Columnist Green
resigns from Post
Loved, reviled writer ends 34-year
tenure
By Dave Curtin
Denver Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 12, 2002 - Denver Post columnist
Chuck Green, who took pride in being both loved and
reviled by his readers, resigned Friday after a 34-year
career at The Post that included stints as
editor-in-chief and editorial-page editor.

Green, 55, delivered The Post door-to-door as a
9-year-old growing up in Longmont and worked as a
part-time reporter in high school and college - an
affiliation with The Post that dates back 46 years.

He wrote 800 columns that generated tens of
thousands of e-mails and letters over his career.

He declined to say why he resigned and said he has
no immediate plans.

"I may do something outside of journalism I don't
even know about yet," Green said. "But I won't leave
Colorado."

"He said it was time for him to go on and do
something else," said Larry Burrough, The Post's
managing editor for news.

"Writing a metro column is one of the toughest jobs in
the world and can be very wearing on even the best
people, and he's been doing it for a long time," he
said. "He's without a doubt one of the best-known
characters in the state not only for his work at The
Post but for his charity work."

Green's charitable work ranges from assistance to
children born blind to the care of the elderly in
hospices.

He's best known as a champion of animal welfare and
an assailant of animal cruelty - the subjects of
columns that deeply touched his readers.

"Columns that brought the most response were
personalized columns about life, the death of my dog,
personal reflections of childhood and my
mother-in-law's collection of 700 cookbooks," Green
said. "I called her "The Kitchen Witch' because she
was out to kill me with her 1950s-style home cooking.
We're still good friends."

Green received hundreds of requests for reprints of
that column, which was reprinted around the world.

Green's general-interest commentary has appeared in
The Post four times a week since 1995. He also wrote
a column as editorial-page editor for five years,
including a series of 50 weekly columns that profiled a
different homeless person every week.

"Our surveys always showed Chuck as the best-read
columnist in Colorado," Post editor Glenn Guzzo said.
"He'll leave behind a loyal following, and we'll miss
him very much."

Green supervised coverage of the fatal 1976 Big
Thompson flood - a job that found him sleeping in the
newsroom for three nights - and of the 1982
Christmas Eve blizzard, which was never published
because the paper couldn't be delivered - the biggest
disappointment of his career, he said.

His columns in 1995 on Keko and Snowy, dogs
poisoned by a neighbor, by themselves generated
thousands of letters and e-mails. As a result, the
Snowy and Keko Fund was created, and readers
contributed $40,000 for animal welfare.

"We gave it to the Dumb Friends League, and we
bought a police officer a dog after his police dog was
killed," Green said.

He also championed the Harrison Memorial Animal
Hospital and the MaxFund, a nonprofit animal adoption
organization.

Green occasionally came to work with his keeshond
dog Gus and later with Auggie. His column on the
death of Gus also generated letters in the thousands.
He brought his small parrot, Reggie, to work nearly
every day when he was editorial-page editor from
1983 to 1988.

"There was a branch on the bookshelf that was his
perch. I called it his branch office," Green said. "He
met presidential candidates, five-star generals,
ambassadors and a congresswoman."

Reggie rode in Bill Clinton's limo as Green interviewed
him during a pre-speech drive from Stapleton Airport
to Civic Center on the eve of Clinton's first election.

"Clinton and the Secret Service didn't know it, but
Reggie was in my pocket," Green said.

Not all the responses to his columns were positive.

Green said he received death threats from people who
despised him for writing about what he termed an
overreaction to the death of the Grateful Dead's Jerry
Garcia. Green called him a deadbeat dad and a
druggie.

Patricia Calhoun, editor of the alternative weekly
newspaper Westword, said Green hadn't been
sounding like himself lately.

"His column didn't read like his heart was in it,"
Calhoun said. "His column read like he was tired. He
has got a long history at The Denver Post, so it is
definitely the end of an era."

Green led The Post newsroom when it made the
transition from Linotype to computers in the 1970s and
when it switched from evening to morning delivery in
the early 1980s. He designed The Post newsroom after
it moved from its longtime locale at 15th and
California streets to its current location at 1560
Broadway. He's listed as a contributor to The Post's
1986 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

He served as a network TV consultant on the region's
biggest stories: Jon Benet Ramsey, Timothy McVeigh
and the Columbine High School massacre. He
supervised coverage of tornadoes, political scandals,
airliner crashes, ski-lift fatalities and the terms of five
governors as he worked in nearly every Post
management position.

"Chuck is a legend in Colorado journalism," said
Denver Post publisher Dean Singleton, who struck up
an enduring friendship with Green six years before he
bought the paper in 1987. "He's contributed
immensely to both journalism and The Denver Post.

"I'm very disappointed that he decided to resign. He's
a close, personal friend, and I look forward to a
continued friendship."

Former Post reporter Fred Brown, who met Green
when Green was a copy boy 35 years ago, called his
colleague a committed journalist who was "not at all
shy about stirring up controversy. He succeeded in
doing that," Brown said. "Chuck's history has been
some of the most colorful in modern Denver
journalism."

Denver Post staff writer Karen Rouse contributed to
this report