Kje Craig Lee Wynkoop, who died at his Centennial home Nov. 22 at age 55, enjoyed a series of vocations that included owning a millworking business and an alpaca farm.
Though he was born in Lubbock, Texas, he was from a family with enduring ties to Colorado. He took pride in his distant but undisputed relationship to his great-great-great uncle, Edward Wan shear Wynkoop, for whom the street currently fashionable in Lower Downtown was named.
His paternal grandfather, Edward H. Wynkoop, was among the homesteaders who staked a claim in Fruita during the 1900s. His father, Noah Neil Wynkoop, was born in a sod house on the family’s Fruita homestead.
His mother, Mildred E. Wynkoop, liked the name Kje because she thought it sounded Dutch. (Kje, a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet, is used in the Macedonian language.)
Her husband, a career U.S. Air Force officer, persuaded her to name the new baby Craig instead, observing that a conventional name was less likely to require repeated spelling and pronunciation instructions. (Kje rhymes with sky.)
Then the baby’s brother, Christopher, started calling the infant “Kje Baby.” Christopher meant to call the infant “cry baby,” he explained, but it was too hard to pronounce. The name stuck, and Kje Wynkoop officially changed his name as an adult.
As military brats, Kje Wynkoop and his three brothers spent part of their childhood growing up abroad. They spent four years in Japan when their father was stationed there and attended the American School in Lugano, Switzerland, when he was stationed in Europe.
After Noah Wynkoop’s retirement from the military, the family resettled in Denver, where Kje Wynkoop graduated from South High School and attended the Colorado Institute of Art.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, he established and operated Victoriana Construction Co., which also produced Victorian-style millworking, including cabinets, interior moldings and casements.
In the mid-1990s, he left the construction business to become a gentleman farmer, using real-estate investments to buy 10 acres of Arapahoe County land. There, he raised alfalfa along with 13 alpacas and, for a while, miniature cows. Eventually, he gave away the cows, which he found less congenial than the mild and relatively tidier alpacas.
Survivors include his wife, Jonna Emery Wynkoop of Denver; daughters Molly Wynkoop and Elise Wynkoop, both of Denver; son Tait Wynkoop of Denver; and brothers Steven Wynkoop of Denver, Ronald Wynkoop of Nebraska City, Neb., and Christopher Wynkoop of Colorado Springs.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at cmartin@denverpost.com or 303-820-1477.
