We’ve seen both these menus before, but one of mine was heavily faded from being on display. Though I never let it be in the direct sun, apparently even a little light causes the yellows and reds to disappear. Fortunately, these menus are quite common, probably because they were printed in October 1969 and were left over after the train made its last run in March 1970.
Click image to download a 1.8-MB PDF of this menu.
It was after I rode the last run of the Rio Grande Zephyr, the Denver-Salt Lake portion of the California Zephyr, in 1983, that I started collecting railroad memorabilia. One of the dealers I purchased items from was a man named John White, who operated a store he called Grandpa’s Depot out of the fading Oxford Hotel a block from Denver’s Union Station. Railfans in the 1970s often stayed at that hotel between arriving on Amtrak from Chicago one evening and taking the Rio Grande Zephyr the next morning. Later, White moved his store into Denver’s Union Station before it was rehabilitated.
Click image to download a 1.7-MB PDF of this menu.
Born in the Bronx in 1925 and trained as a chiropractor, White moved to Colorado early in his adult life and got interested in trains. As he grew his memorabilia business, he distributed a quarterly listing of items for sale, asking readers for $4 for an annual subscription, though repeat buyers didn’t need to pay. He once had a 1958 Great Northern calendars with a Winold Reiss painting that he offered for $75, but he had three copies of the 1956 GN calendar with a Reiss painting, so he offered them for just $25 each. I thought this was strange economics and quickly bought them all.
Being located close to the Rio Grande commissary, he bought many things the railroad wanted to dispose of after it ceased running the Zephyr. This included menus going back several decades that had holes punched in them so they could be bound in commissary notebooks, tablecloths with the California Zephyr logo woven in, china, and much more. I don’t know if he was in business in 1970 to buy the menus presented today, but if it wasn’t him, it was someone like him. John White died in 2007 at the age of 82, but I’ll always remember him as Grandpa.