John Denver Fans Recall Singer As Gentle Friend Residents Organize Service At Resort On Mount Spokane
It wasn’t quite Rocky Mountain high. But close.
The Resort at Mount Spokane, with Saturday drawing its last golden gasp, looked like a place John Denver would sing about. The sun grazed just the tops of the trees, firing the orange and browns hiding beneath the evergreen coats. Wild water hissed in the background, like the static of an old TV left on too late.
None of this was lost on the 60 or so fans of the late singer, who gathered inside the lodge to remember Denver and his songs. The “For You” memorial brought together people who had never met before, but had taken the folksy singer’s Oct. 12 plane accident like the untimely death of a brother or neighbor.
“He was down to earth, he was quiet,” Christine Smith said from behind the microphone. “… the type of man I felt I’d always want as a friend.”
One by one, they said things like that. Some stories were funny, some sad, a few seemed a little obsessive. All sounded sincere.
“I know that John practiced a faith different than my own,” said Terry Read, a leader in a local Reorganized LDS church, “but his message transcends all faith.”
Read said he has used Denver’s simple, wistful songs during worship services. And he met Denver last year, after a concert in Spokane. Denver shook his hand. But after the singer walked away, Read decided this was his one chance - so he followed him.
“I put my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘From my soul, thank you.”’
Read is convinced Denver was a gentle man, not an egomaniac like some have claimed. “He was the kind of person we’d heard about and read about and hoped that he was.”
During her turn at the mike, Smith said she met Denver at a Seattle farmer’s market back in 1980.
That night, at a concert, Denver dedicated his “Annie’s Song” to her. She went bananas.
“He’s looking down on us now, and that’s a true blessing,” she waxed Saturday.
“Look at how I’m dressed. Brown for the earth, white for the snow, blue for the ocean, boots for walking in the forest. This is totally unintentional. This is for you, John. We love you.”
Recently, she and her husband sold their house in Seattle and moved to Spokane, “to come back to the country … John would be proud.” With some of the money she made from the house sale, she bought a CD player and all of Denver’s discs.
Ann Kolbeck said she had to leave work when she heard Denver was dead. She went to Riverside State Park with her husband, reading print-outs about him she got from the Internet.
And Saturday? She and Mike Kolbeck gave up tickets to the WSU-Stanford game to go to the lodge.
Another woman said she couldn’t look at the sky or at birds without remembering Denver. A man called a 5-year-old boy out of the audience he didn’t even know, bringing him up front.
Little Matthew Wasson, 5, was blond and wore half-dollar-round specs. He looked a little like you-know-who. “I was just about in tears when I saw this guy,” the man said.
A woman sang Denver’s “Higher Ground” while another churned out the piece on an out-of-tune piano. A gray-haired woman started to cry. Others laughed at the piano.
A retriever and a house cat circled the crowd in lazy saunters the whole time, begging for pats on the head. All that was missing was Grandma and a feather bed.
The whole thing came about because of letters of grief written by Tammy Bunke and Bonnie Algar to The Spokesman-Review. Bunke read Algar’s letter and called her and together they organized the memorial.
“People called me and said, ‘I feel so alone,”’ Algar said.
“I thought, y’know, somebody’s gotta do something,” Bunke said. “I felt I had a loss, and no way to share it.”
Bunke was a fan in the ‘70s and ‘80s. “Then he sort of drifted. I drifted, maybe.” She re-discovered Denver on “Sept. 16, 1996,” a date she recites like a Bible verse. It was the day she saw Denver perform in Spokane.
“After the concert, I was like, a major fanatic.”
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