Tribute.

This column is for Colorado old-timers who want to remember and for those who have come along more recently who wish to understand the roots of their new home.

Dial the clock back a few decades to a very different era of newspapers and politics. Denver was the scene of a rich, vibrant, prolonged war between the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. Two columnists dominated those papers for years on end.

Gene Amole was synonymous with the Rocky Mountain News while Tom Gavin held court in the pages of the Post. Their columns were formative influences on me as a young, developing political player and a budding observer of the process.

Amole’s trademark was the single-word lede with which he introduced every column. For Gavin, a carefully-selected, on-point quote was how he wrapped up his column and put a bow around it.

When Gavin could not find the perfect, illustrative, summary quote, he would write his own and attribute it to his alter ego, Nosmo King. (Break the two parts of that moniker in a different place to find a common admonition of that period.)

The two of them were peas in a pod. Both grew up in Denver as children of the Depression. Both went off to World War II, though only Amole saw real combat. He would live with those haunted memories for the rest of his years.

A high school dropout, Gavin was only able to attend college thanks to the GI Bill. Amole used those benefits to attend college as well, but never finished. Imagine trying to get through the HR department of a major newspaper now without those sacrosanct academic credentials.

The Greatest Generation has been dubbed that in retrospect. For Amole and Gavin, it was their moment and the backdrop to their lives.

If there was a single key to their resonant success as columnists, it was the everyman quality of their written voices. They were two guys from typical upbringings who lacked any of the pedigree and pretense of so many contemporary media types.

Mind you, Amole and Gavin held sway through the final quarter or more of the last century, a period before the internet became omnipresent and before endless masses with a WordPress blog fancied themselves columnists of a kind.

One of Amole’s earliest columns began so simply, elegantly:

“Morning.

It is the innocent time of day. The air is clean. A small black dog frisks through a familiar backyard routine. The light is bright from the window of an East Colfax all-night coffee shop. Great flights of Canada geese rise swiftly from suburban reservoirs.

Downtown, the first trash and delivery trucks clank through half-empty streets. Street lights and neon signs go out as the new day’s light begins to fill the sky. There is the aroma of fresh coffee. It makes its secret way out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

…The traffic is just a whisper at first. And then a growl. Finally, a snarl. The freeways seem to coil and uncoil like a mindless serpent.

And then, morning is over. The day has lost its innocence and we are at work.”

That, my friends, is writing. Sparse, beautiful and descriptive.

Gavin, first a political reporter and then a political columnist before gaining broader license, could pound a typewriter as well. Here is his opening of a column lamenting that Colorado Day was not celebrated on its assigned date:

“Did you enjoy Colorado Day?

It was Wednesday.

Colorado Day is August 1, and August 1 was Wednesday.

Well, no, it was not a holiday. Most states view their birthday, the anniversary of their admission into the Union, as a holiday. Of sorts. They are runty little holidays, true, observances just a notch above Arbor Day, events not even recognized by banks, which, as we know, seldom meet a holiday they do not like.”

One smiles and gets the point even without the pleasure of reading further.

Amole was a public figure long before joining the Rocky, having co-founded KVOD which he built into one of the country’s top radio stations for classical music. He hosted the morning program and made classical music fun and accessible. Even playing the music of the masters, his was not a rarified, elite world.

He signed on with the Rocky with just one condition. Namely, that his editors were never to change one word of his columns. Good luck demanding such absolute autonomy these days.

Gavin, even longer at his craft, was the wry observer of all things political and beyond. Around his 1995 retirement, others recounted the iconic image of Gavin leaning against a Capitol wall, notepad in hand, watching, listening, taking it in. His column would then convey what he saw and all the underlying forces, often with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

One more thing these close friends had in common was that each fathered a formidable daughter who would follow in their oversized journalistic footprints. Tustin Amole and Jennifer Gavin used words such as “outraged” and “heartbroken” to describe what their respective dads would make of the current political mess.

Jennifer Gavin remarked that her father would be appalled by the failure of all concerned, “to reach across the aisle and actually govern.” Tustin Amole said that her dad would find it “hard to digest what has become of his beloved Denver with the glass and concrete monoliths, and the incessant traffic.”

Year after year, decade after decade, Amole and Gavin knocked out two or sometimes three columns each week. In his dying months, under hospice care, Amole published almost daily to chronicle that final journey.

They were curmudgeons, for sure, admittedly and proudly so. But they were two men, two writers, of deep decency, cherished humor and biting insight who enriched their readers and informed a state.

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin