Richard Lamm

Richard Douglas Lamm (August 3, 1935 – July 29, 2021) was an American politician, writer, and attorney.

Richard Douglas Lamm was born on August 3, 1935, in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Mary Louise (Townsend) and Edward Arnold Lamm, a coal company executive.

He graduated from Mt Lebanon Sr. High School near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he majored in accounting.

Lamm spent his college summers working as a lumberjack in Oregon, a stockboy in New York, and helping out on an ore boat.

Lamm graduated from college in 1957, then served one year of active duty as a first lieutenant in the United States Army at Fort Carson in Colorado and Fort Eustis in Virginia until switching to reserve duty in 1958.

From 1958 to 1960 Lamm lived in Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Berkeley, holding jobs as an accountant, tax clerk, and a law clerk.

Lamm attended law school at the University of California, graduated in 1961, then moved to Denver in 1962, where he worked as an accountant and then set up a law practice.

Lamm took to the Colorado lifestyle, becoming an avid skier, mountain climber, hiker, and member of the Colorado Mountain Club.

In 1963 he married Dottie Vennard, a former airline flight attendant.

In 1964 he was elected to the Colorado House of Representatives as a Democrat from Denver.

In 1967, he drafted and succeeded in passing the nation's first liberalized abortion law.

He was an early leader of the environmental movement, and was President of the First National Conference on Population and the Environment.

He joined the faculty of the University of Denver in 1969 and has been associated with the University ever since.

In 1972, as a member of the Colorado General Assembly, Lamm led the movement against Denver's hosting of the 1976 Winter Olympics, as part of a group known as Citizens for Colorado's Future (CCF).

Denver had already been awarded the games, but the movement succeeded in cutting off public funding for the games, forcing the city to cancel its hosting.

Innsbruck, Austria then replaced Denver as the host.

Lamm's successful effort made him known statewide.

Lamm was selected as one of Time Magazine's "200 Young Leaders of America" in 1974, and won the Christian Science Monitor "Peace 2020" essay in 1985.

Lamm ran for Governor of Colorado in 1974 on a platform to limit growth, and was elected.

Reacting to the high cost of campaigning, he had walked the state in his campaign.

One of his acts as governor was designating musician John Denver as the Poet Laureate of Colorado.

As candidate and then governor, Lamm promised for environmental reasons to "drive a silver stake" through plans to build Interstate 470, a proposed circumferential highway around the southwest part of the Denver Metropolitan Area.

However, continued development in the area led to increased congestion on surface streets, and the highway was later built, largely with state funds, as State Highway 470.

He served three terms as 38th Governor of Colorado as a Democrat (1975–1987) and ran for the Reform Party's nomination for President of the United States in 1996.

Lamm was a Certified Public Accountant and was the Co-Director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver.

In 1984, his outspoken statements in support of physician-assisted suicide generated controversy, specifically over his use of the phrase "we have a duty to die."

Lamm later explained that he "was essentially raising a general statement about the human condition, not beating up on the elderly," and that the exact phrasing in the speech was "We've got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life."

His dire predictions for the future of social security and health care ("duty to die") earned him the nickname "Governor Gloom".

His views were satirized by noted folk singer Tom Paxton in January 1985.

Lamm was elected Colorado governor three times.

When he left office in 1987 after three terms and twelve years in the office, he was the longest-serving governor in state history (his successor, Roy Romer, matched this record).

In 1990, Colorado Democratic state party leaders tried to get Lamm to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. William L. Armstrong, a Republican, but Lamm declined.

In 1992, he was honored by the Denver Post and Historic Denver, Inc. as one of the "Colorado 100" - people who made significant contributions to Colorado and made lasting impressions on the state's history.

In 1992 he ran for the U.S. Senate but suffered his first political defeat.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell beat him in the Democratic primary and went on to win the seat.

(Nighthorse Campbell later switched to the Republican Party.

Lamm was the recipient of the 1993 Humanist of the Year award from the American Humanist Association.

He was Chairman of the Pew Health Professions Commission and a public member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

In 1996 Lamm, while noting that he was still a registered Democrat, criticized both his own Democratic Party and the Republican Party, saying "I think both political parties are controlled by special interest money, and I've had enough of it."

In 1998 she won the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate from Colorado, but lost in the general election to incumbent Republican Ben Nighthorse Campbell.