Bob Zinn practically flunked typing in high school and managed to get by without it all of his life.
He also never owned or operated a computer, and he dictated letters on a nearly obsolete Dictaphone to his legal secretary, Terrie Thompson.
“She was his eyes and ears,” said Zinn’s wife, Linda Zinn.
Bob Zinn, general counsel for Jones International, died June 8 after a brief illness. He was 68.
Zinn told his office staff to “get that thing out of here,” when he found a computer on his desk. “If he didn’t like something, he didn’t do it,” Linda Zinn said.
But she praised him as a brilliant lawyer with a rapier wit and someone who could boil anything “down to the kernel.”
“He was my wingman,” said Glenn Jones, head of Jones International, where Zinn was general counsel.
“He could chisel through the granite and fold everything together,” said Jones, who knew Zinn from law school. “He was the best lawyer I ever knew.”
“Sometimes he’d say, ‘Glenn, that’s the stupidest idea I’ve heard in a long time.”‘
“And he was usually right,” Jones said.
“He was a delightful, caring decent person,” said Elizabeth Steele, a lawyer who worked with Zinn. On their first meeting she was “intimidated” by Zinn, whom she described as “quiet, brooding, serious and demanding. He wasn’t the chatty kind.”
“But once you got to know him you realized how dedicated and loyal he was and what a great sense of humor he had,” Steele said.
Zinn “loved the Los Angeles Dodgers until the day he died,” collected jazz recordings (had them in the thousands), loved playing on his drum set and collected old cars, especially Jaguars and Cadillacs, she said. He didn’t work on the cars – “he polished them.”
He also roamed antique shops and bought “bats, balls, gloves and old Life magazines,” his wife said.
Zinn had the distinction of talking actor Robert Redford into dropping out of college, Linda Zinn said.
Redford, who lived next door to Zinn at the University of Colorado, didn’t like college, she said, and wanted to be an artist. Zinn told him he should pursue that, and Redford left CU after a year.
Redford was the one who got Zinn interested in jazz, Linda Zinn said.
Robert Sidney Zinn was born in Denver’s St. Joseph Hospital on Nov. 10, 1936, graduated from East High School and earned a business and accounting degree at CU. He earned his law degree at CU and did a graduate tax program at New York University.
He practiced law in New York City before returning to Denver.
For 25 years he was a corporate securities attorney at the Denver firm Davis, Graham and Stubbs.
He married Linda Roberts on June 2, 1984.
In addition to her he is survived by two stepdaughters, Sophie K. Kramer of New York City and Mandy K. Lonergan of Brattleboro, Vt.; and four grandchildren.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at 303-820-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com.
