News

Remembering Sandy Widener

In journalism, "30" means the end. But after thirty years, it's not easy to let somebody go.

By Patricia Calhoun 

Weeks later, I find myself driving down the street and, inexplicably, something will remind me of him — something so simple as a tree — and I'll find myself blurring with tears.

It's not easy to let somebody go.

In December 1984, Sandra Widener, one of Westword's co-founders, wrote a stunning piece for the Denver Post, the paper where she was then working, on the death of a friend, lawyer Jonathan Olom. Reading through "The Death of a Friend," I'm reminded of several things. That Sandy was a hell of a writer, and that she did a remarkable job of capturing the spirit of a man who died way too early. A job so good that Jonathan lives on through her words. And now she does, too.

It's not easy to let somebody go.

I met Sandy the very first day of our freshman year at Cornell University, where we were both assigned to the second floor of Dorm 4, a hideous cinderblock building at the bottom of an even more hideous hill. Since the other four floors were filled with boys, our floor bonded fast. Sandy was fresh from Texas, a tiny blonde in even tinier hot pants, with a big personality. She could be feisty and fierce — particularly when people didn't take a tiny Texan in hot pants seriously — but she was also a hell of a lot of fun. She loved to laugh — everything from a piercing shriek to a raucous hoot to a tee-heeing titter when she was particularly tickled. She would laugh so hard that she'd hug herself and cry, her eyes shining like stars.

It was Sandy who got me into journalism — she joined the Cornell Daily Sun, an independent daily in Ithaca, New York, and encouraged me to do the same. By our junior and senior years, we were spending endless nights in a ramshackle building downtown, listening to the old AP machine, drinking wretched coffee and talking — sometimes about politics, but often about nothing so high-minded — with other Sun addicts.

And I got Sandy to Denver: After graduation, fellow Sun alum Rob Simon and I started a newspaper on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, then fled after one smelly, exhausting summer, leaving that paper to another friend and coming to Denver to start a free weekly because when I'd been here to ski, I thought the state seemed so much more interesting than the media made it look. Sandy, who'd spent the summer in Indonesia, signed on to join our harebrained adventure.

John Parr was a major reason that Colorado was so very interesting, but we didn't know it at the time.

We started Westword with little money and less sense. For the first issue — most of whose copies never made it out of our garage because we hadn't quite finished setting up a circulation system — we reported on TV weathermen and the energy boom and Star Wars, still packing them in on Colorado Boulevard. Sandy wrote about Pop Rocks — isolated Denver was a big test market before the Internet started blurring boundaries — and a migrant food fund that was running out of money. She was a serious journalist, but she was also an unstoppable force of nature. She'd streak across the office, leaving chaos in her wake. She was like a comet, Rob said.

And then the comet found her orbit. John Parr had made a name for himself as the smart-growth strategist who'd stopped the Olympics from coming to Colorado, then helped Dick Lamm get elected governor of Colorado. By the late '70s, he was heading Lamm's Front Range Project, looking at the future of the metropolitan area. Sandy went to interview him.

"I love him," she said when she returned to the Westword office, tittering and hugging herself, her eyes crinkling into stars. And for almost thirty years, her life would revolve around the world they created together. The tough cookie had crumbled.

"It's not the end of everything, but whatever happens next does not take the form of these goofy little bodies and personalities we're stuck with now. I don't think we'll come back to Earth; there are too many other interesting places to be. Why would you think that the best thing would be to come back here and be on Earth again? It's kind of like saying, I'm afraid to go up the block, afraid to leave the neighborhood."

After a few years, Sandy left Westword to join Rocky Mountain Magazine and, when that folded, the Denver Post, where she covered everything from rough-and-tough mining towns to the death of a friend. When John moved to New York City to head the National Civic League, Sandy worked for Newsday, covering crime stories while she was hugely pregnant (but still tiny). And then, when John moved the National Civic League's office to Denver, she started writing textbooks so that she could work at home while taking care of their two daughters, Chase and Katy.

• 1
• 2
Next Page »