By Susan Greene
Copyright denverpost
Virginia Culver, who in her 44 years at the Denver Post covered religion and reported news obituaries, yet on the matter of her own mortality remained intensely private, died Sunday in Denver.
She was 84, if you must know.
The irreverent journalist, nicknamed “the Rev” by some colleagues and “God” by others, forged a career out of explaining the intersection of religion and rapidly changing social values, and later memorializing the lives of Coloradans who otherwise would never have made headlines.
“This was Virginia’s gift — helping readers understand the world around them and the people whose names they’d never heard,” Denver Post Editor Lee Ann Colacioppo said. “She wasn’t in this business to do big news investigations. She wanted to tell stories and she did it with unfailing energy for four decades, trailblazing a presence in the newsroom and setting a standard, especially for young women, on how to be tough, generous and fair.”
Culver was born in 1941 to parents who’d lived in a railcar during the Depression-era Dust Bowl before moving to Eads near the Kansas state line. Her father owned a service station, and her mother worked as a teacher and caterer. Both nurtured her lifelong love of classical music.
Fascinated by the intrigues in her small town, she reported for her high school newspaper and studied journalism at the University of Colorado before going to work for the Lamar Daily News.
In 1967, she landed a job at the big-city Denver Post, where she met John Snyder, her editor, whom she married the next year. He died four years later, leaving her widowed in her early 30s. She didn’t remarry, and kept the name Virginia Snyder in her private life.
His death and that of her sister, Margaret, when both were young girls, were conversation stoppers for Culver. Too hard, don’t go there, she’d signal. Period. Full stop.
Culver briefly covered women’s clubs until becoming the paper’s religion editor, a role that largely entailed culling wire copy and posting notices about church meetings. The Post didn’t give women bylines in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But, within a decade, she had turned her job into a hard news beat vital to helping readers understand the role of faith in changing times.
She reported on how various faiths responded to abortion rights and feminism in the 1970s. She wrote about cultists and faith healers, the rise of megachurches and downfalls of televangelists mired in money and sex scandals in the 1980s. She broke the news of Pope John Paul II’s 1993 visit to Colorado for World Youth Day, which she closely covered, even flying here from Rome with the pontiff.
For decades, she chronicled the emergence of female and openly LGBTQ clergy members in various denominations, and debates over whether to embrace civil unions between same-sex couples. She covered anti-semitism in Colorado in the aftermath of Jewish radio host Alan Berg’s killing in Denver in 1984, and wrote about Islamophobia following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, when some readers criticized her for giving Muslims a voice.
Culver cultivated long relationships with clergy members, lay leaders and spiritual followers throughout Colorado — sources she affectionately called “my people,” even though, as an atheist, she didn’t share their faith.
After being moved off the religion beat in 2002, she worked for nine years writing obituaries, turning what felt like a professional slight into an act of creativity. Rather than memorializing business and big-monied bigwigs, she made a point of writing about lives led by strong women, rebels and makers of art, music and wonder.
One of her obituaries celebrated the life of a Bureau of Reclamation photographer who transitioned from a man to a woman and built miniature circuses. Another told the story of a Colorado Springs magician who made a living by suspending his wife in midair.
“She didn’t bend, she didn’t kowtow after being put on obituaries, which she considered a slap. She just stepped up and wrote those pieces beautifully,” said Cindy Parmenter, a college classmate and fellow Post reporter with whom Culver stayed close for 65 years.
Both professionally and personally, Culver relished little more than juicy stories about colorful characters. She liked her food bland, yet her gossip spicy and language salty, rarely mincing words, faking smiles or suffering fools, chauvinists or mansplainers. The winner of dozens of journalism awards elbowed into the all-male Denver Press Club to become its first female member in 1970. She came up with biting nicknames for Post editors and colleagues who annoyed her.
For her friends at the paper — and there were many — she kept a stash of chocolates in her desk drawer. She brought fresh fruit every day through two pregnancies for this reporter who sat across from her, one of several generations of women in the newsroom whose work she championed and with whom she stayed close long after they moved on from the paper.
“To have succeeded in the newspaper business, we had to support each other. That’s how you got by. Neither the world nor journalism were open to us. We had to fight our way,” Parmenter said.
Culver also had a playful side, including weak spots for puns, pinwheels and Cracker Jack prizes. Well into her 60s, she kept a scooter in the downtown Denver newsroom. The giant workspace was like a small town for her. Scooting from desk to desk, she was the authority on its intrigues.
Despite her criticisms of The Post as it changed in the online era, the paper gave Culver her most prized identity and community. She loved news, the company of people who gather it and the honor of telling stories about her native state. “Tis a Privilege to Live in Colorado,” read an inscription on a wall of the newsroom that, long after her retirement in 2011, she remained deeply grateful to be a part of.
As Colacioppo tells it, “There’s a reason the staff stood and cheered and applauded and cried a bit as she left for the last time.”
“We knew we were saying farewell to a giant in our newsroom.”
Culver had respiratory and heart diseases caused in part by her decades-long smoking habit — the only upside of which were the hours she spent schmoozing with Post colleagues on cigarette breaks. In recent years, she hid her health challenges from family and friends and pushed away those trying to care for her and otherwise help with end-of-life planning.
“Virginia had no plans of going anywhere,” said her nephew, Kyle Culver.
“More than anybody I’ve known, she didn’t want to be told what to do,” Parmenter added.
Shifting in and out of consciousness over the last week, the lifelong Democrat surprised friends on Thursday as they discussed politics at her bedside.
“(Expletive) Trump” she blurted out.
Those were among her last coherent words before she let go Sunday morning at the Intermountain Health Hospice in Wheat Ridge.
Culver might have tried micromanaging this obituary from the afterlife were it not for the fact that she didn’t believe in an afterlife. She winced at the verb “passed on” instead of “died.” Once it’s over, it’s over, she insisted, although had recently sought other views about what happens after.
“She seemed curious toward the end,” said Bonnie Gilbert, a former Post staffer and dear friend.
“I think she knew the situation with her health and was afraid,” Parmenter added. “All of us, especially as we get older, worry about where we’re going from here.”
Culver was preceded in death not only by her husband John and sister Margaret, but also her parents Bill and Hilda Culver and brother Gene Culver. Along with her nephew Kyle and his daughter, Lauren, who were at her side Sunday, she is survived by nieces Kyna and Keri Culver. She is also mourned by a wide circle of friends with whom she spent years travelling, attending theater and concert performances, meeting for dinners each Friday and brunch each Sunday and discussing everything from authoritarianism to the afterlife.
Her family and friends will gather at the Press Club later this fall to celebrate her life and legacy over dark chocolate and red wine with ice cubes, her favorites.
Susan Greene is a former Denver Post reporter and columnist.
