New West Book Review

A Review of “Colorado Curiosities” by Pam Grout

By Jenny Shank, 8-16-06

Colorado Curiosities
by Pam Grout
Globe Pequot Press, 275 pages, $13.95

Colorado Curiosities, which hit bookstores last month, is the latest entry in the burgeoning group of travel guides to roadside attractions and unusual sights--besides the Insiders' Guide Curiosities series, there's also the Oddball series, with a Colorado book that came out a few years back, and the Weird series, which hasn't issued a Colorado volume yet. It's amazing there's enough local color left in this rapidly homogenizing country to fuel so many publications. I've lived in Colorado all of my sentient life, and so I wondered if Colorado Curiosities would contain any information that would surprise me. The answer is not really--we all know about Nederland's Frozen Dead Guy Days and Fruita's annual celebration of Mike the Headless Chicken by now. But Colorado Curiosites is still interesting to skim through for more in-depth stories behind familiar attractions, and would come in handy for amusement on road trips across the state.

Tellingly, just last week the Rocky Mountain News ran a local curiosities feature ("Way Out West") that included many of the same things highlighted in Colorado Curiosities, such as the UFO-shaped Sleeper house in Genessee (which I'd always be excited to spot as a kid on my way up to the mountains), and Casa Bonita. As someone who attended many obligatory Casa Bonita birthday parties growing up, I wish people would stop calling the restaurant "odd." Restaurants that feature speedo-clad young people diving from indoor, artificial cliffs should be the norm, in my view. Grout points out that Casa Bonita "is the largest restaurant in the Western Hemisphere," which must be why it has been so awe-inspiring to generations of Denver kids, despite the dreaded side dish of grayish canned peas that come with most food orders.

One new fact I learned from Grout's book is that Telluride "was the first town on the planet to have electric street lamps." Coloradoans claim to have invented both the cheeseburger and the teddy bear--according to Grout, the cheeseburger claim is backed up by a 1935 patent filed by the owner of Colorado's now-defunct Humpty Dumpty Barrel Drive-In, but the teddy bear title is more specious: "According to the Colorado teddy bear contingent, Teddy Roosevelt used the Hotel Colorado as a base camp during a bear-hunting expedition in May 1905. After a hard day of hunting, the president came back empty-handed, so hotel maids took pity on him and stitched him a small bear from rags." In fact, the teddy bear appears to have been invented elsewhere, three years earlier.

As for Boulder, The Alferd Packer Grill on CU Campus, named after "the only man in America Ever to be convicted of cannibalism," the Pearl Street Mall zip code guy and Ibashi-I, the guy who folds himself to fit inside a Plexiglass box, all made the cut. This reminds me of how normal out-of-the-ordinary people and places can seem to someone who has lived in an area for many years. When I have guests in town, I take them to the Pearl Street Mall, and they often want to stop and watch the street performers, who I usually blow past without a glance. So, despite some forced humor--for example, Grout tries to make light of a gas chamber that's open to visitors in Canon City--and ill-advised puns, Colorado Curiosities proves to be an informative, readable guide to Colorado's less-known attractions.

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