The memorial service was attended by over a thousand friends, family members, DU employees, athletes and members of the community. The event featured remarks from friends and family of Ritchie, including DU Chancellor Jeremy Haefner, former Colorado Supreme Court justice Rebecca Love Kourlis, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.

Her son Sebastian confirmed her death in an Instagram post Wednesday, noting that “she wanted to share her journey after her accident and brain surgery, so I thought she would appreciate one last post sharing the news to people who supported her.”

Roughly three weeks earlier, Ban had posted on her Instagram account to reveal the news of her skiing accident. In the caption of a photo where she had her head partly shaved and was lying in bed, Ban said she had a life-changing skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado, on Christmas Eve.

The jewelry designer said at the time that she had been cleared by ski patrol, who had checked her for a concussion, after skiing to the bottom of the mountain and that her fall “didn’t seem that bad at the time,” even though she had a bit of headache. A paramedic suggested that she go to a hospital for a CT scan, where a brain bleed was detected. Ban said that she was then airlifted to a trauma hospital, adding: “Last thing I remember was being intubated and waking up after an emergency craniotomy.”

Ban, who was from Singapore, designed fine jewelry that adorned some of the world’s most recognizable artists and celebrities, including Rihanna, Beyoncé, Cardi B, Billie Eilish, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar and Post Malone. According to her website, Ban also worked with Rihanna on jewelry for her tours, appearances, music videos and her Fenty x Puma collections.

Ban often set precious stones like diamonds in oxidized metals to create visual contrast.

For a 2017 article in The New York Times, Ban talked about her signature armor rings, including a piece she created for Rihanna to wear in photographs for W Magazine. Told to imagine the pop star as the last woman in a postapocalyptic world, Ban created a claw armor ring, an articulated design that stretches up the finger and ends in a clawlike pointed tip. “It continues the theme of my signature armor ring but is even more protective,” she said. “It’s like a weapon.”

Ban added that it was no coincidence that the piece was created during a time of political flux. “Revolution and social protest have always sparked intense periods of creativity,” Ban said. “Just look at the 1960s.”

In a statement Wednesday, Jeff Jenkins, the founder and president of Jeff Jenkins Productions, which produced Bling Empire and Bling Empire: New York, called Ban “a genuine original.”

“Our entire Bling Empire family, in front of and behind the camera, is shocked and deeply saddened,” he said. “To experience Lynn was to receive a big slice of joy.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Nikki Giovanni, the poet, author, educator and public speaker who went from borrowing money to release her first book to spending decades as a literary celebrity who shared blunt and conversational takes on everything from racism and love to space travel and mortality, has died. She was 81.

Giovanni, subject of the prize-winning 2023 documentary “Going to Mars,” died Monday with her lifelong partner, Virginia “Ginney” Fowler, by her side, according to a statement from friend and author Renée Watson.

“We will forever feel blessed to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin,” said Allison (Pat) Ragan, Giovanni’s cousin, in a statement on behalf of the family.

The author of more than 25 books, Giovanni was a born confessor and performer whom fans came to know well from her work, readings and other live appearances and her years on the faculty of Virginia Tech, among other schools. Poetry collections such as “Black Judgement” and “Black Feeling Black Talk” sold thousands of copies, led to invitations from “The Tonight Show” and other television programs and made her popular enough to fill a 3,000-seat concert hall at Lincoln Center for a celebration of her 30th birthday.

In poetry, prose and the spoken word, she told her story. She looked back on her childhood in Tennessee and Ohio, championed the Black Power movement, addressed her battles with lung cancer, paid tribute to heroes from Nina Simone to Angela Davis and reflected on such personal passions as food, romance, family and rocketing into space — a journey she believed Black women uniquely qualified for, if only because of how much they had already survived. She also edited a groundbreaking anthology of Black women poets, “Night Comes Softly,” and helped found a publishing cooperative that promoted works by Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker among others.

For a time, she was called “The Princess of Black Poetry.”

“All I know is the she is the most cowardly, bravest, least understanding, most sensitive, slowest to anger, most quixotic, lyingest, most honest woman I know,” her friend Barbara Crosby wrote in the introduction to “The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni,” an anthology of nonfiction prose published in 2003. “To love her is to love contradiction and conflict. To know her is to never understand but to be sure that all is life.”

Giovanni’s admirers ranged from James Baldwin to Teena Marie, who name-checked her on the dance hit “Square Biz,” to Oprah Winfrey, who invited the poet to her “Living Legends” summit in 2005, when other guests of honor included Rosa Parks and Toni Morrison. Giovanni was a National Book Award finalist in 1973 for a prose work about her life, “Gemini.” She also received a Grammy nomination for the spoken word album “The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection.”

In January 2009, at the request of NPR, she wrote a poem about the incoming president, Barack Obama:

“I’ll walk the streets

And knock on doors

Share with the folks:

Not my dreams but yours

I’ll talk with the people

I’ll listen and learn

I’ll make the butter

Then clean the churn”

____

Giovanni had a son, Thomas Watson Giovanni, in 1969. She never married the father, because, she told Ebony magazine, “I didn’t want to get married, and I could afford not to get married.” Over the latter part of her life she lived with her partner, Fowler, a fellow faculty member at Virginia Tech.

She was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was soon called “Nikki” by her older sister. She was 4 when her family moved to Ohio and eventually settled in the Black community of Lincoln Heights, outside Cincinnati. She would travel often between Tennessee and Ohio, bound to her parents and to her maternal grandparents in her “spiritual home” in Knoxville.

As a girl, she read everything from history books to Ayn Rand and was accepted to Fisk University, the historically Black school in Nashville, after her junior year of high school. College was a time for achievement, and for trouble. Her grades were strong, she edited the Fisk literary magazine and helped start the campus branch of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. But she rebelled against school curfews and other rules and was kicked out for a time because her “attitudes did not fit those of a Fisk woman,” she later wrote. After the school changed the dean of women, Giovanni returned and graduated with honors in history in 1967.

Giovanni relied on support from friends to publish her debut collection, “Black Poetry Black Talk,” which came out in 1968, and in the same year she self-published “Black Judgement.” The radical Black Arts Movement was at its height and early Giovanni poems such as “A Short Essay of Affirmation Explaining Why,” “Of Liberation” and “A Litany for Peppe” were militant calls to overthrow white power. (“The worst junkie or black businessman is more humane/than the best honkie”).

“I have been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from?” she wrote in a biographical sketch for Contemporary Writers. “A poem has to say something. It has to make some sort of sense; be lyrical; to the point; and still able to be read by whatever reader is kind enough to pick up the book.”

Her opposition to the political system moderated over time, although she never stopped advocating for change and self-empowerment, or remembering martyrs of the past. In 2020, she was featured in an ad for presidential candidate Joe Biden, in which she urged young people to “vote because someone died for you to have the right to vote.”

Her best known work came early in her career; the 1968 poem “Nikki-Rosa.” It was a declaration of her right to define herself, a warning to others (including obituary writers) against telling her story and a brief meditation on her poverty as a girl and the blessings, from holiday gatherings to bathing in “one of those big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in,” which transcended it.

“and I really hope no white person ever has cause

to write about me

because they never understand

Black love is Black wealth and they’ll

probably talk about my hard childhood

and never understand that

all the while I was quite happy”

He died peacefully with his wife Polly Kruse at his side after reading the New York Times and doing the Saturday quiz, she said. A newsman to the last, he died from complications related to cancer, Kruse said.

“He was so wonderfully curious; he wanted to know things. But he much preferred to know them first, and got a physical high from then turning around and being the first to tell the world,” said journalist and longtime friend J.R. Moehringer.

The thousands of articles Husted wrote from the early 1980s through 2010s leave an archive of Denver culture that’s nearly unmatched in its detail and nuance, friends and colleagues said, from the foibles of the ultra-rich (some of whom he enraged with his writing) to tender moments at society galas.

“People always got that feeling reading his work that he was our guy, one of us,” said Joe Rassenfoss, who hired Husted away from a server job at Boccalino to write his first column for the Rocky Mountain News in 1983 — for $50 per week. “He wasn’t above us. He was our eyes and ears.”

That included literary quips on society culture and gossip, withering humor and, perhaps most important, fierce competitiveness in a town where more people knew each other than they do now.

Time was, Denver was smaller, newspapers were bigger, and Husted was revered and feared as the primary chronicler of the city’s cultural scene, said Sen. John Hickenlooper.

“He was a real Herb Caen figure — a man about town,” Hickenlooper said, referencing the influential San Francisco gossip writer and journalist. “He wrote one of the first articles about the Wynkoop Brewery. He also named one of our events, where we walked pigs down the alley to the Oxford Hotel on 17th and back. He called it The Running of the Pigs, or Pamplona on the Platte, which I’ll always think is an amazing turn of phrase.”

Husted and Hickenlooper stayed friends through Hickenlooper’s political ascension to mayor, governor, and Senator — in part, Hickenlooper thinks, because of Husted’s incredible love of listening to and telling stories, and the bonding that promoted.

“There was no one who did it like he did,” said Kim Christiansen, a 9News anchor who worked with Husted when he appeared on TV to share his work. “Every time he saw you he asked about someone in your world, which is a gift. He remembered people’s lives, which is not always the case in superficial relationships. I think he got a lot of scoops that way.”

The news media ecosystem at the time supported more than one of those jobs in town.

“We always had a friendly little competition going,” said Joanne Davidson, The Post’s former society writer. “Our goal every day was to make the other choke on their Cheerios, because inevitably one of us would have something really juicy that the other didn’t have.”

Husted debuted as the society writer for the Rocky in October of 1986 with a story on the Carousel Ball, which Rassenfoss described as “the biggest, baddest bash in Denver in those days, put on by Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara. Because Marvin owned 20th Century Fox, he got lots of stars, that year ranging from Gary Coleman to Henry Kissinger, to come and mingle.” (One of Husted’s best story ledes, Rassenfoss added, was the 1992 phrase “Geraldo Rivera wants to punch me in the nose.”)

Husted was a familiar presence at those events, but also restaurants and bars, holding his beloved cigar and martini, friends said. His car usually stood out in the parking lot, given his license plate TELL ME. All of that ran parallel to a silliness he was also unafraid to showcase.

“He always made me laugh with these stupid things,” said Nancy Sagar, who was married to Husted briefly in the early 1990s and stayed good friends with him after their divorce. “He would go into the bathroom and come out intentionally with toilet paper hanging off the back of his pants and his shoes. And he would walk through the restaurant like that.”

Husted was born on Aug. 13, 1948, on the Upper East Side of New York City. At 10 years old, he “was riding subways and cabs, sneaking into clubs, (and) soaking up New York’s last golden age,” according to a biography in his novel “Let Me Tell You About the #VeryRich.”

Husted bounced between Denver, the East Coast and overseas before returning to Denver, where he quickly became a morning fixture for newspaper readers. The Denver Post lured him away from the Rocky in 1996, Husted wrote, where he was the paper’s featured city columnist through 2011.

“He had no journalistic training, but was urbane, well-educated and had such a natural, conversational way of writing that you were immediately engaged,” wrote former Post editor and columnist Suzanne Brown, one of Husted’s first editors, via email.

“Amused, intrigued, you were right there with him as he made his rounds to clubs, parties and hot restaurants,” she wrote. “As an editor, I just had to correct his many misspellings of names and places, as he didn’t let such minor things get in the way of meeting a deadline. He would freely admit this was the case and thank me for saving his bacon!”

In lieu of flowers, and to honor Husted’s love of dogs, his family asked that any donations be made to Safe Harbor Lab Rescue (safeharborlabrescue.org).

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BOSTON, Mass. (AP) — Ethel Kennedy, the wife of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy who raised their 11 children after he was assassinated and remained dedicated to social causes and the family’s legacy for decades thereafter, died on Thursday, her family said. She was 96.

Kennedy had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke in her sleep on Oct. 3, her family said.

“It is with our hearts full of love that we announce the passing of our amazing grandmother,” Joe Kennedy III posted on X. “She died this morning from complications related to a stroke suffered last week.”

“Along with a lifetime’s work in social justice and human rights, our mother leaves behind nine children, 34 grandchildren and 24 great-great grandchildren along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly,” the family statement said.

The Kennedy matriarch, whose children were Kathleen, Joseph II, Robert Jr., David, Courtney, Michael, Kerry, Christopher, Max, Douglas and Rory, was one of the last remaining members of a generation that included President John F. Kennedy. Her family said she had recently enjoyed seeing many of her relatives, before falling ill.

A millionaire’s daughter who married the future senator and attorney general in 1950, Ethel Kennedy had endured more death by the age of 40, for the whole world to see, than most would in a lifetime.

She was by Robert F. Kennedy’s side when he was fatally shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, just after winning the Democratic presidential primary in California. Her brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated in Dallas less than five years earlier.

Her parents were killed in a plane crash in 1955, and her brother died in a 1966 crash. Her son David Kennedy later died of a drug overdose, son Michael Kennedy in a skiing accident and nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash. Another nephew, Michael Skakel, was found guilty of murder in 2002, although a judge in 2013 ordered a new trial and the Connecticut Supreme Court vacated his conviction in 2018.

In 2019, she was grieving again after granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill died of an apparent drug overdose.

“One wonders how much this family must be expected to absorb,” family friend Philip Johnson, founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation, told the Boston Herald after Michael Kennedy’s death.

Ethel Kennedy sustained herself through her faith and devotion to family.

“She was a devout Catholic and a daily communicant, and we are comforted in knowing she is reunited with the love of her life, our father, Robert. F. Kennedy; her children David and Michael; her daughter-in-law Mary; her grandchildren Maeve and Saorise and her great-grandchildren Gideon and Josie. Please keep our mother in your hearts and prayers,” the family statement said.

Ethel’s mother-in-law, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, initially worried about how she would handle so much tragedy.

“I knew how difficult it was going to be for her to raise that big family without the guiding role and influence that Bobby would have provided,” Rose recalled in her memoir, “Times to Remember.” “And, of course, she realized this too, fully and keenly. Yet she did not give way.”

She founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights soon after husband’s death and advocated for causes including gun control and human rights. She rarely spoke about her husband’s assassination. When her filmmaker daughter, Rory, brought it up in the 2012 HBO documentary, “Ethel,” she couldn’t share her grief.

“When we lost Daddy …” she began, then teared up and asked that her youngest daughter “talk about something else.”

In 2008, she joined brother-in-law Ted Kennedy and niece Caroline Kennedy in endorsing Sen. Barack Obama for president, likening him to her late husband. She made several trips to the White House during the Obama years, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014 and meeting Pope Francis in 2015.

Many of her progeny became well known. Daughter Kathleen became lieutenant governor of Maryland; Joseph represented Massachusetts in Congress; Courtney married Paul Hill, who had been wrongfully convicted of an IRA bombing; Kerry became a human rights activist and president of the RFK center; Christopher ran for governor of Illinois; Max served as a prosecutor in Philadelphia and Douglas reported for Fox News Channel.

Her son Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also became a national figure, although ultimately not as a liberal in the family tradition. First known as an environmental lawyer, he evolved into a conspiracy theorist who spread false theories about vaccines. He ran for president as an independent after briefly challenging President Joe Biden, and his name remained on ballots in multiple states after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.

Ethel Kennedy did not comment publicly on her son’s actions, although several other family members denounced him.

Decades earlier, she seemed to thrive on her in-laws’ rising power. She was an enthusiastic backer of JFK’s 1960 run and during the Kennedy administration hosted some of the era’s most well-attended parties at their Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Virginia, including one where historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was pushed fully clothed into the swimming pool. In the Kennedy spirit, she also was known as an avid and highly competitive tennis player and a compulsive planner.

“Petite and peppy Ethel, who doesn’t look one bit the outdoorsy type, considers outdoor activity so important for the children that she has arranged her busy Cabinet-wife schedule so she can personally take them on two daily outings,” The Washington Post reported in 1962.

In February of that year, she accompanied her husband on a round-the-world goodwill tour, stopping in Japan, Hong Kong, Italy and other countries. She said it was important for Americans to meet ordinary people overseas.

“People have a distinct liking for Americans,” she told the Post. “But the Communists have been so vocal, it was a surprise for some Asians to hear America’s point of view. It is good for Americans to travel and get our viewpoint across.”

Kennedy was born Ethel Skakel on April 11, 1928, in Chicago, the sixth of seven children of coal magnate George Skakel and Ann Brannack Skakel, a devout Roman Catholic. She grew up in a 31-room English country manor house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and attended Greenwich Academy before graduating from the Convent of the Sacred Heart in the Bronx in 1945.

She met Robert Kennedy through his sister Jean, her roommate at Manhattanville College in New York. They moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he finished his last year of law school at the University of Virginia, and then in 1957, they bought Hickory Hill from by John and Jacqueline Kennedy, who had bought it in 1953.

Robert Kennedy became chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee in 1957. He later was appointed attorney general by his brother, the newly elected President Kennedy.

She had supported her husband in his successful 1964 campaign for the U.S. Senate in New York and his subsequent presidential bid. Pregnant with their 11th child when he was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan, her look of shock and horror was captured by photographers in images that remained indelible decades later.

The assassination traumatized the family, especially son David Kennedy, who watched the news in a hotel room. He was just days before his 13th birthday and never recovered, struggling with addiction problems for years and overdosing in 1984.

In 2021, she said Sirhan Sirhan should not be released from prison, a view not shared by some others in her family. Two years later, a California panel denied him parole.

Although Ethel Kennedy was linked to several men after her husband’s death, most notably singer Andy Williams, she never remarried.

In April 2008, Ethel Kennedy visited Indianapolis on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. A monument there commemorated King’s death and the speech her husband had given that night in 1968, which was credited with averting rioting in the city.

“Of all the Kennedy women, she was the one I would end up admiring the most,” Harry Belafonte would write of her. “She wasn’t playacting. She looked at you and immediately got what you were about. Often in the coming years, when Bobby was balking at something we wanted him to do for the movement, I’d take my case to Ethel. ‘We have to talk to him,’ she’d say, and she would.”

Ethel Kennedy joined President Obama and former President Bill Clinton — each held one of her hands — as they climbed stairs to lay a wreath at President Kennedy’s gravesite during a November 2013 observance of the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death.

The nonprofit center she founded remains dedicated to advancing human rights through litigation, advocacy, education and inspiration, giving annual awards to journalists, authors and others who have made significant contributions to human rights.

She also was active in the Coalition of Gun Control, Special Olympics, and the Earth Conservation Corps. And she showed up in person, participating in a 2016 demonstration in support of higher pay for farmworkers in Florida and a 2018 hunger strike against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Hickory Hill was sold in 2009 for $8.25 million, and Ethel Kennedy divided her time between homes in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and Palm Beach, Florida.

He died Aug. 21 of natural causes in Los Angeles. Amos’ publicist, Belinda Foster, confirmed the news of his death on Tuesday.

Amos — who played football for Colorado State University and, in the later years of his life, lived in the mountain town of Westcliffe — played James Evans Sr. on “Good Times,” which featured one of television’s first Black two-parent families.

Produced by Norman Lear and co-created by actor Mike Evans, who co-starred on “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons,” “Good Times” ran from 1974 to 1979 on CBS.

“That show was the closest depiction in reality to life as an African American family living in those circumstances as it could be,” Amos told Time magazine in 2021.

His character, along with wife Florida, played by Esther Rolle, originated on another Lear show, “Maude.” James Evans often worked two manual labor jobs to support his family that included three children, with Jimmie Walker becoming a breakout star as oldest son J.J.

Such was the show’s impact that Alicia Keys, Rick Ross, the Wu-Tang Clan are among the musicians who name-checked Amos or his character in their lyrics.

Amos and Rolle were eager to portray a positive image of a Black family, struggling against the odds in a public housing project in Chicago. But they grew frustrated at seeing Walker’s character being made foolish and his role expanded.

“The fact is that Esther’s criticism, and also that of John and others — some of it very pointed and personal — seriously damaged my appeal in the Black community,” Walker wrote in his 2012 memoir “Dyn-O-Mite! Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times.”

After three seasons of critical acclaim and high ratings, Amos was fired. He had become critical of the show’s white writing staff for creating storylines that he felt were inauthentic to the Black characters.

“There were several examples where I said, ‘No, you don’t do these things. It’s anathema to Black society. I’ll be the expert on that, if you don’t mind,‘” he told Time magazine. “And it got confrontational and heated enough that ultimately my being killed off the show was the best solution for everybody concerned, myself included.”

Amos’ character was killed in a car accident. Walker lamented the situation. “If the decision had been up to me, I would have preferred that John stay and the show remain more of an ensemble,” he wrote in his memoir. “Nobody wanted me up front all the time, including me.”

Amos and Lear later reconciled and they shared a hug at a “Good Times” live TV reunion special in 2019.

Amos quickly bounced back, landing the role of an adult Kunta Kinte, the centerpiece of “Roots,” based on Alex Haley’s novel set during and after the era of slavery in the U.S. The miniseries was a critical and ratings blockbuster, and Amos earned one of its 37 Emmy nominations.

“I knew that it was a life-changing role for me, as an actor and just from a humanistic standpoint,” he told Time magazine. “It was the culmination of all of the misconceptions and stereotypical roles that I had lived and seen being offered to me. It was like a reward for having suffered those indignities.”

Born John Allen Amos Jr. on Dec. 27, 1939, in Newark, New Jersey, he was the son of an auto mechanic. He graduated from Colorado State University with a sociology degree and played on the school’s football team.

Before pursuing acting, he moved to New York and was a social worker at the Vera Institute of Justice, working with defendants at the Brooklyn House of Detention.

He had a brief professional football career, playing in various minor leagues. In 1964, Amos signed a free-agent contract with the Denver Broncos, but he was released on the second day of training camp after pulling a hamstring and failing to run the 40-yard dash.

Three years later, he signed a free-agent contract with the Kansas City Chiefs, but coach Hank Stram encouraged Amos to pursue his interest in writing instead. He had jobs as an advertising and comedy writer before moving in front of the camera.

Amos’ first major TV role was as Gordy Howard, the weatherman on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” from 1970-73. As the show’s only Black character, he played straight man to bombastic anchor Ted Baxter.

Among Amos’ film credits were “Let’s Do It Again” with Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, “Coming to America” with Eddie Murphy and its 2021 sequel, “Die Hard 2,” “Madea’s Witness Protection” and “Uncut Gems” with Adam Sandler. He was in Ice Cube and Dr. Dre’s 1994 video “Natural Born Killaz.”

He was a frequent guest star on “The West Wing,” and his other TV appearances included “Hunter,” “The District,” “Men in Trees,” “All About the Andersons,” “Two and a Half Men,” and “The Ranch.”

In 2018, Amos moved to the Colorado mountain town of Westcliffe where Colorado Bureau of Investigation agents investigated allegations of elder abuse after local authorities received reports that the then-83-year-old man could have been the victim of a crime.

A daughter went public with accusations that he was the victim of abuse but Amos rejected the allegations.

Amos was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2020. He served in the New Jersey National Guard.

___

Associated Press writer Kaitlyn Huamani and Denver Post reporter Lauren Penington contributed to this report.

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Koelbel, 72, died Thursday from blood cancer, according to his family.

Koelbel’s father, Walter A. Koelbel Sr., was a Michigan native who moved to Colorado for military training in World War II, then stayed to attend the University of Colorado Boulder. He founded Koelbel and Co. at age 26 in 1952 as a residential brokerage and found early success buying land to the south of Denver in the path of the region’s growth.

“Early on, my dad realized that dealing with the real-estate agents and the brokers wasn’t as much fun as looking for good land and figuring out what to do with it,” Buz Koelbel told Avid Lifestyle, a publication that covers Denver’s southern suburbs, in 2021.

Koelbel, born the same year his father founded the company, was his father’s junior. But he acquired his nickname early on, thanks to his toddler older sister’s mispronunciation of “baby brother.”

“My sister couldn’t say Walter and she called me her little baby buzzer — and it just stuck,” he told the Villager newspaper in 2017. “When I was learning cursive in first or second grade, I looked at it and thought it sounds the same with one ‘z’ as two.”

Koelbel and his father’s company grew up together.

“To get us kids out of the house, he’d take us on property tours,” he told the Villager. “But probably the most significant memory is when they started converting my grandparents’ Hereford cattle farm into what is now Pinehurst Country Club and community. We used to play in the cornfields out there as a kid. That was our first big flagship community.”

Koelbel graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School and, like his father, UC Boulder, where his family became a major donor. The university’s Leeds School of Business is located in the Koelbel Building.

After graduating in 1974, Koelbel worked in property management in San Francisco for two years before joining Koelbel and Co. in 1976. He was named president in 1985. His father died in December 2011.

Koelbel and Co.’s development activity has been varied. The firm has developed single-family home communities in the Denver area, including The Preserve in Greenwood Village, as well as Rendezvous in Grand County. It also developed the region’s largest apartment complex — The Breakers Resort, now TAVA Waters, in southeast Denver, which set a record when it sold in 2016. The company also developed 10 income-restricted housing projects during his tenure.

The firm, however, isn’t just residential. Commercial projects have included retail space in Parker, a business park in Louisville and RiNo’s Catalyst office building. Another office building is underway in Aurora geared at defense contractors. In recent months, Koelbel has been the buyer as sellers have unloaded Denver Tech Center office buildings at big losses.

The firm didn’t stray outside Colorado for decades. But last year, Koelbel and Co. broke ground on a Catalyst office building in Omaha.

Koelbel stepped down from day-to-day responsibilities at the company in the spring, handing the title of president and CEO to son Carl Koelbel and taking on the title of chairman. His other sons, Walt and Dean, are also executives at the firm. Koelbel and Co. calls itself “the longest operating family-owned real estate development firm in the region.”

“We’ve all got what my dad calls the dinner-table DNA,” Carl Koelbel told the Villager in 2017. “It was growing up and hearing my dad talk about real estate. It just got embedded within us.”

Koelbel was a co-founder of the Denver South Economic Development Partnership, the Common Sense Institute and the High Line Canal Conservancy, according to his family. He served as a board member for a variety of organizations including the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and CU Real Estate Center.

Koelbel is survived by Sherri, his wife of 41 years, as well as his four children — Carl (Fallon), Walt (Laura), Dean (Kristin), and Bethany Mihalcin (Justin) — and four siblings: Lynn Stambaugh (Jim), Bob (Deb), Leslie Webb (Tom) and Laurie Chahbandour (John). He is also survived by 11 grandchildren who, according to his family, gave him a new nickname: “Bop.”

A memorial service will take place on Oct. 1 at 1:30 p.m. at Bethany Lutheran Church in Cherry Hills Village. A reception will follow at Cherry Hills Country Club. In lieu of flowers, his family asks that donations be made to Junior Achievement or the High Line Canal Conservancy.

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But Sturm never lost his work ethic, his vision for the future, his desire to help the larger community in the present, and his sense of humor, family and colleagues said.

Sturm, a mover and shaker on Denver’s business scene in the 90s and 00s, died on Saturday at age 92, overcoming his setbacks and leaving his indelible mark on Colorado.

“He was in the office every day — even until right here at the end,” said Koger Propst, CEO at ANB Bank, which Sturm strung together from a group of troubled banks he acquired during the Savings and Loans crisis in the early 1990s.

Propst said Sturm was a thoughtful and strategic thinker who even into his late 80s and 90s never stopped planning.

Sturm’s second son, Stephen, described him as an amazing father, who was kind, attentive and thoughtful. He said his father worked until late last month and when he died this weekend, he was surrounded by family.

“He clearly lived a very busy life but he always made time for his family. You learned a lot through what he said, but you learned more through how he operated,” Stephen Sturm said.

Born Donald Lawrence Sturm to an immigrant family in Brooklyn on Jan. 10, 1932, Sturm attended City College of New York before being drafted into the U.S. Army. He moved to Denver to earn his law degree at the University of Denver, and then returned to New York, where he obtained a master’s degree in taxation law.

After working as an attorney for the Internal Revenue Service, Sturm joined the engineering and construction firm Peter Kiewit Sons Co. in Omaha, eventually becoming vice chairman. In 1984, he guided the company’s acquisition of Continental Group, a multi-national conglomerate.

In 1987, Sturm, previously married, met and married Susan Morgan, who survives him, along with his four children — Robert Sturm, Melanie Sturm, Stephen Sturm and Emily Sturm Ehrens.

The Sturms began acquiring failed banks and troubled properties in the early 1990s after Don left Kiewit and moved to Denver, which was especially hard hit by the S&L crisis, to be closer to their investments. The acquired banks, owned by Sturm Financial Group, came together as Denver-based ANB Bank, which now has 30 locations and $3 billion in assets.

Sturm emphasized building local management teams connected to the local community at each bank location, and understood the important role independent banks played, Propst said.

The family enterprise, named Alder, oversees the real estate holdings and has established master-planned communities over the years, the most recent being The Meadows at Castle Rock, where 20,000 residents live.

Sturm invested heavily in Cherry Creek North, redeveloping the old Tattered Cover building and creating Fillmore Plaza, and its investment arm has funded several startups.

Sturm also was part of a group that helped Continental Airlines emerge from bankruptcy in 1993 and he helped Kiewit spin off what would become Level 3 Communications.

That telecom investment, and a significant holding in WorldCom –once the country’s second-largest long-distance provider– helped Sturm reach an estimated net worth of $3.2 billion in 1999, per Forbes.

That year, he bid $461 million for Ascent Entertainment Group, owner of the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche and the soon-to-open Pepsi Center, beating a $400 million bid from Bill and Nancy Laurie, heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton.

But city officials wanted guarantees that a new owner wouldn’t move either team for 25 years, which Sturm contested. That allowed Stan Kroenke, also associated with the Walton family, to slip in and acquire the two teams and arena in 2000.

Over the years, Sturm and his foundation have supported several area groups and institutions, including Judaism Your Way, which Sturm founded after rabbis refused to marry him and Sue; the Jewish Community Center of Denver; the Denver Museum of Nature and Science; the Summit Huts Association and Arapahoe Community College.

In 2019, the Sturm Family Foundation donated $10 million for ACC’s Sturm Collaboration Campus, the largest gift in the history of Colorado’s community college system.

“Don Sturm was a visionary in imagining a fully inclusive, welcoming home to interfaith and mixed heritage families. He was steadfast and unwavering in his support of Judaism Your Way’s mission to welcome Jews and their loved ones with unconditional love. The wider Jewish world has changed and become more inclusive as a result of his dedication,” Rabbi Caryn Aviv wrote in an email.

His greatest financial generosity, however, was reserved for his alma mater, the University of Denver, where the Sturm College of Law, the classroom building Sturm Hall, and the Sturm Center, a psychology program that helps veterans and those in the military, carry his name.

“From the time he was a determined law student on our campus until the last day of his service as a trustee, Don Sturm, along with his wife, Susan, made so many contributions to the DU community,” Chancellor Jeremy Haefner in an email.

In 2016, the university awarded Don and Sue its first inaugural Founders Medal, the highest non-academic honor the university can bestow.

”You want to help people. You can’t take it with you,” Sturm said in a video accompanying his admission into the Colorado Business Hall of Fame in 2022. “You want the place where you live to be a better place because you lived there.”

The Sturm family will hold a private funeral and memorial service. Donations in Sturm’s memory can be made to Judaism Your Way, 950 South Cherry St., Suite 310, Glendale, CO 80246-2699. Those impacted by Sturm’s life are asked to share memories and stories via a letter to “The Sturm Family” at 3033 E. First Ave., Suite 300, Denver, CO 80206.

The vote Thursday was the latest to turn heads as Caraveo faces a tight reelection race in Colorado’s 8th Congressional District. While other Colorado Democrats defended President Joe Biden and Harris’ immigration record, including Gov. Jared Polis and U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette — who called the resolution a “naked political stunt” — Careveo stood out.

She argued it was part of an independent streak she’s shown as she’s represented a battleground district. But her Republican opponent, state Rep. Gabe Evans, portrayed Caraveo’s vote as part of an about-face from her past “open border record.”

Just five other House Democrats voted with Caraveo on the resolution, and all are in close races in an election cycle in which the issue of illegal immigration has become a top concern among voters. In her first election to Congress in 2022, Caraveo won in the newly formed 8th District by less than a percentage point.

The New York Times reports that since Biden took office, Customs and Border Protection has recorded more than 9.6 million migrant encounters nationwide, mostly along the southern border. Those numbers have declined sharply in recent months, but the issue has remained a point of attack for Republicans against Biden — and then, after he withdrew from the presidential race last Sunday, against Harris.

When Caraveo was a Colorado state lawmaker, she took a much more progressive stance on immigration. In September 2021, she signed a letter sent to both Biden and Harris, along with congressional leaders, requesting that Congress “divest from immigration enforcement agencies” such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The 8th District takes in parts of Adams, Weld and Larimer counties north of Denver.

Evans said Caraveo “can run but she can’t hide from her open border record.”

“Less than three years ago, she called for defunding ICE and border patrol,” he wrote in an email. “You can’t get more open border than that. She’s just trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the voters in an election year.”

In response to a request for an interview, Caraveo’s campaign said Friday afternoon that the freshman congresswoman was “unable to speak on short notice.” The Denver Post first asked for comment Thursday afternoon.

“The voters of the Front Range and Northern Colorado sent me to Congress to be an independent voice who will stand up to party leaders when they’re wrong,” Caraveo said in a written statement. “That’s why I pursued my own bipartisan immigration reform package that would not only surge resources to the border, but prioritize the needs of our communities.”

The latest attempt at bipartisan immigration reform was killed by Republican lawmakers earlier this year amid opposition from former President Donald Trump.

On Thursday, the resolution Caraveo backed raised eyebrows further because it referred to Harris as a “border czar,” a term Democrats and the White House have in recent days said unfairly overstates Harris’ role in managing border issues.

Biden tapped Harris in March 2021 to “lead the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the U.S. southern border and work with Central American nations to address root causes of the problem,” according to reporting by the Associated Press at the time. Some media outlets earlier used the “border czar” term informally to refer to Harris, too.

Colorado State University political science professor Kyle Saunders said Caraveo, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, is “rationally moving to the center on the issue of immigration in order to try to hold or even gain back ground in the district.”

“The vote condemning the Biden-Harris administration, and specifically Harris as the ‘border czar,’ would indicate to me that Caraveo is willing to defect from what was most definitely a ‘party vote,’ ” he said. “Deviating from a party vote like that is relatively rare in today’s polarized congressional environment, unless it is absolutely necessary.”

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The local chain of scoop shops opened its fifth location — its third in Denver — on May 22 at 4022 Tennyson St.

“Tennyson had been on our radar for at least a couple of years,” said founder Bryce Licht. “It fits the demographic we’re looking for: lots of foot traffic, lots of neighboring businesses that we’re big fans of, restaurants, bars, coffee shops. It has a really good neighborhood feel to it.”

The 1,200-square-foot store took three months to renovate. Licht and his wife Giulia signed a lease in late February and started the buildout in mid-March.

The pair met in Venice, Italy, when Licht was working abroad. After marrying, Licht and his wife returned to Colorado and opened their first scoop shop on Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall in 2014. The pair named the store Gelato Boy because Bryce had been nicknamed that in Italy, due to how often he discussed his dream to open up a gelato shop.

There are already two ice cream shops on Tennyson Street, but Licht isn’t concerned about competition.

“We have shops on The Pearl Street Mall in Boulder where in the summer there are 10 to12 options for frozen treats. Yet all of us do well,” he said in an email. “I think it comes down to offering customers more than one to two options in a given area. Gelato is very different from ice cream, so we feel like we are adding a unique option to the neighborhood.”

There are big differences between ice cream and gelato, Licht said. Ice cream is mostly cream with a little bit of milk, while gelato is the opposite.

“Gelato is going to be a bit healthier than ice cream because it has less fat, and you don’t need as much sugar to cut into that dairy fat taste,” Licht said. “It also means that it’s more dense, so there’s less air whipped into gelato than there is ice cream. That makes the flavors more pronounced, too, so more flavor in every bite.

“Since there’s not so much butter fat from all the cream, the flavors are more intense, it’s not covered up by all the fat. Coffee is going to taste more like coffee. Pistachio is going to taste more like pistachio.”

The shop charges $6.35 for a small gelato, up to $9.75 for a large. Other options include milkshakes, cookie sandwiches, affogato (gelato and espresso) and brownie or waffle a la mode.

Most of Gelato Boy’s locations offer 18 flavors with two limited-time flavors shuffled in and out. One of their most recent limited-time flavors was Hot Honey and Biscuits. Gelato Boy’s most popular scoop flavor is Gooey Butter Cake and Caramel. The most popular pint flavor is Salty Cookies and Cream. Pints are also sold in stores nationwide.

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