Forty Years Ago This Week: Outgoing Secretary of State Mary Estill Buchanan landed herself in hot water just days before a retirement reception honoring her service to Colorado.

State officials said that when Buchanan had left office the month prior, she had taken with her state-owned furniture and office equipment including six chairs, two electric typewriters, and three framed photographs. These officials argued that her actions may have been illegal. But Buchanan, who had at least partially reimbursed the state monetarily, maintained that she had a kind of “special ownership” to the property as an outgoing official.

Before her reception, Buchanan had confided to a close friend that she was apprehensive about attending since it was likely the press would lampoon her over the missing furniture. But taking the stage, Buchanan raised the issue herself – before anyone else could – when she took possession of an engraved silver tray from Colorado Republican Party Chair Bo Callaway. 

When an attendee quipped that the gift was “a piece of furniture,” Buchanan shot back, “What I really had in mind when I bought the furniture, was cutting a deal with the governor’s mansion, so that when a governor wanted to go on vacation on a time-share basis, there would be enough chairs.”

Buchanan was referencing Gov. Dick Lamm’s house swap with a prominent San Francisco architect whose family vacationed in the governor’s mansion while the Lamm’s lived in San Fransisco over Christmas.

Meanwhile, Merilyn Handley, deputy secretary of state, said that two chairs and a coat tree were still missing from the secretary’s capital office, although a dictionary and a stand had been returned purportedly by Buchanan who was logged into the capitol building at 11:25 pm one evening.

When asked by The Colorado Statesman about the latest furniture developments, Buchanan tried to wave off the matter.

“There is no latest,” she said. “I haven’t done anything. I had no idea I’d done anything wrong. All I know is what I read in the newspapers. Besides, the typewriter doesn’t work. But the chairs work fine. The flap’s all been aired and this should all be over.”

Thirty Years Ago: State Sen. Bill Owens, R-Aurora, gave a presentation to the City Club of Denver on the changes in the former Soviet Union that he’d seen over five visits to the country.

Owens, who was chairman of the Senate State, Veterans & Military Affairs Committee, said that he supported U.S. attempts to help the struggling country by sending food, forgiving loans, and offering assistance to help set up a new economic and banking system.

“I think it is in our interest to support Russian President Yeltsin,” Owens said, “because the U.S. doesn’t know who will follow should Yeltsin fail.”

Owens, who said he was present on the day that the Russian flag was first flown over the Kremlin in November 1991 [Editor’s Note: perhaps he or the reporter were mistaken about the date because the tri-color Russian flag was first flown over the Kremlin on December 25, 1991] said that the formerly militaristic country had changed considerably.

“They have a park of fallen statues,” Owens said. “Statues of Lenin and other former communist heads of state which had formerly been in places of honor, were torn down by the people and laid on their sides in a park. Now parents take their children there to see the fallen terrorists.”

But for all of the political change he’d seen so far, Owens said that the quality of life in Russia and the surrounding republics was deplorable with lines “everywhere for everything” and with infant mortality four times higher than in the United States.

Even former communist environmental practices were posing a clear and present danger as two rivers that had been diverted from the Aral Sea in order to irrigate cotton crops were in constant danger of failing as the Aral Sea dried up.

“It’s really a third world society throughout most of the Soviet Union,” Owens said.

Rachael Wright is the author of the Captain Savva Mystery series, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University and is a contributing writer to Colorado Politics and The Gazette.