Lynn Bartels grew up in South Dakota with a mother who was a registered Democrat and a father a registered Republican. He used to scream at the TV whenever Sen. Ted Kennedy was featured. Her parents’ political affiliation and being one of nine kids helped prepare her for a career covering politics.
She is fond of saying politics is like sports but without the big salaries and protective cups.
When she wrote for the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post, The Washington Post's "The Fix" blog regularly named her one of Colorado's best political reporters and tweeters.
The death of the Rocky in 2009 still haunts Bartels. It foretold what was to come in the profession she loves.
She ended a 35-year-career in journalism in 2015, and went to work for former Secretary of State Wayne Williams. Her only regret in leaving the business is she was gone before the country realized just how important the press is, thanks to harsh words by President Donald Trump.
As someone who went from the press table at the state Capitol to answering press calls, Bartels has seen reporting -- or the lack of it -- from both sides now.
She does communications consulting, and writes a weekly column for Colorado Politics, the political arm of the Colorado Springs Gazette. Bartels recently went to Iowa to cover the Democratic Party’s Liberty and Justice Celebration, where 13 presidential candidates, including Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, spoke.
She probably is the only Coloradan who traveled to Iowa to report on the presidential race who looked at the grain bins and barns and kept exclaiming, “Isn’t it beautiful?”
But she hasn’t lived in the Midwest since high school. She graduated from Cottey College in Nevada, Mo., in 1977 and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff in 1980.
She recently sold her four-bedroom, two-car garage in north Denver for a condo south of downtown. She has quickly adjusted to not having to shovel snow, but laments that the lack of space has made it impossible for her to continue her hobby of collecting campaign T-shirts.