The Saguache Crescent: The Last of Its Kind
CBS News Sunday Morning
The Saguache Crescent, the only newspaper in the United States still produced on a hot metal Linotype, is celebrating its 133th year in operation in Saguache, Colorado. Third generation newspaperman, Dean I. Combs is a one-man show writing, printing, distributing a paper which keeps readers aware of political, social, and business events of the community. The weekly paper is the glue that holds the community together. Since 1889, the newspaper office on 4th Street has been the epicenter of communication for the county seat in Saguache County, Colorado.
The Saguache Crescent Building is a hoarder’s paradise of printing equipment, machines, tools, type, pictorial linotype, supplies, historical and archival materials that document the concerns and life of this unique Colorado town. The prodigious collection crowds out the building and there is little room to walk around. The intact social history of a ranching and farming community exists within its walls. Combs is the watchdog and protector of this cache.
Saguache is a ranching and farming community, one without skiing or tourism industries that inevitably and permanently changes the fabric of the town. The rhythms of farming and ranching life rule here and makes the community unique. The newspaper usurps Facebook and Twitter as a communication tool. Events announced in the paper are well attended.
Enter the newspaper office and Combs magically appears from the back of a dark and clutter workspace. What’s back there I wondered as I talked to him about his newspaper .
He is the last of his kind and has not been able to find anyone to take his place. He learned the trade from his father, who learned the trade from his father. Combs so loves his paper, the process, and his place in the community.
“You have to be an eccentric to do this job.” He told me as we talked and I asked if he had an apprentice to keep the paper alive. Combs is somewhere in his 60’s, neatly dress, plaid-shirted, eye-glassed, and sports a beard he cannot control. “I’d rather work with women than men.” he says.
At one time, he had some help. “The men think they know how to fix these machines. They can’t. And women tell me the machines are broken and then take long coffee breaks at the 4th Street Diner & Bakery leaving me to fix them. I much prefer it that way.”
He is well aware when he goes the paper goes unless someone equally eccentric and smitten comes forward. Everyone in the town knows he keeps banker’s hours. The shop opens at 10AM closes at 5PM and he takes an hour noon lunch at the 4th Street Bakery across the street. The news finds him as members of the community know they have to drop off their copy at the newspaper office.
While I was in the office, someone from the Sheriff’s office came in to drop off legal notices, which are the fiscal backbone of the paper. Other country and court legal notifications also help support the paper.
Count me in and I wrote an $18.00 check and received the news from direct from Saguache Country in the heart of the San Luis Valley on the Front Range. Classifieds are only two dollars, advertising revenue is sketchy, but the paper continues to be published thanks to the epic dedication of Dean I. Combs.
What does the paper report? The news from the library—they just received a grant for literary outreach to toddlers. A weekly column from the school district. Editorials on future fracking and current water issues. Information about the annual Hollyhock Festival.
A reminders from Saguache County Road and Bridge Department will pay a $5.00 bounty for coyote ears. All of the legal news including foreclosure notices, calls for volunteers to serve on the library board, the Colorado River Water Conservation District, and poetry from local poets.
At Christmas, Combs unearths vintage pictorial Christmas linotype block prints resurrected from somewhere in his office that the townspeople and businesses use to convey holiday wishes to each other. It is a beautiful, artful issue.
On the very bottom of some columns, he publishes quotes from literary giants. One from Mark Twain says, “If you tell the truth you won’t have to remember anything.” Or Joseph Conrad reminds us, “The mind of a man is capable of anything—because everything is in it all the past as well as all the future.” Or Henry James shares, “It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” I have come to believe that the quotes are a kind of code into the inner life of Saguache’s most literary citizen.
How to Subscribe
My husband Stephen and I subscribe to The Saguache Crescent every year. It affords us the pleasures of peering into the past and embracing the heart beat of a small community in Colorado where everything is simple and uncomplicated and good. Stephen and I need The Saguache Crescent in our lives to sooth our souls in these troubled times.
To subscribe for a yearly subscription, please send a check to
The Saguache Crescent
P.O. Box 915
Saguache, Colorado 81149
Phone: 719-655-2620
Enclosing
$16 for a Saguache County residence
$18 for a Colorado residence
$20 for out an of state residence
I hope that you enjoy the publication as much as we do!
