Phil (Premier Login OurSprings.com) Forum Owner from IP address 68.232.123.72
It was big headlines yesterday when Chinook bookstore announce they were closing.
They were Colorado Springs! Having been in business for over 40 years, I can't think of too many others that have had as much of an impact.
They exemplified what it meant "doing it right" ...
* their attention to service first
* employees that have been their for YEARS..that speaks boat loads to them as employers
* their growth over the years to one of the best independent bookstores in the nation!
Finally, though, the market has caught up to them. I have to be honest, even though I always could count on them to find what I was looking for, I am one of those that would shop at the "discounters" if I needed it now or at 40% off.
Regardless, they are an example of the best in the Springs.
A couple of years late, I know, but wanted to share this column I wrote about the Chinook back on April 1, 2004 (from Rocky Mountain News):
It's always a sad day when one of the great citadels in the culture wars falls before the seemingly irresistible forces of our ever coarser society. So it was on Wednesday when I learned that the Chinook Bookshop in downtown Colorado Springs would be closing after 45 years.
Tucked away in a narrow, unassuming storefront on Tejon Street across from Acacia Park, the Chinook has been a cozy and refreshing oasis of refinement for as long as I can remember.
As a book-loving kid growing up in the Springs, it was perhaps inevitable that I should find my way into its welcoming arms.
How well I recall the many times I've walked its creaking wooden floors, chatted with its erudite and ever-helpful staff, flipped through the pages of the latest arrivals or stood scratching my head and smiling at the endless and clever variations of the store's shop-window "invisible reader" - an unforgettable construct of thread and props and charming doggerel.
And the books! It was here I first discovered the valor and vision of Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae as they made their way from Lonesome Dove, Texas, to the promised land of Montana. It was here I first stumbled into the dark pleasures of Stephen King in the cloying yet weirdly alluring town of 'Salem's Lot. And here I first dallied with Tolstoy and Chandler, Bradbury and Hardy, Steinbeck and Wharton and so many more.
(Not every memory is tender, of course. There was the rather embarrassing moment in my callow teens when I sauntered up to the counter and asked whether they had a copy of the new John Simon collection, Paradigms Lost, only to have my atrocious pronunciation - Para-didge-ums Lost - quietly and kindly corrected.)
Opened by Dick and Judy Noyes in 1959 (and frequented by me since 1966), the Chinook has at last succumbed to the same wounds that have decimated the ranks of the nation's independent book sellers: big chain stores, the Internet and, as Dick Noyes so plainly puts it, "the lousy economy, the tough times."
He's right. A recent visit to a thinly populated Chinook was in stark contrast to the usual bustling beehive of my youth. And, of course, the years have caught up with the Noyeses, too. Both in their 70s, they say the time has come to ring down the curtain on their beloved enterprise and start enjoying those much talked-about "golden years."
One hopes that somehow the business can be continued in some way, that perhaps one of the Noyeses' three children will pick up the standard and carry on. Or that a new owner, with the same love of the written word and the same professional acumen, can be found.
No, I admit, that is unlikely.
Still, it will be hard to say goodbye . . . hard to walk down Tejon Street without being able to wander into the Chinook's reassuring confines.
When the doors close on June 15, it will be like saying farewell to a part of myself. It will be a loss that I and anyone who cares about anything good in life will mourn deep in our bones.
