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Jack Phinney
Denver, Colorado
I am a native of Wyoming, born in Goshen County in 1932. I grew up in the Nebraska Panhandle, attended the University of Nebraska and graduated (finally) in 1959. I was in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1955, serving mainly in South Korea and Tokyo on the staff of the military newspaper Pacific Stars & Stripes. In the five years following, I worked for the Galveston Daily News, the Lincoln Star and the Omaha World-herald, in that order. In 1960 I joined the Denver Post as a copy editor. I left the Post in 1965 to work for Gene Cervi as managing editor of his weekly business newspaper, Cervi’s Rocky Mountain Journal. Two years later I rejoined the Denver Post and in 1968 began an 11-year stint as a business reporter. I covered several business sectors, including Colorado’s oil and gas industry and notably John King’s operation. (Mr. King, needing to make a phone call, borrowed a dime from me at his 1976 SEC trial in lower Manhattan and never repaid the loan.)
In 1979 I left the Post and joined Richard Zirbel’s public relations firm, which served most of the Denver-based oil and gas companies going public at that time. When the industry crash of 1982-83 wiped out many of these companies, I went on my own – in office space subleased from Sigmund Rosenfeld’s company, Valex Petroleum. I had met Sig in 1970 when he was with Inexco and we became good friends.
The mid-1980s were dismal years in Denver, so in 1985 I signed on with Pacific Stars & Stripes for a two-year run as senior editor in Tokyo. After returning to the U.S.A. in 1987, I worked for the Omaha World-Herald for a while, then taught a journalism course at Metro State College in Denver, then became editor of the Denver Daily Journal, a McGraw-Hill business publication. I retired in 1998.
My wife, Gerry and I were married in 1962. She was working in the Denver Post library when we met. We have two sons and two daughters, all living in or near Denver. My father was a banker in farm communities in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska for 40 years. My brother, 11 years older than I, became a banker and I’m sure I was supposed to become one, too, but a high school journalism teacher led me astray.
Jack Phinney
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