The well-lived life of John Stulp
When it became clear that John Stulp had little time left to live, he specified that the memorial service would come later, after the wheat had been harvested but before the next planting.
That service was held on Saturday, August 2, at the First Baptist Church in Lamar, in southeastern Colorado, not quite a month after his death. Several hundred people attended, many of us from out of town.
Fittingly, the family had positioned a few large vases fill with bundles of wheat next to the photos of Stulp. One photo was Yuma High School, and another was from a meeting with then-President Jimmy Carter. He got around in his life, but in his heart, he remained a farmer.
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Tributes to his life were lavished at the church in Lamar, and from my experiences with him during the last 13 years or so, they were deserved. Responding to my first impressions on Facebook, one individual said this: “A great man.” Said another: “These sorts of people make civilization work.”
Former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter was at the remembrance in Lamar, as was an individual who may possibly become Colorado’s next governor, Phil Weiser. Neither spoke, and as for Weiser, I saw no evidence he was campaigning. It appeared to me he was simply there to pay his respects after likely arising early in Denver to get to Lamar by mid-morning.
This was in addition to former U.S. senator, Ken Salazar, who was in the audience along with Kate Greenberg, the current Colorado commissioner of agriculture, and two of her predecessors, Don Brown and John Salazar. I also recognized various people from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, including at least two former directors of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, Becky Mitchell and James Eklund.
John Hickenlooper, still another former Colorado governor, was not there but had delivered a eulogy from the floor of the Senate shortly after John’s death on July 7. “John was a good man, a great man by any measure,” Hickenlooper had said.
What came out again and again was his love of place, his devotion to family and community, his generous heart. And while he was also a notably good listener, it was also said that John was a very good storyteller.
I knew Stulp a bit. In about 2012, I went to Beaver Creek for a water forum, and he was a speaker. I struck up a conversation with him, and he invited me to visit him on his farm south of Lamar the following weekend. Then I didn’t fully realize the irony of his position as the state’s “water czar” for Hickenlooper: his farm south of Lamar was entirely dryland.
When I visited him at that farm, we talked at length before he showed me around his home country. We stayed in touch after that, usually it being a matter of me seeking his perspective about water, energy, and other matters.
John leaned into the future. He saw the tiny details and the big pictures. Several times I consulted him to understand the role of eastern Colorado in our state’s energy transition. He had been a Prowers County commissioner from 1992 to 2003, and during the latter time he voted for approval of Colorado Green. The wind farm south of Lamar was, when it began operations in 2004, the largest in the country.
Of late, I was particularly interested in his experience as an early adopter. In his electric pickup he made the rounds between Lamar, a home in Lakewood that I believe he and his wife, Jane, had acquired during his 12 years in his position in Colorado state government, and Yuma, where he had begun life during an intense snowstorm in 1948 and where he still had farming property. Trips often also included Fort Collins, where two of his children lived.
See: Electric pickups and farm country
Earlier this year, I was curious whether the growing network of fast-charging stations in eastern Colorado was meeting his traveling needs. By then, he was on oxygen, eight liters a minute, and when in the pickup he needed to draw on the battery. That gave him less margin for error, he said, and no, Colorado’s fast-charging infrastructure on the eastern plains fell short. He had been forced to return to an internal-combustion engine for trips to the Front Range.
As recently as late June, I had written to him after noticing a letter from him filed in a Colorado Public Utilities docket. It was, I wrote to him truthfully, the most compelling of all the comments I had seen filed in that case.
The main reflection I had after hearing the remarks in Lamar was a reinforcement of my previous opinion. For whatever reason, John put it together early in life. Many of us struggle to figure out our paths. He did not. He must have been a bright boy. By age 4, he was accompanying his aunt to a one-room schoolhouse. He grew up farming, growing corn, and raising cattle and hogs. He went to Colorado State University and became a veterinarian.
After stints as a veterinarian in Windsor and then Las Cruces, N.M., he and his wife, Jane, moved to the Lamar area, where she had grown up on a farm. They had five children, and he assumed new roles in agriculture organizations, his community, and state and national organizations. He was on the board of directors for the State Land Board, for the Colorado Wildlife Commission, and the board of governors of Colorado State University.
In the 1990s, then Colorado Gov. Roy Romer twice asked him to be the state ag commissioner, but he declined, citing the need to be with his family. Bill Ritter made the same request when he was elected in 2006, and this time he excitedly said yes. He served a four-year term.
When John Hickenlooper was elected governor in 2010, he asked Stulp to be part of his team but in a different capacity. In his eulogy on the floor of the Senate, Hickenlooper explained what he was up to. Colorado had experienced particularly severe drought in 2011 and even more in 2012.
“I was convinced that we needed a blueprint, a plan of some sort, to address the projected growth and its future water supply, to make sure that we had the supply that could match our needs. I recruited John to serve as my top water policy advisor. We made it a cabinet-level position. He came to all our cabinet meetings. He was our water czar.”
Stulp’s background in agriculture — which uses 85% to 90% of water in Colorado — was key to his choice.
“John understood the agriculture community in Colorado better than almost anyone,” explained Hickenlooper. “Maybe that’s why, when I first approached him with the idea of a statewide water plan, he wasn’t immediately convinced. Actually, he was far from it. He was, I would say, more than skeptical.”
Hickenlooper explained that he understood how difficult it would be to get buy-in. “He didn’t think it was a smart idea for me politically as a new governor to take on an issue that had the potential to be so divisive,” explained Hickenlooper. “But he understood that we couldn’t let our rivers and farms be at risk of running dry. We needed him. Colorado needed him. And he set aside his reservations, rolled up his sleeves and went to work.”
Stulp’s work in achieving consensus was part of the state water plan completed in 2015 (and since updated twice). What has been the result of that plan? Has it actually been a success? That’s a much longer story.
In his eulogy, Hickenlooper also added a personal touch.
“I’m not sure there are gradations of ‘goodness,’ but I have traveled long distances with John Stulp, and I’ve stayed at his home in Prowers County where he and his remarkable wife, Jane, would cook up a barbecue and get me together with some of their neighbors.” “He even loaned my son, Teddy, a .410 shotgun so he could learn how to shoot,” said Hickenlooper.
“If I did believe in gradations of ‘goodness,’ John and Jane Stulp would be at the very top.”
Delivering a testament later, once again in response to my Facebook post, was Jackie Brown, who spent 39 yeas in public health, including 22 years in Prowers County. Stulp had recruited her to the position from nearby Baca County.
“John was the best example of a good man and a great leader,” she wrote. “He was honest, smart, caring, fair and had integrity. His family, community and his employees were his priority. Plus, he had a great sense of humor.”
When we talked by phone later, she recalled having a discussion with Stulp about home-schooling. “And he said, ‘Well, you know we home-school our kids. We send them to the public schools during the daytime, and when they get home at night we home-school them there.’ I have never forgotten that one.”
The service was held in a church, and it turns out that Stulp was deeply religious. During covid, after his work in Colorado state government, he was confined to his home. He had, he told me, been admonished by one of his sons for venturing out to Walmart. Later, he lost a brother in Yuma to covid.
In this time of isolation, John agreed to take over the Baptist minister’s daily phone tree that sought to connect people during times of isolation. The pastor, Darren Stroh, said that Stulp had sent more than 200 messages. One of them contained these thoughts:
“If you were judged — choose understanding.
If you were rejected — choose acceptance.
If you were shamed — choose compassion.
Be the person you needed when you were hurting, not the person who hurt you.
Vow to be better than what broke you -— to heal instead of becoming bitter.
Act from your heart — not your pain.”
At the church on Saturday, his son Jensen told us about the father he knew, the father who relished wheat harvest, where he loved to offer rides in a combine to his grandchildren and others. Harvest on July 4th always produces extra energy amid questions of will it rain and will there be time to watch fireworks.
On this year’s July 4th, days before he died, the Stulp family gathered around John. With his strength ebbing, he delivered “one of the most meaningful and powerful speeches we’ve ever heard,” said John Stulp III. “It was a charge to the grandkids. First thing he said, finish harvest. Keep cutting the wheat. That was said multiple times.”
Then he continued about how he wanted them to comport themselves. Be flexible. The world is better when you are generous. We produce food, and the world is hungry. Care for others. Make sure they know you love them. Jesus wasn’t petty; neither should you be. Live in this moment and live it to the fullest, but plan for the future.
And with those words to his grandchildren remembered we were invited to the fellowship hall and a long table of tasty home-cooked food and an equally long table of desserts. In the middle of each table was a centerpiece consisting of a mementoes of John’s life and a small bundle of wheat.
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