Las Vegas Weekly

December 24, 2011 · 2 AM

Writing from a childhood haunt: ‘It is still a good place to be’

By John Katsilometes

The College Market in Pocatello, Idaho.

Photo: John Katsilometes

Over the years, I’ve found I work better from odd locations. I joke about it all the time. I write from such places as the Palms sports book, the bar at Cue Club in Commercial Center, the Green Room at Fox 5 and a table at the Beat Coffeehouse on Fremont East. I once wrote a 2,000-word story from Krispy Kreme at Fitzgeralds. Another time I posted a column from the roof of the parking garage at Riviera.

Something about variety, I guess. Maybe it’s for inspiration. I feed off the energy that a public locale affords. People ask what I’m doing, and I don’t mind. Sometimes I’ll spin the screen of my MacBook Air around to face them and ask, “How am I doing?”

Once, a couple of years ago, from the sports book at Suncoast, I was writing a rather lengthy and involved column about attending the U2 concert at Sam Boyd Stadium. Sports bettors wandered over from time to time to see how I was progressing. This was during the teeth of the NFL season. Taking note of the laptop flipped open in front of me, a few football fans mistakenly assumed I was a professional oddsmaker and asked me for betting advice.

“Take the Cardinals,” I said, not even knowing the betting line on that day’s Cardinals game, or even who the Cardinals were playing. They did beat the Giants on the road that day, so I was something of an incidental genius.

Today, the Kats Report bureau is College Market in Pocatello, Idaho. College Market is a dripping-with-nostalgia coffee pub located just three blocks from the first house my family owned. I would love to actually write from that home, or shoot a photo of it, but it was long ago wrested from its moors to make way for a medical facility. Our old family domain was eminently eradicated in favor of a fancy, glass-cased office complex.

But the red brick building that is College Market remains. It used to be a grocery store, what would come to be called a “convenience” store, but its clientele was almost entirely pedestrian. College Market abuts the lush, tree-shrouded campus of Idaho State University. The university and Union Pacific railroad have historically served as the dual hubs of what is known as the Gate City. I have long felt that the railroad’s steely presence has provided Pocatello a sort of nitty-gritty edge, sort of like a seaport without the water.

College Market was where my brother and I, as little boys, bought candy and comic books. That was it. I can’t recall there being any other purpose or point to College Market other than to catch up with the Fantastic Four while devouring Three Musketeers. It was a long-ago era, and a testament to the small-town quality of Pocatello, that two kids could feel safe walking three blocks (often in bare feet, during the summer) to the grocery store.

In the years since, long after my family relocated to Chico, Calif., when I was 12, College Market changed its identity. Today it is a coffee pub, inhabited by earthy and introspective college students and professorial sorts. I look around and I am the only male in the establishment who did not enter wearing a stocking hat and am the only guy without a healthy growth of facial hair.

The conversations around the pub are thoughtful and slow in developing, the customers speaking in a measured and loping tenor. They read the local newspaper, the Idaho State Journal, and exchange thoughts and opinions about community happenings.

At the moment, three gentlemen who seem to be in their 50s (but could be 25 for all I know, as the bitter cold can age a man before his time) are arguing about the recent resignation of Idaho State University’s men’s basketball coach. The Bengals are a disappointing 2-8 this season. Coach Joe O’Brien stepped down, abruptly, — huge! There is no doubt the coach needed to either improve the program fast or get gone, but the debate here is centered on whether the school needs a basketball program at all if it can’t produce a record better than 2-8 and is replacing its head coach the week before Christmas.

I take these men to somehow be affiliated with the university’s Department of Political Science. It’s just a “feel” thing. Overhearing this debate, I am resisting the urge to call over to them, “Deane Martin used to be an assistant coach at UNLV!” This is in reference to the man who is replacing O’Brien as Idaho State’s head men’s basketball coach, and an opportunity to introduce Las Vegas into this argument. But there is no need to accelerate this discussion or invoke the unexpected specter of Vegas into the dialogue. It’d be like tossing a firecracker into a meditation session.

That is what is different about my old hometown and my home today: the energy level, the pace. You don’t readily realize the high gear of Las Vegas, its elevated RPM, until you visit a place like Pocatello. This is true of any city or town in the Intermountain West, and probably any smaller burg anywhere in the country. But what I love about Las Vegas — its animation and around-the-clock intensity — is what needs to be reined in when I visit Pocatello.

This is a city where motorists actually drive slower than the posted speed limit. Residents walk a lot, too, for no reason other than to walk. With no destination plotted, we go for lots of walks in Pocatello. Years ago I made the remark to my family that there are two types of people in Pocatello: those who walk, and those who sit on their porches and wait for the walkers to walk past. That is true today, still, even in the holiday chill and snow-covered sidewalks, as Pocatellans walk around neighborhoods and chat and breathe out the icy winter air.

I’m home, in a way, yet a long way from home.

I’m reminded of something a buddy of mine who is a native Las Vegan said to me long ago: “I love Las Vegas. When I leave Las Vegas, I can’t wait to get back to Las Vegas.”

That’s true with me, too, even during these wintry Christmas jaunts. Love my Vegas. But at the moment, it is time to chill out. I see it just started snowing again, and soon I’ll have to head back to Dad’s house. We have no schedule, really, but it doesn’t matter. He knows I’m at College Market, like the old days, and it is still a good place to be.

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWithTheDish.

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