Appealing for Justice

By Susan Berry Casey

Gilpin Park Press

It’s been 25 years since Colorado passed Amendment 2. The passage, which led to a nation-wide boycott of Colorado, allowed discrimination against gays and lesbians.

In light of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing gay marriage, it seems shocking that Coloradans would have voted for such blatant discrimination. But they did, and by law, the state was forced to defend the amendment in court. The case was Romer vs. Evans.

Leading the fight to override Amendment 2 was Jean Dubofsky, a Boulder attorney. She had been Colorado’s first female deputy attorney general and the first woman appointed to the state Supreme Court. The fight went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where in 1996, it was declared unconstitutional.

Former Denver City Council member Susan Berry Casey tells Dubofsky’s story against a background of a half-century of civil rights upheaval. In this soft biography, Casey writes that Dubofsky was an unlikely crusader for social change. In 1960, the high schooler was named Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow.

Dubofsky planned on more than being a housewife, however. She attended Stanford and then Harvard Law School, where she was subjected to ridicule by her professors for taking a place that should have gone to a male. But like other Harvard Law students of her era, Elizabeth Dole and Pat Schroeder, she not only endured but also became conscious of the overwhelming plight of women and minorities.

Following school, Dubofsky worked on civil rights cases in the South, filing slavery charges against employers of migrant laborers. Eventually, she moved to Boulder with her lawyer-husband, where she combined legal and political work with raising two sons.

Casey’s uncritical biography has its flaws. But it is a compelling account of one woman’s struggle for civil rights for others, all the while fighting the gender bias directed at herself.

“Appealing for Justice” is also a comprehensive look at the passage of an amendment that was a blot on Colorado, and the fight to declare it unconstitutional.

Rolling with the Press

By Edward Lehman and Suzanne Barrett

Filter Press

There was a time when virtually every reporter dreamed of owning a small town newspaper. Edward Lehman was a reporter for The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, a lawyer and Denver district attorney when he and his wife purchased the Longmont Times-Call in 1957.

“Rolling with the Press” is Lehman’s story of reviving the Times-Call and turning it into an empire of small-town newspapers.

Lehman came from a prominent Denver family — so prominent, in fact, that during the 1920s, his family feared he might be kidnapped for ransom. His grandfather was a jeweler, his mother a real estate investor. They lived in a mansion on Pennsylvania Street and spent summers at an Evergreen estate.

The family chauffeur was Stephen McNichols, later Colorado governor.

As a student at the University of Denver, Lehman moonlighted as a police reporter for the Rocky Mountain News. In “Rolling with the Press,” he recounts some of the major stories he covered.

They were mostly crimes. One criminal slugged Lehman because he thought the reporter was sneering at him.

While Lehman’s days as a reporter are the most interesting part of “Rolling with the Press,” the bulk of the book is the story of the author’s years as a small-town newspaper publisher. With his wife’s help, Lehman modernized the Times-Call, which became one of the state’s best newspapers. Publishing required constant change and upgrading and eventually led to the acquisition of newspapers all over the state. The newspaper business became a family affair, as the Lehman children joined the enterprise.

“Rolling with the Press” is the story of a small-town newspaper and how it thrived — but it’s also a look at growing up in Denver in the first half of the century.

A Short History of Denver

By Stephen J. Leonard and Thomas J. Noel

University of Nevada

Steve Leonard and Tom Noel’s 544-page “Denver Mining Camp to Metropolis” is a Colorado classic. Now, the authors condensed that opus into a 211-page “A Short History of Denver.”

The new book is more than “Denver Mining Camp”-light, however. It is a lively history of the Mile-High City with all its foibles, and with a look at future challenges. The authors say in a preface that they have boiled down a “Pikes Peak of information to a climbable hill.”

They begin with Colorado’s geology and native settlers, then launch into the city’s gold rush history and the prospectors. One was William McGaa, who gave his name to a LoDo Street for a brief time. Pioneers quickly decided they didn’t want to honor a drunken polygamist “unfit to associate with less pickled citizens,” the authors write.

The town was named for James W. Denver, who was governor of Kansas Territory. By the time the name was chosen, Denver actually had been replaced by Samuel Medary, but fortunately town founders didn’t know that when they reached the Cherry Creek encampment. Otherwise, we might have been Medarites, rooting for the Medary Broncos.

“A Short History of Denver” is a solid if brief history. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act and its importance are summed up in one paragraph, for instance. It is enhanced by the authors’ puns, humor and sly asides. (The Denver Zoo’s Wolf Pack woods, they note, has been a “howling success.”)

Opportunity School was founded in part to help immigrants, one of whom identified Abraham Lincoln as the man who made the pennies. And a group of down-and-outers stole a train following the 1893 silver crash but the caper was unwise because, the authors write, “authorities easily tracked them down.”