Allen Nossaman

"I’m speaking to you on a rotary phone. They still have those, you know,” said Allen Nossaman (’62), a grad with an aversion to computers and cell phones. The third-generation Colorado native now living in Durango could be considered a mountain recluse were it not for his insatiable and long-practiced propensity for delivering the written history and news of his beloved high country.

“No matter how small the community is, it needs something,” he said.

Nossaman moved from Denver to Cedaredge when his father, a frustrated writer, had a hankering to break into the news business. “My dad came home one day and said, ‘I’m tired of this city life. I bought a newspaper (the Surface Creek News).’ Then I started learning to operate the hand-set press at 12. I also started writing sports stories. I was a journalist at age 12,” he said.

Nossaman has been a newsman of one sort or another ever since. Reluctant to leave the small mountain community of Silverton in which he settled for most of his life, he delivered more than just the news over the years, however. The 65 year-old diabetic amputee, survivor of multiple heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery, said he committed himself entirely to providing continued service and devoted citizenship to Silverton and the now-burgeoning Colorado town of Durango.

“This guy is as solid as a rock when it comes to honesty and integrity. He is a genuine colorful Colorado character – and one of my heroes,” said Alan Cunningham (’62), a former classmate and retired newspaper reporter and columnist now living in Walnut Creek, Calif.

When Nossaman was 16, his father died of heart disease. Since then, he said he’s spent a good part of his life living his father’s dreams. “Dad wasn’t able to do it, so I wanted to take a turn at it,” he said. For five years in the four room basement of old Hellems, the Colorado kid gleaned as much knowledge as possible from Professors John Mitchell and Robert Rhodes, whom he still thinks of fondly and greatly respects. Nossaman graduated magna cum laude.

Throughout his academic years, Nossaman said he divided his time between editing at the Colorado Daily, then the wave-making campus newspaper, and working for the Ballantine family, owners of The Durango Herald, in reporting, circulating and utility managing capacities.

“I really got a good taste of what was going on in the newspaper business,” said Nossaman of the four consecutive summers he spent working for the Ballantines. He was a shoo-in for a job at the Herald as soon as he earned his diploma.

However, within a year of Nossaman’s graduation from the School, Colorado’s oldest newspaper, the Silverton Standard & The Miner, became available for purchase. None of the previous owner’s three sons wanted to continue in the newspaper business, and the eldest son, one of Nossaman’s college friends, could think of no better man for the job than the recent grad to take on the publication of the mountain community’s source for news. So, 23- year-old Nossaman, already an old hand at newspaper reporting and printing, became a newspaper publisher.

Aside from spending six months in service with the National Guard during the draft days of the 1960s, Nossaman spent nine years cranking out the Standard & The Miner. More than anything, he said he enjoyed the labor intensity of the manual, hand-set press for newspaper production.

“Those were the greatest days of my life. I just loved it,” Nossaman said. “It was so great doing the physical part of it and thinking of Dad the whole time.”

During his time as owner of the Silverton Standard & The Miner, Nossaman, in addition to receiving attention for his often criticized weekly column about such issues as planning and zoning, became a sought-after and respected obituary writer.

“I wrote obits for 25 years. I turned them into features from my point of view. People would tell me, ‘I want you to write my obituary,’ ” He won two Ralph Crosman editorial awards from the Colorado Press Association for his work with the paper.

Nossaman has always been blessed with what he calls the “journalist’s curiosity: it allows you to peek into every other person’s vocation, career, etc., without committing to it.”

And the slender, six-foot one-inch mountain man with a beard down to his breast pocket wore many professional hats in Silverton.

“The bottom line is: It’s amazing what a person will do to stay in a small town they like,” he said with a chuckle. So, while he was fixing to sell his paper after nearly 10 years, he had his eye on other possibilities.

In late summer of 1971, Nossaman said he got wind of a San Juan County position opening up. Despite never having spent a day in law school, he was encouraged to apply for a term as a county judge.

“Those were the good ol’ days. It was a pre-computer judicial department.” The 6th Judicial District Commission on Judicial Performance liked him so much that they recommended he be retained several times.

The commission wrote: “By every measure, the Commission was impressed by Judge Nossaman. He is well respected by the people who appear in his courtroom and by law enforcement personnel, attorneys and state employees who work with him on a daily basis. In response to survey questionnaires, Judge Nossaman received high marks in being both fair and impartial to those who appear in his courtroom. … Judge Nossaman was also rated highly for his knowledge of the law, his timeliness in making decisions and his clear manner of speaking. Of the attorney responses received, 92 percent voted to retain Judge Nossaman.”

Another opportunity arose in the county when a law created the position of land use administrator, and Nossaman was quickly plucked from the bench for that job. However, his time as a judge was definitely not over, and since the county judge position was part-time, and because Colorado doesn’t require part-time judges to be lawyers, there was no need for him to leave his much-loved mountain town.

Nossaman also spent time as a city treasurer, part-time janitor, painter, roofer, train station agent for the narrow-gauge railway and part-time ambulance driver. Throughout his tenure as Silverton’s jack of every trade, Nossaman did, indeed, gain peeks into hundreds of people’s lives and vocations, feeding his journalist’s curiosity and fostering a growing awareness of the rich history of his community.

He was one of the founding members of the San Juan County Historical Society and is now working on a fourth volume of his Silverton history titled “Many More Mountains.” All three of his previous volumes are out of print, and recent eBay prices for existing copies “have been absurd,” he said.

Although he said he “wouldn’t wish himself on any woman,” an entire mountain community has him to thank for its historic preservation and devoted companionship.