“Buffalo Phil” Caragol: From CU Superfan to Memoirist

Phil Caragol says his newest book will attempt to bring his two clashing identities together. “This [book] shows a different side of me. And for people who went to CU, they’ll get some real first-hand account of what it was like to go to CU and live in Boulder in the first half of the 1970’s.”

There’s the local celebrity, “Buffalo Phil,” a viking-helmeted CU fanatic. And then there’s Caragol the writer, now stepping into the spotlight with the publication of his memoir-in-vignettes, “The Blunder Years.” Reconciling those two personas wasn’t easy. At times when he looked in the mirror and saw his black and gold beard, his beer koozies, and eye makeup, it was difficult for him to feel like a ‘real’ writer. “I asked myself at one point, is this a good look for a serious author?” he laughed.

The book darts from his childhood on Long Island through Boulder’s hippie heyday to the beginning of his ad-man years in New York City. Written in short, skit-like buzrsts, the style mirrors the “scatterbrained” label teachers once gave him. In it, Caragol recalls the national unity he felt as a child cracking after JFK’s assassination, and how the upheavals of the ’60s echo the uncertainty of today.

His first attempt at writing, a sprawling dystopian thriller, collapsed under its own weight. “I got maybe about a third of the way through and there were so many subplots, so many characters that I just got tangled up in it,” he said. “I stepped back and I said, okay. Mark Twain once said, ‘write what you know’. What do I know? I know what it was like growing up.”  

That decision gave him both purpose and momentum. “Our lives are so serious right now,” he said. “My readers helped me […] to realize that people are remembering how to laugh again when they read this book.”

Caragol has been making people laugh since his ad-agency days in New York and San Francisco. He once launched The San Francisco Comicle, an absurdist annual parody of city life that ran for 15 years and even landed him on the local evening news. After three decades in big cities, he and his wife Susie returned to Boulder, her long-promised reward after his 25-year “urban tour.”

What he found upon his return was a town very different from the “magical” Boulder of the 1970s. “Everybody got along,” he said, “we were accountable. We were responsible. I think it may have been a bubble.” Today, he worries about congestion, sameness, and less room for civil dialogue.

Even with his worries, he still thinks that Boulder County has much to offer, “Culture, check. Creativity, check. Those major careers, check. And work-life balance, check, check, check, check, check.”

Even as Buffalo Phil, he’s kept his independence, politely rejecting CU’s invitations to make him an official mascot. He wants to keep his own schedule and engage with the team on his own terms with a beer in hand. “I’m indie,” he said.

Caragol hopes his October 22 Boulder Bookstore reading can help fuse his twin personas permanently; the crazed buffs fan with a dyed beard and the satirist with the sharp eye and alligator grin.

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