Novelist, journalist and former Denver Post staff writer Chance Conner died in his downtown Denver home earlier this month.
Conner, 58, wrote for the Post from 1991 until April 1997, mostly as a business and city desk reporter, covering a wide range of stories, including the Timothy McVeigh trial, the death of JonBenet Ramsey, the inception of Colorado Rockies baseball, skiing in Colorado and the business of sports.
In 2009, Conner’s first novel, “Career Killer — A Journalist’s Wild Ride with Scotch, Sex & the Sundance Kid,” was published. He was working on a planned trilogy.
“He was a longtime career reporter who left the business but couldn’t leave the writing,” said Patrick O’Driscoll, a former Post staffer and colleague of Conner’s. “He loved working on and writing these stories.”
Conner’s website describes the book as following “the rise and fall of newspaper reporter Jack Clancy, whose cockiness and sometimes reckless style land him in trouble and often get him out of it as well.”
“That was very exciting to people,” Neil Westergaard, editor of the Denver Business Journal and a former editor at the Post, said of the novel. Conner “drew somewhat on his own experience, although embellished,” he said with a chuckle. “It was a pretty good read.”
At the time of his death, Conner was editing his second novel, “Career Inferno.”
The website describes Conner as a film, hiking, cooking and sports buff with a weakness for Labrador retrievers. He was an avid Colorado Rockies baseball and Penn State football fan.
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1952, Conner moved with his family to State College, Pa., where he graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in journalism.
His career as a reporter and editor spanned more than 30 years, including work at the Colorado Daily, Boulder Daily Camera, Rocky Mountain News, USA Today, Centre Daily Times and Winter Park Manifest.
“He was a terrific reporter. He just got things quickly,” said Mike McPhee, a former Post staffer and Conner colleague. “He had a reporter’s sense of how things fit together. He’d drill right down to the core issue of a story as quickly as anyone could, and then produce it.”
Other former colleagues also praised his work.
“He really believed in the power of the word, and he wrote stories that would affect people deeply and help them understand the world around them,” said former Post columnist Diane Carman, a friend of Conner’s. “He was a very passionate journalist.”
Conner also taught writing and tutored students at Metropolitan State College of Denver and Community College of Denver.
He is survived by his sister, Drucilla Weirach, and her husband, Doug, of State College; a brother, Keith Conner of Sunbury, Pa.; and his former wife, Janet Day, of Fraser. Conner was preceded in death by his brother, John Andrew “Drew” Conner, and his parents, Lois and Arthur Conner, of State College.
A celebration of life will be held at a later date in Colorado.
Kieran Nicholson: 303-954-1822 or knicholson@denverpost.com
