Leo Cone was not an easy man with whom to argue – whether you were a neighbor or the mayor of Denver.
Cone, who died Oct. 8 at 89, served as the Denver City Council’s budget analyst for 14 years and as a Denver Civil Service commissioner.
He could be unrelenting – and often right- in an argument about the city’s budget or the conjugation of a verb.
For a man who didn’t get a college degree until he was 45, he was uncommonly well-educated. “An omnivorous reader,” said his wife, Jedeane Macdonald.
In 1981 he disagreed with council members who wanted to subsidize city performance halls, according to newspaper reports.
The halls, Cone said, “are a bunch of losers” in paying their own way.
In 1983, when he argued against Denver leasing land to Glendale, he said: “I’ve abandoned any attempt to see logic in what the city does.”
Former Mayor Federico Peña said Friday that Cone was a “dedicated and committed citizen of Denver who worked hard to keep the city’s financial health. He was a straight- shooter who had no hidden agenda.”
Cone was just as direct when a clergyman came to visit him about two weeks before he died.
The Rev. James Harlan, pastor of Ascension Episcopal Church, asked Cone what he expected after death. Cone put his thumb and forefinger together to make a zero.
“He thought things through and was clear about his feelings,” Harlan said at Cone’s memorial service.
Cone “liked to debate – some would say argue – if only to challenge assumptions,” his stepson, David Knowles of Portland, Ore., said at the service. “But cantankerousness didn’t define him.”
Cone was an avid opera and symphony buff, but “didn’t consider music written after 1890 as real music,” his wife said. “Getting him to stay put (for modern music) was a challenge.”
He could take apart an engine and put new pads on his car brakes or discuss the writer Balzac and Beethoven, his favorite composer.
Cone was meticulous on English usage, and once wrote to The Economist magazine about confusing the use of the words breach and breech. The editor acknowledged the error with one word: “Egad.”
Leo Francis Cone was born May 26, 1918, in a cabin on an Indian Reservation near Ronan, Mont.
He and his four brothers lived with their parents in a one-room cabin and learned how to trap animals for fur from their father, Joseph Cone.
His mother died when he was 2, and Cone moved to Kansas City, Kan., where he was reared by his aunt, Lillie Murphy.
After finishing eighth grade, he returned to Montana to help support his family with whatever work he could get.
A job with the Forest Service had him sitting in a lonely lookout tower, so he spent the time teaching himself algebra.
While serving as a navigator in the Air Force during World War II he was shot down twice behind enemy lines – once in Romania and once in Yugoslavia – and walked out both times, Macdonald said.
“He was a tough old bird, even when he wasn’t old,” Knowles said.
At age 45, Cone earned a degree in general education at the University of Omaha.
He was widowed three times.
In addition to his wife and stepson, he is survived by his daughter, Lucinda Scrittore of Colorado Springs; one grandchild; two stepdaughters, Dorri Morgan of Tampa, Fla. and Sara Knowles of Denver; and five stepgrandchildren.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, the surnames of Leo Cone’s stepdaughters were incorrect. They are Dorri Morgan of Tampa and Sara Knowles of Denver.
