Jon Pinnow

Senior Producer, Content and Promotions

[email protected]

Education:
Bachelor's degree in English and mass communications, University of Denver; Master's degree in English, University of Denver.

Professional background:
Jon worked for many years producing and recording books for the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, a program of the Library of Congress. In addition, Jon taught and worked in various administrative positions at local colleges and freelanced as a writer/editor. Through it all, the music was always playing in the background — that is, until he came to CPR in 2001.

How I became interested in music:
When I was a child, my uncle moved to Australia, leaving his classical music collection in the care of my father. For years, the records sat on a shelf gathering dust while Eddy Arnold and Herb Alpert held sway on the turntable. But idly pawing through the stack one snowy afternoon, I was suddenly drawn to my uncle's old LPs: the Mozart Requiem, the Berlin Philharmonic, Deutsche Grammophon .... Reader, I carried them all down into my bedroom that very day.

A few years later I went off to college as a music major, where I soon discovered my skills as singer and trombonist — and my dedication to improving those skills — meant I'd be better off in the English department. Still, one highlight from my time as a music student was singing in the chorus of an enormous Easter Sunday performance of the Mozart Requiem.

Why I got into radio:
A true story: As a kid, I loved to build elaborate towns out of Legos, then commute through make-believe streets in a Matchbox car to a pretend job at a pretend radio station. A few years ago, I was driving to work early one morning, in an old VW, past little quiet houses that might as well have been made of Legos, and it hit me: I'm one of the people lucky enough to live out the reality of a childhood fantasy.

How I ended up at CPR:
I was hired as writer/content developer in 2001 and worked my way through a variety of positions to the post I hold now. I'm grateful to everyone who makes possible this grand experiment we call Colorado Public Radio.

Colorado Postcards

Creede Repertory Theatre

The Creede Opera House was built to show movies to miners. But by the mid-’60s, as both mining and the town seemed tapped out, the opera house was boarded up. Enter locals, with an idea —to mine for tourists with summer melodramas in the old opera house.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

Hiram Bennett

Before Colorado became a state, “law and order” came down to vigilantism, or a criminal code with three punishments: whipping, banishment, or death. Then Hiram Pitt Bennet came to Denver — with higher ideals and a small law library.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

Berthoud Meteorite

October 2004, in a backyard near Berthoud. A couple step outside, hear a strange whooshing overhead and duck! A fireball hits the ground, and when it settles, they find a baseball-sized rock from space — still warm, still smoking, and incredibly rare.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

Silver Dollar Saloon

Time-travel back to Colorado’s Wild West past: step onto the creaky floorboards of Leadville’s Silver Dollar Saloon. Originally called the Board of Trade when it opened in Leadville in 1879, regulars were miners and gamblers. Oscar Wilde stopped by, so did Molly Brown. The legendary Doc Holliday was a fixture.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

Pueblo flood

Float the Arkansas River on a raft, on an inner tube: buckets of fun. But a far cry from the utter destruction and tragedy that wiped out downtown Pueblo in 1921. That June, relentless rain and snowmelt turned the river into a raging torrent 14 feet deep. It swept away everything in its path.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

Damon Runyon

Before Damon Runyon gave us Guys and Dolls, he was a teenage sportswriter in Pueblo. At fifteen, Runyon was already hammering out baseball stories between shots of whiskey. He bounced around Colorado newspapers, usually fired for heavy drinking — and, at the Denver Post, for letting a sex worker type up his stories.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

Cherrelyn Horse Car

Up by horse, down by gravity. In the late 1800s in present-day Englewood, electric streetcars stopped near Hampden and South Broadway. A mile further at the top of a hill, developers were turning farmland into a place called Cherrelyn. You could walk there, or step onto a horse-drawn trolley for the ascent.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

Mountain Bluebird

Bird lovers know Colorado is the home of the blues — bluebirds, that is. Found all across the state, Mountain bluebirds are some of the first migrants to return every spring. Brilliant flashes of iridescence, small flocks of Mountain bluebirds travel by day, close to the ground.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

Chipeta

In the fraught story of the early years of Colorado settlement, you’ll find two revered figures beside each other: Chief Ouray and his confidante, Chipeta. Born in 1843 somewhere near Conejos, Chipeta was 16 when she married the Ute leader.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

Antoinette “Tony” Perry

Broadway’s best plays and musicals, and people on and off the stage, are honored every year in an awards ceremony named for a Denverite. Born in 1888, Antoinette “Tony” Perry made her first public performance at the Elitch Gardens Theater at age 11.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

John Valentine & FTD

Flowers are love’s truest language, said a poet. And today you can direct a bouquet to anywhere in the world and have it delivered in a day, thanks to a Coloradan named John Valentine.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

Rossonian Hotel

When Denver’s Five Points was the Harlem of the West, the Rossonian Hotel was an especially hot spot. Opened in 1912, on a wedge of land where Welton Street meets Washington, it was a lavish, triangular-shaped accommodation first known as the Baxter.
By Jon Pinnow
Colorado Postcards

USS Colorado

Colorado is far from the ocean, but the state’s name has sailed the high seas on four different vessels since 1858. The first was a steam frigate. During the Civil War it captured several Confederate vessels and sank a schooner. It was named for the Colorado river.
By Jon Pinnow

Spanish Peaks

In Southern Colorado, the Spanish Peaks appear as a pair, a “double mountain” of mystical significance to Native peoples. Neither the West nor the East Spanish Peak is a fourteener, yet they soar seven thousand feet out of the arid plains, higher than any point in the country farther east.
By Jon Pinnow