Gazing into another time

A little piece in today’s newspaper led me to this blog. The short version: photographer finds excellent photographs from the 1930’s and 40’s among the other offerings at an estate sale and buys as many as she can. Then she follows up and finds that they were taken by Ellet N. Shepherd (1901 – 1965), Denver lawyer and judge. She gets the rest of the unsold photographs and has shared several of them with the rest of us on a blog.

On reading the article I clipped it out, grabbed my coffee and moved into the study to visit the blog. And I’ve been somewhere else for the last half hour as I look at the pictures and read some of the newspaper articles about Ellet Shepherd’s time as a prosecutor and a judge.

I’m visiting a Denver I have often wished I knew, a much smaller town that I might not have liked but suspect I would. It is I’m sure a longing driven by the desire for simplicity and certainty.

I have visited that place before, often by way of some of Sandra Dallas‘ novels – especially New Mercies. And I pored over the details of the town and people in Mainliner Denver (heck, I even met one of the lawyers in that case, who was still around many years later when I moved here fresh out of law school and passed the bar).

Honestly? One of these days I may just go down to the public library and read old local newspapers on microfilm or however they are stored now, just for the heck of it and not in search of anything special.

In the meantime, I am engaged with Judge Shepherd’s pictures, and the places I go when I look at them.