Rich. Republican. And running for governor.
That’s pretty much all that Bob Beauprez and Marc Holtzman have in common as they work Colorado’s Republican assembly Saturday in hopes of making that party’s primary ballot in August.
Beauprez, 57, has been married for 36 years to his high school sweetheart, Claudia, who chairs the bank he owns and whom in private he calls “Mommy.” The couple have four children and one grandson.
Holtzman, 46, is a lifelong bachelor who has for more than two years been engaged to Kristen Hubbell, 28, his former staffer at the Governor’s Office of Innovation and Technology who now works as spokeswoman for the state attorney general. After several delays, the two plan a small ceremony in California on July 8, weeks before the August GOP primary.
Beauprez, a lifelong Coloradan, spent his youth pitching in on his parents’ dairy farm near Louisville. His late father, he likes to say on the campaign trail, “wore bib overalls and couldn’t wash the smell of cows off his hands.”
Holtzman grew up in Wilkes Barre, Pa. He went to work at age 12 as a camera salesman for the national chain of catalog showrooms owned by his father, Seymour Holtzman.
Paths to parties
Beauprez switched from Democrat to Republican after becoming disgusted with the anti-war and pro-choice activism of his peers at the University of Colorado in the late 1960s.
Holtzman got his start in Republican politics in 1976 while watching Ronald Reagan give a stump speech on TV. He became pen pals with the Gipper at age 16, rode shotgun on the campaign trail in his dad’s corporate jet and, at age 20, managed Reagan’s winning 1980 campaign in Pennsylvania.
Beauprez worked for years on his family’s dairy farm, eventually building the business into one of the world’s leading producers of Holstein embryos. In 1990, he sold his family farm and developed it into a 1,500-home subdivision and golf course, Indian Peaks. He parlayed profits from that into millions of dollars after investing in a struggling community lender and developing it into the 13-branch Heritage Bank.
Holtzman leveraged his ties to Reagan into a lobbying business that earned him $380,000 a year after graduating from college.
He moved to Hungary in 1990 and, with no experience in banking, helped arrange the first public offering of a private Eastern European company to go to the private equity market.
Political histories
Holtzman then snagged $4 million in federal funding for his private firm, which invested in markets emerging throughout Eastern Europe and Russia in the 1990s. Holtzman and partners sold their bank to the Dutch ABN Amro in 1997.
Beauprez served as Colorado’s Republican chairman before winning his 7th District seat in the nation’s tightest congressional race in 2002. Re-elected in 2004, he accepted campaign donations from indicted former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and contributed to DeLay’s defense fund.
Holtzman has never served in elected office. He ran for Congress in his native Pennsylvania at age 26, and was trounced by the district’s Democratic incumbent. He served as Gov. Bill Owens’ technology secretary before snagging a controversial appointment as the University of Denver’s first president.
Beauprez divides his time between his studio apartment in D.C. and the home he keeps in his congressional district. He also owns a large house on the golf course that used to be his family’s “homeplace.”
Holtzman lives most of the year in a condominium in Denver’s Cherry Creek. He has a retreat and vineyard in New Zealand and a 48-acre gentleman’s farm in Carbondale, where he grows alfalfa “to keep the land green.”
Staff writer Susan Greene can be reached at 303-820-1589 or sgreene@denverpost.com.
