Longtime Denver journalist Marilyn Robinson, who broke into a male-dominated news industry and set a standard for tenacious and accurate police reporting over 45 years, died on Saturday at the age of 89.
Marilyn Faith Robinson was born in Centralia. Her father died when she was 13 and she helped her mother manage a household and three brothers. She was the valedictorian of her high school class and played the clarinet. She attended the University of Washington and worked during the summer of her junior year at The Chronicle.
Former colleagues remembered her as a 5-foot-3, Keds tennis shoe-clad woman with enormous grit.
Through multiple casts of owners and editors at The Denver Post, Robinson carefully gathered information on law enforcement and crime, then produced thousands of reports conveying the hard side of a rapidly expanding city.
Robinson relied on relentless questioning, modeling the methods and core values of journalism to inform the public — even when the news was horrific and unwelcome, such as the murder of JonBenet Ramsey and the Columbine High School tragedy, for which The Post won a Pulitzer Prize.
She worked mostly in the newsroom beneath towering stacks of old newspapers and her notes, making countless calls to dispatchers, desk sergeants and frontline officers from the old landline telephones, sometimes with a phone on each ear, sustaining herself on coffee, Pepsi, popcorn and yogurt. Robinson simultaneously monitored chatter from police radio scanners.
Her best sources counted on her checking in with them, no matter how hectic their day, tracking their action but also, on their birthdays and anniversaries of big cases, asking how they were doing. From her perch in the newsroom, she zealously kept editors apprised of what she was learning.
“There’s a body in the river. Do we care?” she once chimed to nobody in particular, one of the numerous “Marilynisms” that colleagues compiled.
Fellow reporter Kieran Nicholson considered her his mentor and recalled how, when she learned about a man who had barricaded himself in a house, she rode to the scene in a cab (she didn’t drive). Police had surrounded the house, Nicholson said.
“She got out of the cab, walked up to the front door and knocked. She started interviewing the guy. Meanwhile, all these cops were standing around waiting on her,” he said. “She was a dogged reporter. Even though she was really well-sourced with the police departments, she wanted to investigate and check out all the angles. That’s what she was doing that day, going straight to the source.”
Retired Colorado State Patrol Capt. Larry Tolar called her “the most truthful and courteous person I ever met. There will never be another one like that.”
A mother of three sons in Lakewood, she enjoyed riding her single-speed bicycle with a basket on the back for groceries and swimming up to 100 laps in her neighborhood pool.
“Her cooking – cookies, fudge and pot roast – was extraordinary,” said her son Jon Beegle, who took her to Colorado Rockies baseball games.
After graduation, she worked briefly for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, where the editor said he already employed two women and had no immediate position for her, prompting her move to Denver in 1956 for a job with The Post.
She started in the “women’s department,” then covered various topics before settling on police in the early 1960s. She’d married Robert Beegle in 1962. He died in 2007.
“Fairness and accuracy are the watchwords of our profession. I like to add another one – compassion,” Robinson said, describing her approach to journalism upon retirement from the Post in 2002. “I believe reporters should put themselves in the other guy’s shoes.”
Police valued her expertise and trusted her. “The way Marilyn was respected was due to her character and the way she handled the news and the way she talked with you,” said former Jefferson County Sheriff’s deputy and longtime agency spokesman Steve Davis. “There will never be another Marilyn Robinson. The world and the way news is gathered and reported has changed so much. She set a standard that will be impossible to match.”
The Post’s former executive city editor Todd Engdahl remembered her as a perfectionist who constantly pushed to refine stories more. She stood out for her interviewing skills, Engdahl said. “She always seemed to know exactly whom to call for information, whatever the situation. And once she’d reached the right person, Marilyn was a virtuoso of telephone interviewing. She always seemed to know just the right combination of cajoling, familiarity, curiosity, sternness and sense of urgency to extract the information she needed to get the story,” he said.
When Frank Scandale, a former assistant managing editor for news, arrived at The Post, he saw Robinson as “the epitome of a solid news reporter,” he said in an email Monday morning. “Facts. Quotes. Story. Nothing fancy. But boy could she collect information. If you asked her for something that she wrote about 18 years ago, she would reach into one of those skyscraper piles and pull out the notes from the story and say, ‘This what you’re looking for?’”
Her colleague Jim Kirksey called her “the consummate journalist. It was her life.” And working beside Robinson for years in the 1990s, Billie Stanton, an early riser herself, knew Robinson as “the first one in and last one out. I used to beg her to leave,” Stanton said. “I felt: You are never going to be paid for all this overtime you are giving us. She was so committed. So relentless. She loved the work.”
She’s survived by her three sons, her brother, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Family members were planning a small, private burial and hoping to organize a celebration of her life at the Denver Press Club.
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