![]() A hiker, skier, and mountain climber, the young attorney also found time for politics he was elected to the legislature from an upscale district near the University of Denver. He arrived in Denver in 1962 and set up a law practice. He grew up in Madison, Wis., studied accounting at the University of Wisconsin, and then went to law school at the University of Colorado. Like many present-day Coloradans, Lamm is a midwesterner by birth who came here searching for the wide-open spaces and the wide-open professional opportunities the Rocky Mountain West provides. Lamm was gloomy long before anybody outside of the Colorado Legislature - where he began his political career in 1966 - had ever heard of him. Gloom just to place some articles in national magazines. ![]() for a lot of these people, the attractiveness is that you've got a governor." I don't know that, you know, they would accept me as a nongovernor. "I write for Playboy because I'm a sitting governor. And I'll tell you - that's a real mind trip for me. "I could write a scenario that what I will do is drift back into obscurity. "Yesterday's politician is like yesterday's newspaper," he says. When his third term as governor ends next January, Lamm will leave politics - temporarily, at least. Lamm fears he will soon be whisked off the national stage. He likes doing the "Donahue" show and banging out op-ed pieces for The New York Times he's delighted that reporters show up in his office all the time to write about his ideas, his projects, and of course his gloom.īut now this sweet notoriety may be threatened. Lamm readily concedes that he enjoys the attention and recognition his far-flung endeavors have garnered. The candid, blunt politician Coloradans have long known as "Governor Gloom" has emerged as America's national Cassandra, predicting a baneful future for the nation and pouring out provocative ad-libs on issues ranging from hospital patients with terminal illness ("We've got a duty to die and get out of the way") to victims of AIDS ("There are two kinds of AIDS patients: Either you're dying or you're dead"). This ferocious drive to fill the unforgiving minutes helps explain why the governor of Colorado has not one, not two, but three new books - from three different publishers - in bookstoresip, right now, why his columns and articles can be found in journals from Playboy to The Christian Science Monitor, why he has become to television talk shows what Mary Lou Retton is to television commercials. I go down and sit on a beach and I start getting twitchy if I have nothing to read." I stopped even watching the nightly news on television because I find National Public Radio is a much more efficient way to get news - because of the absence of commercials. ![]() ![]() I sit there and strategize how I can make best use of my time. "I am so Type-A - which I control through exercise. "I am almost obsessive," the 50-year-old Democratic governor says. But such concerns hardly matter to a man who jams every corner of his life with projects, projects, projects. "I can't read music." He has no idea whether anyone will ever perform the Thomson piece with his narration. Lamm doesn't claim to be perfectly suited for this task - "I'm not a poet," he says. I have found a symphony by Virgil Thomson called 'The Plow That Broke the Plains' and I am trying to put words to that as the experience of the West." I really got this passionate desire to tell the story of the West and use music, like Aaron Copland's 'A Lincoln Portrait,' or 'Peter and the Wolf,' to offset it. "I was out running one morning," the unfailingly energetic governor related recently, recalling the moment of inspiration. Lamm, the man of a thousand projects - author, teacher, TV reporter, lecturer, futurist, national prophet of gloom and doom, and, almost incidentally, governor of Colorado - has just thought up another project. From out of nowhere, he's been hit with a completely new idea. Suddenly, the jogger stops in his tracks. He's stewing over the next script for his weekly stint as a local TV newsman he's mentally rewriting the text of his five-part mini-series on the history of the West he's pondering his publisher's request for a new novel. As he listens, he's thinking about tomorrow's lecture in the college course he's teaching. As he runs, he's listening on his Walkman to a cassette of Bruce Catton's Civil War trilogy. Two hours and change before the first gleam of dawn will glisten off the snowy Rockies, and the white-haired jogger is already out plodding Denver's streets.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |