When my parents Manny and Joanne Salzman were thinking about changing up their lives in the mid-1970s, Manny liked the idea of growing apples, and they toured a few orchards.
But Joanne thought it would be more interesting to live in one of the vacant buildings in Denver’s Skid Row with homeless people and dive bars and not much else. Manny’s brother lived in a renovated brownstone in Greenwich Village in New York, and Joanne loved the community of artists and small businesses she saw there. Denver at least had the old buildings, if nothing else.
A few years later, in 1978, Joanne was on a scaffold sandblasting the walls of the former Spice and Commission warehouse at 1738 Wynkoop Street in Denver with the help of Delfino, whom she hired off the street.
It took about a year for the two of them just to get the paint off and clean out the building, and years more, with Joanne as the general contractor, to design and create an office building, with a loft on the top floor. Along the way, Joanne fired an architect who didn’t listen to her ideas and replaced him with the gentle Frank Zancanella. That delayed things, but she eventually completed the renovation in 1981, threw a party by the Platte River when they got their certificate of occupancy, and moved into the loft, one of the first down there.
Forty-three years later, on June 27, 2024, a worker from the Colorado State Anatomical Board, which collects cadavers for scientific research, put Joanne’s body in a bag with a black cloth rose on it and wheeled her out of the same building on Wynkoop.
An evangelical atheist throughout her life, she’d arranged to donate her body to science decades ago and asked me repeatedly to make sure she was registered properly – even though her husband Manny, a research scientist and doctor who’d done his time with corpses, quietly called the science-donation plan “kind of grotesque.”
Her stoic dedication to rationality and willingness to carve her own path didn’t dent her love of people. After she died, friends told us she was their stand-in mother – or even the mother they wished they had — the positive person they wanted to be around.
You could fill many obituaries with stories about her kindness, how she made people feel seen, as my wife Anne Button put it, and comfortable.
She’d start by greeting people at the door with great enthusiasm, as if they were a long-lost partner or visiting dignitary. She’d clap when guests arrived and raise her voice and arms as she said their names. She’d offer a quick invitation for a meal at her round, expandable table, where everyone could see each other; she’d bake a quick cake. She loved champagne and, for her, as my son Dylan said, no occasion was too small to celebrate.
Crispy Mint in Suburbia
In the 1960s and early 1970s, before she and Manny bought the building on Wynkoop, they were living in their Tudor house in a Jewish neighborhood in Denver. She could have had the typical life of a suburban mom of her era, like other privileged wives of doctors, but she transformed it.
Joanne led a life that was ahead of her time. She was drying lavender from her herb garden, making crispy mint leaves, sewing her own clothes with Marimekko fabrics and bright pillows from the scraps, cutting cloth napkins, cooking with fermented black beans, making pesto and strong black coffee in the morning, playing ukulele, smoking Wee Willum cigars, building a kiln and making pottery, lighting an unscented candle at every dinner, wearing Birkenstocks and never makeup. She’d spent a semester in France when she was just 16, and she never let go of cheese, cappuccino, and wine.
She married Manny in 1962, about a year after Marcia Shpall introduced them at a dinner party. She moved in with him and his three children: Charlie, who was nine at the time, Danny seven, and Naomi, five, who says Joanne inspired her to become an artist. Danny remembers Joanne looking at a big ornate chandelier in their house and saying, “That has to go.”
The challenge of being pregnant with me, marrying Manny, 10 years older than she, and living with his children didn’t faze her. “I loved it that Manny had adopted three kids,” she told me. She welcomed the chaos they brought as the house became the hang-out place for all of their friends.
When she met Manny, Joanne was working in Boulder as an assistant to a CU professor after splitting with her first husband.
But Joanne had initially come to Colorado in 1947 to attend the University of Colorado, where she thrived in the honors program and was part of the group that launched the World Affairs Conference.
After graduation in 1951, she returned to Shaker Heights, Ohio, where she was born on Feb. 8, 1929, and where her mother and father, Edna and Walter Clark, raised her and her two sisters, Marilyn and Carol. Walter, a paint salesman, had died suddenly that year, and Joanne wanted to help her mother.
In 1952, after her mom got a job and adjusted to life without her husband, Joanne left Shaker Heights and got a job in Los Angeles as a secretary for a phone company and the Girl Scouts. She lived over a merry-go-round on the Santa Monica pier, and then in Malibu with her first husband, working for an advertising agency as he struggled to run a bookstore — and with alcohol. She’d already left him and moved back to Boulder when he died in a car accident.
Life on Skid Row
After she and Manny moved to their Lodo loft (though the neighborhood wasn’t named “Lodo” yet), Joanne managed their newly renovated office building and advocated for the preservation of the area’s old buildings. In 1982, she and Manny founded the Saint Charles Neighborhood Group to promote Lodo historic preservation, and five years later, the Denver City Council created the Lower Downtown Historic District. From 1988 – 2006, Joanne was appointed to the Lower Downtown Design Review Board. She was uncompromising about size and design limitations on signs and other architectural features on buildings, and ultimately pressure from developers pushed her off the board.
If you were with her, you’d see how she connected to the design of everything around her – not just architecture.
She once said that the only thing she knew about football was that when the players break from their huddle it looks like a flower dispersing seeds. (She hated professional sports, and never even set foot in Coors Field, two blocks from her loft.)
She liked skiers more than snowboarders because of the design skis leave on uncut snow.
She noticed the shadows of plants hanging from our porch, the shapes of pasta, and almost always, even days before she died, the moon and the clouds.
The loft she designed as their home on Wynkoop centered around a raised fireplace and a giant yet proportional island in the kitchen area, with a slanted atrium garden. It was on architectural tours. A fire in the fireplace was welcome even on a hot summer night. During her last year, I lit a fire at her place and asked her if she was comfortable in her wheelchair, which she’d at first steadfastly refused to use. “I’m always comfortable by a fire,” she said.
A few years ago, we were driving around looking at holiday decorations, and Joanne said she was trying to find lights that expressed the “simple joy of Christmas.” She found it in a string of deep blue LEDs on an iron fence.
A Bedrock with Zingers
During her 43 years at the Wynkoop loft, Joanne and Manny helped raise their nearby grandchildren, Metta, Ahtem, Dylan, and Nell Salzman – and to the extent possible Andy and Peter Salzman who live near San Diego. I did a search for Joanne on my computer last week, and she came up everywhere, as a school volunteer, our childcare schedule, the school garden, our own rock garden, kindergarten graduations, all the parties, fundraisers, and more over decades. All my causes were her causes.
She was her husband’s number one supporter too, applying her meticulous organizing abilities and people skills to the projects he launched — like the Telluride Mushroom Festival and “Mushroom Study Tours” that she and Manny led to 23 countries. Manny, who never learned to type or use a computer, couldn’t have done these things without Joanne – and she wouldn’t have done them (and related stuff like tripping on shrooms) without him.
At her Lodo loft, she took advantage of the long floor space to expand the Thanksgiving table to 30-40 people, many of whom had no family. She’d welcome everybody with a dark toast about how the world was on the precipice of disaster and how terrible the Republicans were, and then she’d express her gratitude to everyone in the room – and for being together. (She didn’t notice the two Republicans present, including my mother-in-law?)
As in most parts of her life, she was also a risk taker in conversation – and she liked to be the grandmotherly woman who dropped the zinger, especially if it could be about politics or sex.
On Wahoo’s crowded patio where everyone was eating fish tacos, she loudly debated whether Monica Lewinsky’s blow-job was sex or not. Her voice elevated to a scream: “A blow job is sex!”
“Joanne is the best conversationalist I know,” Manny said. (Maybe he thought this because she liked to talk about “protecting his jewels.”)
Her attention to the person in front of her extended to the world around her. She read broadly – newspapers, magazines, biographies, novels. She had mini-libraries about herb and rock gardening, cooking, ceramics, architecture, and more.
Politics was always important to her. (When I was 10, she used me as an unwitting prop in a pro-teachers picket. My sign read, “Students Love Teachers,” which was a definite lie at the time.)
But political news consumed her in her later years, especially after Manny died in 2018.
Though she selectively forgot most negative stuff in her own life and rarely outright cried about anything, when something happened that was terrible, she felt it. She especially hated war or anything that looked like war or fighting (like birds jostling at a bird feeder. We told her not to worry; they were mating.).
At the Wynkoop Brewery in 2017, the waiter asked her cheerfully how her day was going. She told him she was unwell.
“How can you carry on with the terrible news that we received today?” my daughter Nell remembers her saying.
He asked her what news she had received, and she told him she was despondent. Trump had launched strikes against Syria, injuring civilians, and she had been glued to news alerts all afternoon.
During the last two years of her life, as her long slow decline proceeded, she still had an easy smile, which my brother Charlie loved. She enjoyed her family, caretakers, more salt and more sauce, and the very few people who visited.
She’d still say, “My stars” if something surprised her, and “Zoot” if she dropped something.
She decided she wanted to commit suicide, a request that was impossible for us to make happen. But it came from her life-long intellectual approach, grounded in reality and an unconventional touch. She modeled how you could be responsible and forward-looking, and insist on doing things beautifully and with kindness. And lo and behold, I’m donating my body to science like she did. I also have a big herb garden and so much more.
She continued to say she wanted to end her life, and I’d tell people I wanted her to die but I never really did. I appreciated too much of her in the little that was left.
Two days before her last big stroke, Anne and I wheeled her to Commons Park for a picnic dinner. We told her we’d just seen a touring performance of the podcast, “Two Dykes and a Mic.” The show was vagina forward, I said, and asked her, “What’s better, a vagina or a penis?” Only because she was my mom Joanne did I ask that question.
“Vagina,” she answered. Why? “There’s more to it,” she said.
Disclaimer: Joanne Salzman is the mother of editor of the Colorado Times Recorder.
