This page is a memorial in honor of my beloved father, the late Western writer and humorist Edward Kenneth Quillen III, who died on June 3, 2012.
About Ed Quillen
Edward Kenneth Quillen III was born on November 12, 1950 in Greeley, Colorado, to Dorothy Quillen (died December 11, 2015) and Edward Kenneth Quillen, Jr. (died May 3, 2011). When he was two, the family moved to nearby Evans, where they lived in a log house his father built.
Ed attended Chappelow Elementary School and then Evans Junior-Senior High School until it closed in 1965 as a result of school consolidation. He then attended Greeley West High School, where he started an underground newspaper, and worked on the regular school paper, until his graduation in 1968.
He attended the University of Northern Colorado (it was Colorado State College when he started) off and on from 1968 to 1974, generally majoring in English. He wrote a regular feature called Old Weird Herald for the campus paper, the Mirror, and became editor in 1970-71.
While in college, he met Martha Patterson; they were married in the summer of 1969 and had two daughters, Columbine and Abby; both are married and living in Oregon. Abby has two sons, Ezra and Ira.
In 1972, Ed reported to the U.S. Army, which quickly agreed with Ed that he was not military material and gave him an honorable discharge. He returned to Greeley in the fall of 1973, but left the next spring.
Ed and Martha went to work for the weekly Middle Park Times in Kremmling in 1974; they bought it a year later, then sold it in 1977. For a few months In 1977-78, Ed edited the Summit County Journal in Breckenridge. They moved to Salida in the spring of 1978, where Ed was managing editor of its small daily, The Mountain Mail, until 1983, when he quit to become a full-time freelance writer.
He began selling occasional columns to the Denver Post in 1984, and in 1986 became a regular columnist. His column was the longest-running of any on The Denver Post’s op-ed page. He was also a regular contributor to High Country News, and he wrote for many other publications, including Empire, then the Sunday magazine of the Denver Post; Computer Shopper (he was the assembly-language columnist for a while); PC Computing; Profiles (the Kaypro computer users’ magazine; he was the CP/M columnist), Farm Journal, Country Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Clean Scene (a laundry trade journal), Utne Reader, Midnight Engineering, Spirit: the Magazine of the Southwest; Colorado Homes and Lifestyles, and the Los Angeles Times.
Ed also wrote, co-wrote, or ghost-wrote the following books:
- The White Stuff: The Bottom Line on Cocaine, written with B.J. Plasket, published in 1985 by Dell.
- Spitbol 386, written with Mark Emmer, published in 1986 by Catspaw. Most of this was written by Mark Emmer, who ported this old but powerful mainframe programming language to the PC, as he had earlier with SNOBOL4. Ed did editing and indexing, and contributed some writing.
- Mentally Tough: The Principle of Winning in Sports Applied to Business, published in 1986 by M. Evans & Co. Ed was the ghost-writer for James E. Loehr and Peter J. McLaughlin.
- Ten adult Westerns for the NAL/Signet Trailsman series, written with his wife Martha Quillen. All books in the series are supposedly written by Jon Sharpe, a pseudonym that covers many other ghostwriters. Ed and his wife Martha co-wrote: Confederate Challenge, 1987; Santa Fe Slaughter, 1987; Colorado Robber, 1988; Minnesota Missionary, 1988; Smoky Hell Trail, 1988; Utah Slaughter, 1988; Texas Hell Country, 1989; Mexican Massacre, 1989; Cave of Death, 1989; and Desperate Dispatch, 1989.
- Deep in the Heart of the Rockies, a selected collection of Ed’s Denver Post columns from 1986 to 1998, published in 1998 by Music Mountain Press of Westcliffe.
- Deeper into the Heart of the Rockies, a collection of Ed’s Denver Post columns from 1999 to 2012, edited by his daughter Abby Quillen and published posthumously in 2013 by Sidewalk Press of Eugene, Oregon.
Martha and Ed founded Colorado Central Magazine, a regional monthly, in 1994 and published it for 15 years until they sold it to Mike Rosso in early 2009.
Ed was active in the Salida Business Alliance and Historic Salida, and organized Anza Day, a yearly event in Poncha Springs, Colorado celebrating Juan Baptiste de Anza, who left the first written record of what would become Central Colorado. A Colorado history buff, railroad buff, civil war buff, and Presidential trivia aficionado, Ed frequently gave local history presentations and was a regular speaker at the Headwaters Conference at Western State College for many years.
Ed had three brothers. Tony is a prison chaplain in South Carolina; Kurt is an engineer in Longmont, Colo. His third brother, Philip, died from complications of muscular dystrophy in 1974.
Ed died at 61 of a heart attack. People across Colorado mourned his loss.
Click here to buy one of Ed Quillen’s books.
Ed Quillen’s Archives
Ed Quillen’s family treasures a nearly complete collection of his more than two million published words. Hundreds of his best columns appear in the above collections, which are available at Amazon.com and other bookstores. If you’re looking for a specific column, contact me and I’ll help you track it down! (Scroll to the bottom of this page to find links to my email and social media accounts.)
Tributes to Ed Quillen
Ed Quillen was a character in the full sense of the word—and a wordsmith of the first order . . . Our world has lost a one-of-a-kind voice.
He was a straight-shooter, a fact-checker, a proud wordsmith, a brilliant thinker, a touch of down-home Colorado the likes of which are rare.
He was a keen chronicler — a mountain-town crier, an unofficial state historian, and a self-described sloth. The first word that comes to mind to describe Ed is “colorful,” and I mean that as an absolute compliment.
– Curtis Hubbard, With Ed Quillen’s passing, Colorado lost some of its color, Denver Post, June 9, 2012
Columnist Ed Quillen . . . listed one of his major talents as “complaining” and . . . used his sharp pen and wit to poke fun at politicians and to chronicle the foibles of life in the Rocky Mountain State. . . .
Ed’s writing won him modest fame, and it was a remarkable skill. He could deliver a history lesson, provoke a chortle and a snort of indignation — then take you to a place you’d never expected, all in the space of 600 words.
He was a precocious child. He talked before he could walk. Even as a small child, he was an “entertainer.” I always read to him, but he learned to read on his own before he started to school. . . . he has left a legacy that few other people can leave.
Even when speaking of those he disagreed with, it was without spite or malice, unlike so many blowhards who pass for so-called “pundits” in today’s media landscape.
He was one of a kind, and he’ll be missed.
I will miss Ed Quillen’s voice of passionate opinions mixed with respectful dialogue. Whether you agreed with him or not, you had to admit the man never wavered from him convictions. We should all be so brave.
He had an encyclopedic knowledge of Colorado History, he understood the politics of our region, and he just plain did not think according to anybody’s rule book.
A legend from first glance to the very end. That’s how I’ll always remember him.
We’ll miss Ed’s sometimes curmudgeonly, always wise perspective.
One of my favorite people in the world has died. . . . He was a beloved Jeffersonian figure from the center of Colorado. The world will be a lesser place without Ed Quillen in it.
Ed was always worth reading, an old newshound who sought to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
He talked and wrote favorably about “old beater pickups” (usually with some uncontrolled substance stashed under the seat), and recommended putting beat-up refrigerators and washers on the porch to discourage yuppies from moving in, but he was neither redneck nor hippie himself; he read too much, thought too much.