Dick Kreck’s passion for storytelling and Colorado’s culture led him to the wilder side of Denver’s history, where he rediscovered forgotten Western heroes, power players and the average folk who made the city what it is.
The fact that his writing was often ridiculously fun and, at times, naughty made it a daily must-read for hundreds of thousands of Denverites during his late-20th and early-21st century heyday, friends and colleagues said.
Kreck, the multi-award-winning Denver Post columnist and author who’s perhaps best known for coining the term LoDo, died Wednesday at age 83, in a Denver assisted living facility. He was being treated for Parkinson’s disease and a skin cancer tumor over the past two years, daughter Molly Kreck said.
“He was so full of mischief and wit, and just these stunning observations,” she said. “If he had something to say about you — however it was he said it — it was going to go to your heart.”
That drove Kreck’s prolific coverage of Mile High City culture, from Denver’s daily rhythms and nascent brewpub scene to exactingly researched, vibrantly written articles and books about the scandals, murders and self-inflicted tragedies of the hapless elite.
“He was a raconteur on paper,” said Sen. John Hickenlooper, whose friendship with Kreck preceded his own political ambitions, including turns as Denver mayor and Colorado governor. “He could take wildly improbable events that actually took place and make them real in his daily column.”
Kreck was key in promoting Hickenlooper’s brewpub, Wynkoop Brewing Co., when it opened in 1988 on Wazee Street. Kreck’s column in The Post was so well-read, Hickenlooper said, that the brief mention of his 25-cent, opening-day beers at the Wynkoop drove a frenzied response.
“It was a measure of his (reader) loyalty and following that the line stretched out the front door, down to the corner of Wazee Street, and all the way down to the Oxford Hotel,” Hickenlooper said. “We sold 6,000 cups of beer and he just kept coming up to me the whole time saying, ‘Don’t you wish you had charged 50 cents now instead of 25?’ “
Kreck also helped pioneer coverage of the modern craft beer scene — so much so that his license plate read Mr. Beer.
“He had to put special screws on the plate because people kept taking it,” said journalist Vicky Gits, whom Kreck was married to between 1986 and 2007.
Kreck’s social ease, connections, and smarts gave him access to Denver’s biggest nerve centers. He was good friends with Barry Fey, the music mega-promoter who built Denver’s modern concert scene, as well as former AEG Presents president Chuck Morris, who worked with Fey.
“Dick was the quintessential old-school critic,” Morris said. “The best this town ever had.”
Still, it was his curiosity, courage and harsh humor that prompted some of his most memorable writing, his daughter said.
“Somebody once said to him how hard it is for women to spend all day in high heels, and he made a joke about it,” said Molly Kreck. “So of course he did a whole column about how he wore high heels all day and went about his normal life, including walking around the 16th Street Mall.”
No matter how arcane, he also made his historical subjects feel immediate, friends said, whether that was highlighting unsung pioneers such as The Post’s first female reporter, Polly Pry, or adding rich context, color and record-setting details to stories that had become modern myths.
“He didn’t have a filter, and sometimes that got him in trouble,” Molly said. “When John Denver died he wrote that if he had to listen to ‘Rocky Mountain High’ one more time he would have wished he was in the plane with him.”
Denver Post Columnist Dick Kreck sits in one of the cars on the American Orient Express train in this June 22, 2000 file photo. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
“Dick was gifted with a boundless curiosity and a fabulous wit,” said William Porter, a former Post colleague who inducted Kreck into the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame in 2010. “He loved Denver and had his fingers on the pulse of the city, and that pulse found its way right into his keyboard and onto the page.”
One of those loves was The Brown Palace, the site of a shocking crime on which Kreck based his 2003 book “Murder at The Brown Palace: A True Story of Seduction and Betrayal.” After it was published, he insisted on visiting the upscale hotel on the anniversary of the murder, and having a drink at the bar.
“He was literally living it,” said Gits, who was there with him.
“He was so much more than a writer,” said Dean Singleton, The Post’s former publisher who first met Kreck when he bought the paper in 1987. He and Kreck would become fast friends and, later, grab beers at The Brown Palace after Kreck’s retirement in June 2007, Singleton said.
“He revived The Denver Post Cheyenne Frontier Days Train in 1993, which had originally gone from 1907 to 1970, and that was always a wild time, with up to 1,000 traveling up to Wyoming,” Singleton said. “And he was right there leading every trip. We were also 44 chapters into my writing my memoir, with four left to go, which we had been doing for about four years. It’s such a sad day.”
Kreck was looked up to by not only his three daughters and son, but by other journalists in Colorado, former colleagues said.
“I’m so grateful to have gotten into newspaper journalism at a time when the old-school newsperson was still a ubiquitous presence in the newsroom — and Dick embodied that anachronism with charm, compassion and more clever one-liners than a comedy festival,” said Ricardo Baca, a former reporter, critic and editor with The Post and Rocky Mountain News. “… this one hits our Queen City like a sucker punch to the gut.”
Kreck’s impact on the city is hard to calculate, but a well-known example is his coining of the term LoDo — an abbreviation of Lower Downtown — on Nov. 2, 1983, according to late Post columnist, friend and sometime-rival Bill Husted, who died on Nov. 9.
Dick Kreck and Bill Husted before John Hickenlooper’s inauguration party on July 17, 2003. (Photo by Amy Ellis/The Denver Post)
“I just wish I had trademarked it so I’d get 25 cents every time somebody used it,” Kreck quipped in 2016. “No one paid much attention when I first wrote it, then I started seeing it in press releases.”
Kreck was a primary figure in Colorado journalism for more than four decades, first drawn from his southern California home to a copy-editing job with The Denver Post in 1968. He wrote a city column for 18 years and covered local TV and radio before retiring in 2007.
Kreck also authored well-read, celebrated books on local history, such as 2003’s “Murder at The Brown Palace” and 2009’s “Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.” His final book, “Rich People Behaving Badly,” was published in 2016.
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Kreck didn’t care if Denver was considered a cowtown, friends said. He was less interested in polishing the city’s reputation and more interested in flogging how it came to be, even though he loved it all. His at-times harsh humor belied a joyful soul who worshipped “The Simpsons” and classic pop, rock and R&B, such as Fats Domino and Chuck Berry.
His daughters cheerily tried to get him to say “I love you” in his final days — since he was not that kind of dad, said Molly Kreck, even though they all knew he loved them deeply.
“My sister Valerie looked at him a few days ago and said, ‘I love you, dad,’ and tried to get him to say it,” she said. “And he looked at her, with basically his last words, and he said, ‘Well, who don’t?’ ”
As Kreck used to write when signing off: Exactly.
A public celebration of Dick Kreck’s life is scheduled for Jan. 4 at Wynkoop Brewing Co. in Denver.
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