 26-year-old LandCruiser. This led to a diatribe against Apple, all delivered with flat, emotionless affect, punctuated by these harsh, barking laughs … Heh, Heh, Heh … all the while staring off at the horizon. He was so creepy we actually worried he might jump in as we started to pull away, and tell us "to drive."

But this summer it was young people. Literally teenagers. Personally, I blame it on the fact that they are now teaching “Into the Wild” in English classes, setting another generation off on their own personal walk-about. If you haven’t read the book by Jon Krakhauer, it’s about a young man named Chris McCandless who decides after graduating from college to go to the Alaskan wilderness, where he eventually starves to death.

But in reality it goes far back beyond that, and even your grandfather’s beatnik, Jack Kerouac. In “Everett Ruess A Vagabond for Beauty,” (Ruess could have very well been McCandless’ grandfather. At age 21 he went along into the Utah desert with just his supplies and a burro and disappeared, never to be seen or found again), author W.L Rusho says, “Like Everett, we all yearn to cut ourselves off from the comforts and securities of a drab existence at some point in our lives. We too feel a need to enter our own small wilderness in that difficult search for a unique destiny…”

One morning there was three of them out in front of the rack, laying against the wall rummaging through their backpacks as they tried to scope out their next ride.

One of them, a small blond kid, said he was from Maine on his way to Los Angeles. The other pair, a girl with a guy who was obviously her boyfriend, initiated the conversation after I broke the ice by saying “hey” and looking at them as I started to load the rack.

We talked a bit. The couple was from Florida they said … One of the things I learned this summer was to just go with their story. Admire it for its creativity and not bug on the fact that more than likely, they are lying right to my face … The girl looked about 19. A tangled mass of black and bright blue hair hung in her eyes. The guy had dreadlocks down to the middle of his back. Momentarily I felt sorry for the blond kid, imagining what he must have to think of to try and distract his mind when the girl and guy are going at it late at night in the next stall of whatever rest stops they find to sleep in for the night.

“Can you give us a ride, mister?” the girl said.

For some reason I wasn’t into getting anymore involved in this Generation Y Peyton Place.

“I’m only going a couple of miles up the road,” I said. “The next exit isn’t the best place to pick up a ride that’s going to take you anywhere amount of distance. You’re probably better off hanging here and trying to catch a ride with someone else.”

Mr. Dreadlocks, obviously uneasy about not being the alpha male in this scenario anymore, quickly agreed.

“I just want the fuck out of here,” the girl whined.

“Really,” I said with the same smile I’d give one of my daughters, “I think you’re better off here.” I walked over and handed the girl the change from the rack. They thanked me and scurried back into the truck stop. I finished filling the rack with papers. As I was leaving, they came outside with a handful of food and drinks and started scanning the parking lot.

Then there was Tyler.

Despite the Wall Street Peg Boys, Lesli and I had been able to send Riley to college. In several weeks, she’d leave for Montana State in Bozeman to start her freshman year. Eighteen years old and straining at the reins to get out on her own, she had recently, and nicely, told me, “I really don’t care where I live, as long as it’s not with you guys.”

Tall, taller than me, with short blond hair under a baseball cap and eyes bluer than the skies my baby would soon range under alone, 10 hours away from my embrace, Tyler saw me walking toward the rack and shuffled off across the parking lot.

“Hey,” I barked. He turned around. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” he said with a shy grin.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Eighteen.”

I motioned him over to the rack.

“I’m going up the road about three miles,” I said. “At the next interchange you’ll have I-25 going north and south and Highway 34 going east and west pretty much through the state. You want a ride?”

Tyler tossed his backpack in the back of the LandCruiser with the papers and climbed in. He said he had been on the road for a bit. He had started out in his Toyota pickup, which he spoke of lovingly and like a gearhead, but it had blown up in Idaho and he’d just sort of kept going. He’d picked up a ride in the mountains of Colorado and they’d left him off here at the truck stop.

We pulled up to my next stop. He climbed out. I handed him the handful of change from my jacket pocket. I also pulled out a business card.

“See this side of the highway,” I said. “This is the town of Johnstown. See that side of the highway?” I said, motioning across the road. “That’s the city of Loveland. If you’re going to get in trouble, get in trouble on this side and give the cop my card and tell him to call me.”

“What’s on that side,” Tyler said.

“A huge mall,” I said.

“there would  be girls there?” he said with a grin.

“Lots and lots,” I said.

I told Lesli when I got back to the office about meeting Tyler. She smiled and suggested that when I give them the change I need to tell them that they needed to call home with part of it. They didn’t have to say where they were, if they didn’t want to, but they needed people to know they were alive. She also joked that Tyler was going to wind up in a field dead, with no ID, and just a business card with my name and a bunch of quarters in his pockets with my fingerprints on them. I said that well at least I would be able to tell them that he said his name was Tyler, And he said he lived in Montana.

Tyler and I shook hands. I told him to be careful. As I walked into the store with my papers I looked back at him. He had shouldered his pack and was already scrambling up the grass berm hill on the other side of the road. He had not looked back.