Greetings from Leadville, Colorado, which, rising at more than 10,150 feet, is the nation's highest incorporated city.
I thought it would be fun to write a little travelogue from the road, a fluffy piece about a once-proud mining town that today looks a little worn, especially when compared to its fabulously wealthy neighbors like Aspen. But as is usual in my life, serendipity or fate took control of the wheel and instead I find myself pondering the incredibly rich saga of Baby Doe Tabor, who, together with her husband, is Leadville's greatest celebrity, a woman whose impoverished beginnings morphed into incredible wealth and fame, only to return back to destitution and seclusion. And for me, the story of Baby Doe has a bit of everything, from a humorous opera connection (everything in my life comes seems to come back to opera) to a much more serious and cautionary tale about the death of newspapers.
Now, before you start shaking your heads, asking how in the world the story of a scandalous marriage in 1883 (at The Willard, no less!) between a divorced young woman and a divorced man twenty-six years her senior could have anything to do with the death of newspapers, bear with me.
This all started, as do many conversations in my life, with a stranger standing next to me. We were in line at the Advantage rental car office at the Denver airport yesterday, waiting patiently for more than an hour an a half to get a car, when I struck up a conversation. (A quick warning: Do not, under any circumstances, rent from Advantage in Denver. The cheap rates will suck you in, like sirens to Ulysses, but the service is beyond terrible. And my car smells like an ashtray.) I asked this gentleman what he did and he replied that he was a percussionist with the Rochester Symphony and was on his way to Vail to play a music festival. He asked me where I was headed and I told him Aspen, though I planned to spend a few days writing in the much less upscale town of Leadville, a place I picked completely at random. (I wanted a cheap room and nothing to distract me.)
"They have a famous opera house in Leadville," he said.
"Really?" I replied. " I love opera. Who knew?!"
"Yeah, it's a funny place" he said. "By the way, did you know Renée Fleming is from Rochester?"
I didn't know that, in fact. Fleming is, of course, one of the greatest sopranos of all time. But I was more intrigued by little Leadville and its opera house. We said our goodbyes and I started driving up and up towards my destination.
Leadville is a neat place, actually, known more for what it once was than for what is is today. The birthplace of the silver rush of the late 1800's, it once boasted a population of more than 40,000. Nowadays, according to a quick census check, that population is somewhere below 3,000. But it doesn't seem to matter much. The mountain views are spectacular, the air is clean (and thin), and I keep looking both ways before crossing streets on the main drag only to realize there are rarely any cars coming. It may be rusty but it's decidedly unpretentious, and that suits me fine.
One thing that is inescapable to anyone visiting Leadville is the legend of Baby Doe Tabor. She is everywhere, from postcards to videos for sale to tours of the Matchless Mine and opera house she and her husband, Horace Tabor, once owned. In fact, tomorrow night, descendants of Baby Doe's sister will perform "The Opulent and Tragic Baby Doe Tabor" in the restored opera house. And while I first chuckled a bit, thinking immediately of one of my favorite movies of all time, "Waiting for Guffman," and its community theater ode to Blaine, Missouri (Corky St. Clair and "Red, White, and Blaine"), people around here take the Tabor saga pretty seriously. And the more you read, the more you understand why. This story has everything, from class struggles to poltical favors to a daughter named "Silver Dollar." (Her real name, no lie.)
The story goes basically like this (and for a more detailed history, click here): Born Elizabeth McCourt in 1854, Baby Doe (a nickname that sticks) divorces husband number one and meets Horace Tabor, a wealthy silver mine owner. They begin an affair that is an open secret and son after Horace divorces his wife, Augusta. From 1883 until 1893 the pair live famously and flamboyantly, hobnobbing with governors and presidents and spending money in that way that can only signal impending doom. (In the same vein as that great Onion headline about the Titanic: "World's Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg.")
Beginning with a controversial marriage in the Crystal Room at The Willard (her dress costs $7,000 in 1883 dollars!), a room I've photographed many a wedding in and one that I won't look at in the same way again, the couple is scorned by Washington and Denver society. (Apparently, even the Catholic priest who married them didn't know both parties had fishy divorces in their recent pasts. He was peeved.) And and with all meteoric rises, the whole thing comes crashing to the ground in 1893 when gold finally replaces silver as our monetary standard. Horace dies in 1899 and Baby Doe spends the next 36 years living alone in the tiny cabin at the Matchless Mine, finally freezing to death in 1935.
The more I saw all the Baby Doe paraphernalia, the more her named seemed to ring a bell. Wasn't there an opera about a Baby Doe, I thought? I got back to my room at the stately Silver King motel, where the Fruit Loops are prepared just the way I like them, and Googled "La Fanciulla del West," even though I already knew that the Puccini opera by that name takes place in a mining town in the Sierra Madre mountains of California, not Colorado, and whose main character is Minnie, not Baby Doe. So I Googled "Baby Doe'" instead and laughed immediately at the results.
Baby Doe rang a bell with me because not only have I heard the American opera The Ballad of Baby Doe before, I've actually seen the opera, at the Kennedy Center in my own backyard. As Homer Simpson might say, "D'oh!" and yes, the pun is intended. In hindsight, I remember it now, because Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a huge opera buff, was entering the theater that night just as we were walking in. My memory lapse notwithstanding, The Ballad of Baby Doe is one of the most heralded of all American operas, though usually lagging in name recognition behind the likes of Porgy and Bess and Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, my personal favorite. Google told me one more thing that made me smile: one of the more acclaimed recordings of The Ballad of Baby Doe features Renée Fleming singing the title role.
By the way, did you know Renée Fleming is from Rochester?" that guy said to me only yesterday in line at the rental car place. Weird.
Now for the big u-turn. Opera serendipity aside, I was struck by something completely different as I thought about the rise and fall of the Tabors and their silver mine. As I paid my $7 this afternoon and toured the Matchless Mine and Baby Doe's tiny cabin, all twenty square feet of it, all I could think about was the newspaper industry. A stretch, perhaps, but that's the way my mind works.
You see, for all the scandal, intrigue and infamy that surrounded the love affair of Baby Doe and Horace Tabor, their ultimate downfall came as a result of something far less glamorous: they utterly failed to anticipate the complete collapse of the silver market and the triumph of the gold standard. They partied like it was 1899 (okay, actually 1893), right up until the rug was being pulled out from under them. (Reminds me a bit of some of the Gannett Christmas parties in the late 1980's.) There wasn't, as far as I could see, any kind of diversification that would have left them insulated from the disaster that was looming.
Obviously there's a new standard in the newspaper world, where I spent my first 15 years as a photographer, and it's known as the internet. The silver standard that is print is crumbling before our eyes. Newspapers, like those mines of 1893, are laying off journalists by the score. Ad revenue is evaporating. And like a huge dirigible crashing to the ground, media corporations, led by barons like Sam Zell and Rupert Murdoch and Dean Singleton, are clamoring to throw off what they see as dead weight, namely reporters and photographers and copy editors.
It's a pretty grim situation, and a recent letter on the media site Romenesko, simple and stark, really makes one stop and think. It reads, "McClatchy shares are worth 1/10th of what they were four or five years ago and they just keep sinking. As a former Knight Ridder employee with vested rights in the pension plan, I'm wondering what will happen to newspaper pension plans if some of these media giants go bankrupt. I haven't seen this question addressed on your site. I'm sure there must be plenty of other journalists who are wondering the same thing I am."
1/10th of what they were...
I doubt that number will improve. More likely, and sadly, it will get even worse. And like the thousands of miners who became extinct after the collapse of the silver, the newspaper industry, looking more and more like yesterday's currency, faces a bleak future. Much of the blame is being heaped on the new executives, especially guys like Lee Abrams, the chief innovation officer for Sam Zell's Tribune empire and a man with little newspaper experience, for their seeming indifference to the old ways. (Abrams recently expressed surprise that newspapers actually have reporters covering the news in places like Iraq. I'm not joking. He was appropriately ripped to bits by a former newspaper editor-turned-blogger, Nancy Nall, who, with her biting wit, made him look like an emperor without a shred of clothing.)
And though it's easy to make fun of someone like Abrams for being clueless, this trajectory was started long before he arrived on the scene. This is a sea change, not the result of one bungling manager. What we are seeing with newspapers and print is more akin to the collapse of film for digital, or horses for Model-T's, or silver for gold.
Mining towns like Leadville exist today only as ghosts, places where you take your family to buy a souvenir piece of Fool's Gold and then get back on the interstate. They are monuments to the obsolete. I'd hate to have to explain to Alexandra someday what a newspaper was, but after spending some time with the legend of Baby Doe Tabor this afternoon, I have to believe it's inevitable.
Matt
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