Sureva Towler has a reputation around Steamboat Springs, Colo.

“I’m the nosy old lady who writes,” the 73-year-old says proudly. “I know who all the culprits are, and I drink with a lot of them.”

Her reputation around Lawrence – where she’s spent the falls, winters and springs for the last seven years – isn’t to that level yet.

But give her time. She says it took her “10 years and good manners to buy into the community” in Steamboat Springs, and she’s not about to rush things here.

How else do you get people to trust you enough to write things like this about them?

¢ “Men who have garages don’t have affairs. They lust for automatic door openers, not sex.”

¢ “The Losers’ Book Club is a monthly gathering of overeducated, overworked, and overhormoned ladies, firm in the conviction that no one has ever written a book that couldn’t be improved upon by eating chocolate.”

¢ “Personally, I’ve had my fill of craft shows, art fairs and garden tours. I’m sick of music and film festivals. I don’t want to attend another gala, fashion show, or benefit. I’m calling it quits on anything requiring silly hats and buckets of cash. No more fundraisers to save shoeless kids and starving horses, or vice versa.”

Sureva Towler, who divides her time between Lawrence and Steamboat Springs, Colo., recently published The

All this abuse for Towler’s town, and 600 people still showed up to her book signing last month in Steamboat Springs.

The book is “The Boys at the Bar: Antics of a Vanishing Breed of Cowboys and Hellions.” It’s based on 36 years’ worth of stories she’s heard from the rough-and-tumble men who hang out at bars in Steamboat Springs.

She’ll have a book signing tonight at the Eldridge Hotel.

“Everything in there is true,” Towler says. “The names have been changed to protect the guilty.”

Mike Hogue, a rancher near Steamboat Springs and a friend of Towler’s for two decades, says people there know the author will tell it like it is.

“She’s very civic-minded, and she’s pretty liberal in her thinking, which is against the grain in this community,” he says. “But everybody still appreciates her. She’s entertaining in the least.”

‘Universal’ stories

Towler first went to Colorado in 1970 to visit a friend. She was living in Washington, D.C., at the time and had worked for the Democratic National Committee, National Endowment for the Arts and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

She fell in love with a cowboy-plumber over a game of pool and decided to stick around Steamboat.

That’s when she started spending time with the “boys at the bar.”

These days, she spends her summers in Steamboat but much of the rest of the year living in a Lawrence carriage house behind the home of her daughter, Judy Keller, Keller’s husband and their three daughters.

This is Towler’s eighth book, but the others have mainly been historical pieces. This is the first piece to rely on her observational humor and dry wit.

Some of the stories for the new essay compilation are regurgitated from her column in the Denver Post, which runs about twice a month. Some of the stories are new material.

Many of the tales focus on the tension created when yuppies and cowboys collide. Or, as she puts it, it’s about “Brie-eaters moving into the land of American cheese.”

The population of Steamboat Springs has quadrupled to around 10,000 since Towler moved there. She says it’s easy to see the parallels with a town like Lawrence – or any town for that matter.

“It happens to be about Colorado; that’s where the bar is, and where people telling the stories are,” she says. “But there are these changes anywhere there are pretty places, and college towns are pretty places.”

“There’s a universality about community,” she says. “There’s going to be friction any time animals or people have to share a watering hole.”

Civic involvement

In Colorado, Towler has published a small-town newspaper and served on civic boards. In Kansas, she’s worked for the Kansas Humanities Council and the Lied Center.

These days, she spends her time writing and being with her granddaughters. (“I’m the only one who gets to say s*, but we still have a lot of fun,” she explains.)

Keller, Towler’s daughter, says the stories in the book are the ones she grew up hearing. Keller admits she’s biased, but she says the book would be a good read for pretty much anyone.

“She says the names have been changed to protect the guilty,” Keller says. “It should be herself included.”