The Message

The paper should have taken credit for its foresight. Imagine the marketing slogan: "Read the Rocky, for tomorrow's news today!"

Gimme shelter: During the years when he toiled as a columnist for the Denver Post, Chuck Green was nicknamed "the Dogfather" because of his fondness for writing about his four-pawed friends in the most sentimental manner conceivable. So it's not exactly a shock to discover that Green recently crossed the line between opinion-sharing and active campaigning in order to tout a couple of canine-oriented ballot issues. The first concerned the building of a new animal shelter in his adopted home town of Pueblo, while the second dealt with funding the project after its completion. Despite the eventual passage of the construction measure, Green says, "I never want to be involved in politics."

Green, who syndicates a column in fourteen newspapers across the state, including Pueblo's principal newspaper, the Chieftain, describes the city's current shelter in Dickensian terms. "It's basically a concrete bunker with no drainage system, no ventilation and cast-iron cages covered with rust," he says. Appalled, he joined a group of about a dozen Pueblans dedicated to putting up a $3.7 million facility in another location. Green wasn't officially the organization's spokesman, but he played this part on a number of occasions, and even went door-to-door throughout town. He doesn't see this as breaking a journalistic taboo because, he says, "I never wrote about the subject."

The Chieftain twice editorialized against both propositions but eventually backed the erecting of the shelter, though not the long-term funding. Green says this shift was astonishing, because when he was the Post's editorial-page editor, the paper "usually only reversed positions if we found out a candidate we'd endorsed had a felony conviction."

The Chieftain's switcheroo helped propel the construction plan to victory by about 3 percent of the vote. Now Green's involved in fundraising to equip and run the shelter, which should open in early 2006, and promises that he won't hit up any possible sources for donations. Just don't count on him to get involved in other campaigns. "We didn't have any polling, so we didn't know where the hell we were -- and it was nerve-racking wondering if Pueblo would do the right thing," he allows. "I don't know how guys like Dick Wadhams have the brass to do it. I wouldn't want to go through life like that."

In other words, he wouldn't wish it on a dog.