Longtime Times-call owner was also civic leader and once practiced law
Ed Lehman — the journalist, lawyer, former legislator and civic leader who owned the Times-call for 54 years — died Saturday morning in Longmont, surrounded by family members. He was 93.
Lehman is survived by his wife, Connie; son, Dean Lehman, and his wife, Anne; grandchildren Jennifer Lehman and Gregory Lehman; and daughter, Lauren Lehman, and her husband, John Kivimaki. Funeral arrangements are pending with Ahlberg Funeral Chapel.
Lehman and his late wife, Ruth, bought the Timescall in 1957.
He had been a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post, as well as a former practicing attorney and deputy district attorney in Denver. Ruth was a practicing attorney before entering the newspaper business.
Lehman oversaw the expansion of his company, Lehman Communications, at Fourth Avenue and Terry Street, eventually doubling its size in the 1980s to about 45,000 square feet.
Lehman was named the Colorado Press Association’s Outstanding Publisher of the year in 1967. That year, Lehman bought the Loveland Reporter-herald. In 1985, the company purchased the Cañon City Daily Record. And in June 1997, Lehman Communications purchased the Louisville Times, Lafayette News and Erie Review. At its height, the company employed hundreds at its downtown Longmont location alone.
Ruth Lehman died in 2000.
In May 2009, Lehman Communications opened a 60,000-square-foot, stateof-the-art printing facility in Berthoud, where the Times-call, Reporterherald and other regional newspapers continue to be printed.
In January 2011, Lehman announced that he was selling Lehman Communications to Prairie Mountain Publishing, publisher of the Daily Camera in Boulder. Lehman was named editor emeritus, and his son, Dean Lehman, was named publisher as part of the agreement.
In retirement, Ed Lehman continued writing columns for the newspaper and began working on an autobiography, “Rolling with the Press: A Publisher’s Journey,” which published in 2016. In the book, which he wrote with longtime friend and colleague Suzanne Barrett, Lehman shared his observations over three quarters of the 20th century.
He was exposed to the news business at an early age, he said in the book. In 1933, Charles Boettcher, grandson of one of the state’s most famous businessmen, was kidnapped just two blocks from where Lehman was living with his aunt on Pennsylvania Street in Denver.
“While Boettcher was missing, Aunt Bertha and I had daily telephone calls from The Associated Press and United Press International, as well as local news reporters from The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News,” Lehman wrote. “Aunt Bertha and I did a good job of answering questions for the press and for the police as to what was going on.”
“He worked to age 85 because he loved his work and his community,” Connie Lehman’s daughter, Dana Coffield, said in a text. “He modeled for all of us that the newspaper is a critical part of our community.”