We start with an anecdote, of course. There’s no other way to write about Lynn Bartels. And, besides, if I can’t find a way to laugh about our years together and her unique place in Colorado politics, I’ll never make it to the end.
I don’t remember the exact day or even the month or the year. But Bartels — who never forgot a date, a name, a face, a birthday, your kids’ birthdays, your aunt’s wedding anniversary, your bowling team’s name — could have told you in a Colorado minute.
Anyway, Michael Bennet — in whatever day or month it was — had recently been appointed U.S. senator, and he was taking a tour of deep red Southeastern Colorado. Bartels, the best political reporter I’ve ever known, was covering the story for the Rocky Mountain News, and I had come down for a few days of columnizing.
When Lynn and I teamed up — which was often — I was basically Robin to her Batwoman. I knew she’d make the intros, and suddenly a source or two were pouring out their hearts — all because Lynn had vouched for me.
So, on one of those days in Southeastern Colorado, I was riding with Bennet from one stop to the next on his tour — Lynn could tell you which stops — and we saw Bartels pulled over, apparently for speeding.
I told Bennet — I don’t recall the exact quote — something like this: “I’ll bet you anything Lynn doesn’t get a ticket. She’ll know the cop’s mother or his sister-in-law and they’ll become best friends by the time he lets her off. Lynn won’t have to ask. It will just happen.”
When we ran into Lynn maybe an hour later, we asked if she had gotten a ticket.
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She laughed — the famous Lynn laugh, the wheeze and then the gasps, making a sound no one could forget — and said no. She and the cop had started talking, and Lynn did know his brother or his mother or both. And if she were alive today, I’m sure she could tell you the cop’s birthday, the name of his wife and how many children they have.
I’ve been known, on occasion, to tell a few stretchers, as Huck Finn would say of Mark Twain, but I do not exaggerate here. Lynn was one of one.
Her memory was a gift. I’ve never known anyone who could match it. But it was more than a gift. If she knew your aunt’s wedding anniversary (even though you no longer did), it was because she cared enough to listen and she cared about what she heard. And because of her bottomless curiosity. She had to know everything, which is the hallmark of the great ones, and, as far as I could tell, she succeeded.
She had, more or less, a million friends. She would always joke about how terrible she was at math and how she would require me or Kevin Vaughan or Henry Sobanet or one of her many other friends to walk her through an arithmetical minefield. But I’m sticking with the million.
It is virtually impossible to be a political reporter, and a tough one at that, who is loved by Democrats and Republicans alike, lobbyists and political activists, staffers, Capitol employees of all stripes, fellow journalists (even those she scooped, which was every one of them).
But Lynn more than pulled it off. She was brave and smart and funny as hell. If she walked around the Capitol like she owned it, that’s because she did. And did I mention her generosity? She would put up reporters from the Western Slope who were in town for a few days covering the legislature. Interns would live with her. Her generosity, like so much about her, was legend.
Former Rocky reporter Jim Tankersley, now the New York Times bureau chief in Berlin, tells about his year covering the legislature with Lynn. (That was back when the Rocky and Post each had three or four people covering the lege fulltime.) He learned from her how to see details no one else managed to see and then craft them into glorious narratives that were less about politics and policy than about the people involved.
“She always had diet sodas around,” Tankersley texted me. “I think once — maybe twice — I borrowed one for a deadline hydration rush. It became the detail she used to introduce me, to friends and sources and anyone else: ‘Tankersley, the guy who steals my diet Cokes.’
“But of course, that little ribbing was more than worth it, because Lynn’s introductions were priceless. She knew everyone, truly everyone, in Colorado politics, lobbying, campaigns, you name it. And they all spilled to her. She charmed scoops out of people who had screamed at her for her previous days’ stories. She collected little snippets of information and hoarded them until they piled into a good story…”
And when she heard you mention a detail that sparked something in her, she’d tell you how to use it and why it will make the story — your story — so much better.
”What I’m saying is,” Tankersley continued, “she was one of the very best beat reporters I’ve ever known, and it was fully a function of her caring about people. Information, yes, but people first.”
I asked our friend Tina Griego, the wonderful writer who worked with me and Lynn at the Rocky and later at the Denver Post, to send me her thoughts on just how Lynn could collect so many friends.
She told me about Lynn’s generosity, her laugh, her willingness to be vulnerable. And this: “I think about Lynn as a river. Always moving and connecting people and sometimes she let you dip your toe into her thoughts and experiences and sometimes she carried you along with her and you became part of them and of her. And once that happened, you knew and she knew, you were never going to drift apart.”
She never drifted apart. Not even when she died. If you’ve read any of the many Lynn remembrances on social media, you know how much she lives on in so many hearts.
Tina, who now works for ProPublica, was too heartsick to write about Lynn. Kevin Vaughan, who also worked with me and Lynn and Tina at the Rocky and the Post and now is an investigative reporter for 9NEWS, was as well.
I’m heartsick, too. I don’t want to write, but I have to.
For Lynnie, for me, or all the people who know and love Lynn. Yes, I use the present tense because we’re never going to drift apart.
And I had to write this for the memory of the late, great Rocky Mountain News. Lynn was the face of the Rocky. Also the heart, the soul, the conscience.
When the Denver Post signage came down the other week on the building it once shared with the Rocky — the Post’s vulture capitalist owners hadn’t paid the back rent — I thought it was a fitting farewell gift for Bartels. Even though she worked, brilliantly, at the Post, where some of us were lucky enough to go after the Rocky folded. But at heart, wherever she worked, she was a Rocky partisan forever.
She could have gone to bigger papers — and been a star wherever she landed. She could have been another Maggie Haberman if she’d wanted. But she came to the Rocky from Albuquerque, following John Temple, who would become editor and publisher of the paper. Lynn, though, was the beating heart — of the Rocky and, as my colleague Mario Nicolais wrote, of Colorado politics.
In her stories, she humanized the politicians people only knew from the headlines. She also knew more than even the most savvy politician about what was happening in her state.
Even when, as her career ended, she left journalism to go to the dark side — working for then Secretary of State Wayne Williams before working with election clerks throughout the state. You can guess what she thought of Tina Peters. She was still a reporter. Still knew every story.
I write this for the time Lynn said to a governor — it may have been Bill Owens, maybe Bill Ritter — in the newsroom, boomingly, over the phone, “I told you never to call me at this time. I’m on deadline.”
I don’t know if the quote is exactly right, but it’s close. And it’s so Lynn, who was at once humble and also the boss of you. The boss of everyone, from governors on down. She’d tell you straight-faced if you had something wrong in your story. But she was more likely to tell you how great it was — and it wasn’t flattery. She meant it.
When we learned, to our shock, that Lynn had brain surgery, we waited for days to learn how it had gone.
Finally, the family told us that she had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive brain cancer. For nearly all people it’s a death sentence, and Lynn, though a fighter’s fighter, had to give in this once.
When she was moved from a hospital to hospice at a nursing home, Vaughan and I went to visit her. It was not a good day — some were better than others. This day, she wasn’t responsive at all. We didn’t know quite what to do, but one of her great friends, Tustin Amole, another Rocky alum who was so often at Lynn’s side, suggested we tell her a story about our time together.
Kevin and I knew immediately which story to tell. It was maybe Lynn’s favorite.
It was the time of the University of Colorado football scandal in the early 2000s. If you’re old enough, you remember. Strippers and escorts for high school recruits visiting the campus, booze flowing freely, rape charges, complete lack of oversight. Botched responses from the coach and the AD, the defense of the C-word by CU president Betsy Hoffman. (She said it could be used as a term of endearment. She later explained that she meant like in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.)
I think it’s fair to say this was the ultimate example of crisis mismanagement. And everybody lost their jobs.
Finally the Board of Regents commissioned an independent panel to investigate. And sometime in the spring of 2004, the panel announced that the report was finished and that it would present the report to the regents on the following Monday night.
This was on a Friday. That meant every reporter in the state, and reporters from larger newspapers across the country, were frantically trying to get their hands on the report by the end of the weekend.
It would be the scoop of scoops. Lynn was working every source she knew. Kevin was working his sources. And I was working mine.
To no avail. All weekend we were on case — and nothing.
And then on Sunday evening, when it seemed that all was lost, Lynn called me and Kevin to say we would have access to the report — for one hour. We got the handoff — if it sounds like something out of LeCarré, that’s because it was — but we had to make copies of it immediately. I can’t tell you who gave us the report or who got the handoff, although I bet you could guess whose scoop it was.
We found a nearby hotel and asked the clerk if we could use his copier for maybe a half hour. He said, sure, if we rented a room there.
And so we did. We got the copies. We split the pages three ways and shared every juicy detail we could find.
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The hotel door was open, by the way. It felt like college — back in the day, when the male guest had to keep one foot attached to the floor — but Lynn and Kevin wrote the story and I wrote my column. And then I had a brainstorm. Let’s put all our bylines on the story, and everyone would guess that if the columnist’s name was on the story, too, that he must have gotten the copy. That would throw off the scent.
We killed. We killed the competition, and on Monday morning, every news report had to credit us. It was the ultimate. And it forced the regents to release the report early that day because we had stolen their thunder.
Lynn, Kevin and I were on top of the world when we drove home that night. And I wish I’d been there when Lynn walked into the newsroom that Monday morning to see her, face aglow, revel in the big news.
”Me and Littwin and Vaughan had a threesome last night,” she announced.
The room exploded in laughter. And then she told them, tears running down her face, about the hotel room and the demanding clerk.
That was Lynn. That will always be Lynn. One of one. The best of the best. Great reporter and great friend.
Whose laughter at the story we broke, about her outrageous report to the newsroom, about the thrill of scooping the world, I can hear even now.
I told you, you hear it once, you hear it forever.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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