George Blevins is a cartoonist who was not only able to give Nederland an identity, he gave the town a voice. As an editorial cartoonist for The Mountain-Ear Blevins did not just caricaturize an entire town into one entity, Blevins was able to write the right words for that entity to say, to have Ned speak on what is best for Ned. And with “Cabin Fever,” his Nederland-centric comic strip that ran in The Mountain-Ear from 1983 into the 2000s, he defined the Nederland spirit and lifestyle.

Growing up, lying on the floor on his stomach as a young kid in Louisiana, visions of the classic Sunday comic “Pogo” swimming in his impressionable mind, all Blevins wanted to do was draw. It took many years down a long, dangerous and winding road, before he was able to make a living with his art and his humor. And it was that very road, that life lived, that forged his unique perspective which fuels his creativity and makes him able to carry the unforgettable voice of Nederland.

Blevins was born in 1939, grew up in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and went to school in Ecuador at the age of 12. As a precocious teenager he attended boarding school in Texas, where he was expelled for stealing the principal’s car. In his early 20s he attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he had a chance meeting with Walt Disney, who was on the institute’s board of directors.

“One day I was walking back from lunch and there he was walking towards me, and I thought ‘oh my god, there’s Walt Disney, what can I say to him?’ and as I’m thinking this he got closer and he looks at me and says ‘your shoe’s untied.’” Blevins told The Mountain-Ear as he sat at the front desk at the Gilpin County Public Library.

In Los Angeles, 1961, Blevins was compelled to get involved in the Civil Rights Movement and joined the Freedom Riders, a non-violent protest organized by the advocate group Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Freedom Riders were a group of white and black protesters who rode buses through the country’s southern states who had failed to recognize a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 1946 that desegregated interstate travel.

Blevins faced the authorities of oppression and hate, he was arrested and charged with Breach of Peace, he was imprisoned and beaten in Mississippi State Prison, and he had “disgraced” his father and family.

“There was a stretch of time when we were all housed in the maximum security unit, and the blacks were separated by the whites,” Blevins recalled. “They were on the other side of the building so we could all talk back and forth. After a while there got to be too many of us, so they moved all the white guys out and put us in a first offenders camp, which was one big room with a bathroom out the side.”

“As a first offender you’d typically go out during the day and work on the farm, but we were kept inside the whole time. They were being careful not to do any noticeable damage to us because the press was starting to pay attention to it,” Blevins said, regarding the Civil Rights movement taking over the country at the time.

Once released from prison, Blevins lived in a poor neighborhood in New Orleans, in the “colored section of town” as it was called then, where he was unjustly arrested and beaten. Again, Blevins had “disgraced” his family and would have to face them. At a crossroads in his life, faced with the choice of continuing the battle for equality and Civil Rights or bending to the expectations placed upon him by his family, many of whom were vehemently against what Blevins and so many others were fighting for, Blevins chose to face his family and explain to them his point of view.

“My father showed up and he was really upset. He read the letter I had written to him from prison and he flew all the way from Brazil to get me out,” Blevins said. “We had a tense and tearful confrontation where he said, ‘I want you to leave this and come with me.’ And I refused him and I started to walk away, and he came up to me in the hallway and he said that he had a revolver in his luggage and he would shoot me.”

“I looked at him and he looked at me and we both realized the enormity of what he had said and we both began to weep. The only reason I was refusing was because I had just been beat up by the cops and I thought it was the coward’s way out…and to a certain extent it was.”

Though he had stood up to his father and to his family as opposed to “falling in line” as they would prefer, Blevins still is not positive that he did the right thing.

“I went with him and we went around and talked to all my aunts and uncles and I explained my point of view. Most of them took it quietly, one of them showed support for me, and another one said that if I was his son he would’ve killed me.” Blevins may not see himself as a hero, but his actions prove that he is far from being a coward.

“It was an education for all of us, and I’ve often thought that it was the most good that I did for the movement, aside from being a body to help pack the jails. It didn’t change their minds, but those are minds that are long gone now anyway.”

After his confrontation with his family, Blevins drove out to Mexico looking for peace. Once there he picked up a hitchhiker, got robbed, was hit repeatedly in the head with his own tire iron, and was left for dead. After that, Blevins traveled to New York City where he worked in advertising and was published in the World Journal Tribune; this is when he started earning a paycheck for his humor.

Several decades rolled by before Blevins moved to Colorado in 1982.

“I came to Colorado because my wife told me to, and then she dumped me here.” Blevins joked about how his sudden divorce led him from baking bagels in Boulder to moving to Nederland.

Blevins' new new life in Nederland turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as he was able to live out his dream job as The Mountain-Ear’s staff cartoonist, a position he was willing to do for free at the time. More than three decades later Blevins has built an impressive body of work, with three volumes of his Cabin Fever series and his children’s book Mr. Turtle meets Ms. Ladybug available at libraries and bookstores all across the Peak to Peak area.

Blevins was not only Nederland’s absurdist voice and precocious humorist, over the years he has worked alongside many community leaders in the area, including Scott Harrison, creator of the Carousel of Happiness.

Most recently, t-shirts and hoodies featuring Blevins’s iconic Ned character, representing the embodiment of Nederland, are now available at the Nederland Visitors Center. Ned is a large man with a rotund belly, a strong jaw and scraggly beard, and a roof with a smoking chimney atop his head instead of hair. Blevins notes that the inspiration for the design of Ned was based on a regular bartender at his favorite Nederland bar in the early 80s, the Pioneer Inn.

A cartoonist’s mind is a funhouse mirror reflecting their absurdist view of the reality we live in. Their perspective and humor is soaked in satire, with a naïveté that is able to cut through the reader’s social defenses and elicit a real, emotionally hearty guffaw. Blevins encapsulated the cartoonist’s mind and spirit through his decades of work on The Mountain-Ear, and it is clear that his brand of humor, which fit perfectly for Nederland, was forged through living such an incredible life.

“I’ve run out of vim, I guess. I’ve accomplished what I’ve wanted to accomplish,” Blevins said when asked to think back about his life and career. “It might not amount to a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, but what the hell, I did what I wanted to do.”

“And eventually you have to get used to the idea that you’ve mostly done what you wanted to do, so it’s time to just read a book and relax, and shuffle off to Buffalo when the time comes.”

Today, Blevins is enjoying his semi-retirement as he continues to work the desk at the Gilpin County Public Library. He enjoys his freedom, reading a good book, and meeting up with friends, the “old guard” of Nederland, for breakfast and conversation. Blevins tells stories and laughs the lighter laugh of a man whose humor, that once served him through dark, scary, and lonely times, can now be enjoyed more freely.

“Now, especially with the world in the condition it’s in, with so many people in the dire situations they’re in, you realize that we were born in lucky times. And you don’t know how lucky you are because you didn’t have to suffer the other, so I try to be appreciative of that and pass it on as much as I can.”

His brand of humor, his heartfelt and joyous expression of his view of the world around us, a harsh world that he has experienced first hand, has entertained generations of Nedheads. Blevins’ work is a celebration of all his trials and tribulations that can be felt by all who have tried, fallen, and tried and fallen again; to all those who have started a new new life in Nederland.