It would have been a terrific party.
Weeks from stepping down as Denver Water’s longtime manager, Chips Barry was looking forward to his retirement send-off later this month. His friends and colleagues were already preparing their speeches to roast the prankster and practical joker the way he would have expected.
But then came word late Sunday from Barry’s farm in Hawaii where he and his wife, Gail, were planning to spend more time after retiring. He had been mowing his property and died when his tractor apparently flipped over.
“The heart has gone out of Denver Water,” said its lobbyist Sara Duncan, a friend for a half-century. “It wasn’t that we didn’t know he was leaving. It’s that he left way, way too soon.”
For as long as anyone can remember at the utility, Barry began his staff meetings at 2 p.m. each Wednesday by announcing, “And now it’s time for a bit of humor.” Then he would launch, sometimes for far longer than anyone had time for, into an off-color joke that usually wasn’t as funny as Barry thought.
Still, his staffers say, it wasn’t the jokes that mattered as much as their boss’s insistence on having some fun while tending to the serious business of water.
Barry, a former state natural resources chief, took over Colorado’s biggest water agency in 1991. It was a crucial point after Denver Water had lost its fight to build Two Forks Dam and faced a legal settlement prodding it to take massive conservation measures.
He made the department less insular, smoothing over ties with suburban water users and negotiating cooperation with the Western Slope and other Colorado River states.
He made Denver Water less hierarchical by opening his office to the department’s 1,100 workers to talk about anything, any time.
And he called things like he saw them.
In 2000, when Gov. Bill Owens failed to address pressing water issues affecting the drought-ridden state, Barry had the guts to speak out. “The emperor has no clothes,” he told me during a water convention at Caesar’s Palace. The governor freaked, Barry’s board scolded him, and one of his aides says she was kicked off the Water Conservation Board in retaliation.
“Classic Chips. He would say things that other people felt but didn’t have the nerve to say,” says friend and water lawyer Jim Lochhead, who has been named his replacement.
What folks remember most about Barry, 66, were his eccentricities: his mismatched clothes, the way he cheated shamelessly at golf and his endless stories about his years at Yale.
What I liked best were the times after the interviews when he talked proudly about his sons or the 8 acres he bought on Hawaii’s Big Island where he produced macadamia nuts, honey and coffee. He handed out taste tests of a concoction he called “macamania,” a form of nut butter mixed with honey. After retiring, he aimed to buy a mechanized nut cracker for the farm, where he loved tinkering with old machines and tractors.
He planned to return to Colorado this week to represent Denver in mediation toward a long-awaited settlement with the Western Slope. Those talks will go on in his absence.
And so will the party.
It’ll be bittersweet, said former water board member Susan Daggett: “Chips would have loved having everyone in the community sit and tell him how much they adored him.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
