COColorado Famous People

Two Coloradans stand in the US Capitol

Every state sends two statues to the National Statuary Hall. Colorado sent a doctor and an astronaut. Florence Sabin, born in Central City in 1871, became the first woman to hold a full professorship at the Johns Hopkins medical school and the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences, in 1925. She retired to Denver at 66 and rewrote the state's public health code; those bills are still called the Sabin Health Laws. The second statue is John L. Swigert Jr., born in Denver in 1931, the command module pilot pulled onto Apollo 13 days before launch after Ken Mattingly was exposed to measles. Swigert won a Colorado House seat in November 1982 and died of cancer a week before he was due to be sworn in. Boulder produced Scott Carpenter, the second American to orbit the Earth.

From Manassa to the medal stand

Jack Dempsey was born in 1895 in Manassa, a San Luis Valley town of a few hundred people, and fought his first bouts in mining camps for whatever was in the hat. He held the heavyweight title from 1919 to 1926 and is still called the Manassa Mauler. Amy Van Dyken of Englewood won four golds in the pool at Atlanta in 1996. Chauncey Billups went from George Washington High School in Denver to the University of Colorado, was Finals MVP for Detroit in 2004, and finished with the Nuggets. Missy Franklin of Centennial won four golds at London in 2012 while still at Regis Jesuit High School.

Silent film to South Park

Douglas Fairbanks, born in Denver in 1883, became the biggest male star of the silent era, co-founded United Artists in 1919 with Chaplin, Pickford and Griffith, and was the first president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Lon Chaney was born the same year in Colorado Springs to parents who were both deaf, learned pantomime at home, and designed his own makeup for The Phantom of the Opera. Hattie McDaniel went to East Denver High School and sang on Denver radio before Hollywood; in 1940 she became the first Black performer to win an Academy Award. Trey Parker was born in Conifer and Matt Stone grew up in Littleton; they met in a film class at CU Boulder and set South Park in a fictional mountain town. Tim Allen was born in Denver in 1953, and Amy Adams, born on a US Army base in Italy, grew up in Castle Rock.

The president question

No US president has been born in Colorado. The nearest thing is Dwight Eisenhower, who married Mamie Doud of Denver in 1916, ran a summer White House out of Lowry Air Force Base, and spent seven weeks at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora after his September 1955 heart attack. The state has sent one of its own to the Supreme Court. Byron White, born in Fort Collins in 1917 and raised in the sugar beet town of Wellington, was an All-American halfback at the University of Colorado, twice led the NFL in rushing, and sat on the court from 1962 until 1993.

Writers, doctors and organisers

Dalton Trumbo, born in Montrose in 1905 and raised in Grand Junction, became the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood, went to federal prison as one of the Hollywood Ten, and won an Academy Award while blacklisted under the invented name Robert Rich. Justina Ford reached Denver in 1902 as the first Black woman licensed to practise medicine in Colorado; refused hospital privileges, she delivered more than 7,000 babies in patients' houses, and her home on California Street now holds the Black American West Museum. Rodolfo Gonzales, born in Denver in 1928 to migrant beet workers, boxed professionally, founded the Crusade for Justice in 1966 and wrote the poem I Am Joaquin. Governor Ralph Carr welcomed Japanese Americans removed from the West Coast in 1942, lost his Senate race that year, and never held office again.

Names Colorado claims, and one it lost

Margaret Brown, the Titanic survivor remembered as Molly Brown, was born in Hannibal, Missouri, and became Colorado's only after she married J.J. Brown in Leadville and moved into the Pennsylvania Street house that is now a museum. John Denver was born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. in Roswell, New Mexico, took his stage name from the city, and settled in Aspen; the legislature made Rocky Mountain High a second state song in 2007. Golda Meir spent part of her teens in Denver with her sister and met her husband there; the house she lived in was moved and preserved on the Auraria campus. The traffic runs both ways: Ken Kesey was born in La Junta in 1935 and is claimed almost entirely by Oregon.

Common questions about famous Coloradans

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