Obituary- Bob Maurer

… Revered Lake City artist, 96, mirrored quickening pulse of
Lake City in early 1970s.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, April 4, 1928, Bob Maurer followed a passion for art from his earliest years.

His acclaimed art career extended from Brooklyn to eventually Lake City and then on to Grand Junction and Gunnison. Early in life, his art career took a brief intermission 1947 to 1950 when he served in the U.S. Army Reserves as an upholsterer apprentice and as Army Sergeant/Cook from August, 1950, to April, 1952.

At his death, age 96, earlier this spring at Aspen Ridge Alzheimer’s Special Care facility in Grand Junction, the former Lake City resident told jokes and conversed with family. He retained his art skills until shortly before his death, avidly scanning a blank sheet of paper and then skillfully creating a line drawing depicting family and friends and creating a lifelike image of a family dog.

On the day of his death, he inquired about family members and, in a final gesture, laid aside his art markers and pencils for one last time.

“And that was just dad,” says Maurer’s daughter, Kim Spirek, “like the Energizer Bunny, he was a fighter to the end.”

A memorial service will be held at Veterans Memorial Cemetery, 2830 Riverside Parkway in Grand Junction, at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, July 9.

As a native New Yorker, Bob received formal art training at Cooper Union and School for Visual Arts in New York. Fresh out of college, he joined the scenery painters union and painted scenery for such Broadway smashes as “Voice of the Turtle”, “Oklahoma!”, “I Remember Mama”, and “Detective Story”.

A blind date on August 25, 1957, was particularly eventful. As luck would have it, Bob’s date that night was Lydia Victoria Holtz (1928-2007), a native of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, who was working as a fashion illustrator in New York City.

Smitten at first sight, Bob and Lydia married on September 21, 1957, just three and a half weeks after their initial date.

The couple relocated from New York to Denver in 1959 and started a family.

In Denver, Bob was art director for ABC Television. He opened Studio 10 with corporate accounts which included Pepsi Cola before relocating to Boulder, Colorado, where he worked as graphic designer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Despite having a fine house and comfortable livelihood on the front range, the Maurers were restless. When asked about their eventual relocation from comfortable Boulder to a pioneer cabin in a small town called Lake City on Colorado’s Western Slope, Bob Maurer reflected, “sure we had a comfortable home but in retrospect we spent 10 months of the year camping out, we liked rural areas better than we liked city life.”

1972 was a milestone year for Bob and Lydia, and their young family, which by that point had grown with the birth of eldest son Marc, twin daughters Kim and Lisa, and youngest son Toby. Enchanted with the art prospects of Lake City, they arranged with Harold Stewart to purchase a near-century-old log commercial building at the southwest corner of 4th and Silver Street.

The structure had a storied past starting with Bank of Lake City in 1876 and engineer and surveying headquarters for brothers J.J. and J.W. Abbott. Still later and before the Maurers opened The Artists’ Workshop, the log structure with clapboard siding was home of W.C. Blair’s Lake City TIMES and SILVER WORLD Newspaper from 1916 until the newspaper ceased publication in 1938.

In Lake City, the Maurers made ends meet by creating an inspirational art studio and gallery which they christened The Artists’ Workshop featuring pen and ink, calligraphy, acrylic, oil, and watercolor artwork of local scenes which they created, together with the works of other local artists.

The original log cabin building was enlarged with an addition, now World of Gem Creations, starting in 1975.

Relocating to Lake City, according to Bob Maurer in 1972, “has been the most rewarding experience of our married lives. We’re breathing fresh air and meeting a lot of people who enjoy the same lifestyle we do. We have found a good place to raise our children and we have found friends who are not afraid of openness and love. What more could you ask?”

The Artists’ Workshop, a combination of print shop, mini gallery and the Maurer family residence with its round oak dining table and nearby coffee pot, was the epicenter of Lake City’s resurgence starting in the early 1970s.

Comfortable entertainers who enjoyed lively conversation and debate with like-minded progressives, it was at the Maurer dining room table that initial conversations were held on the formation of a local historical society and museum, in 1973, and — January 22, 1974 — it was at the Maurer family’s round oak dining table that initial discussions were held which resulted in the formation of Lake City Area Medical Center.

 While small Lake City, set in a virtual wilderness setting had many good points, Mrs. Maurer as the mother of four young children acknowledged that the lack of medical facilities was a glaring drawback. “I was getting very nervous about there being no doctor,” Lydia said in 1975, “when you have youngsters who hunt, fish, and ski you get that way.”

In addition to Bob and Lydia Maurer, also present for that initial landmark discussion on the requisite need for establishing locally-based medical facilities were Terrance Burnell who worked with Outward Bound on the upper Lake Fork, and local business owner Margaret Therese Ryan. Others taking part in those early discussions were Lake City native Jessie Hunt Wheeler, Tom Ortenburger, and Bob and Becky Weeks. I believe Phil & Susie Mason and Burton Smith and Patsy (Smith) Troutner were also involved.

Lydia Maurer headed up a group of local volunteers to raise $5,000 and convince members of Pioneer Jubilee Women’s Club to vacate the front portion of their Silver Street club rooms — now Linda Gardner’s Inklings in the Mountains — to be partitioned off as a small entrance vestibule office and examination rooms.

Equally as important, the Maurers and other medical center advocates scratched their collective heads in a search for a physician to operate the envisioned medical center. Who? Just Who might that be? They followed up on Dr. Calvin Fisher, a physician at St. Luke’s Hospital in Denver who was reaching retirement age.

And as luck would have it — particularly fortuitous — Dr. Fisher was already familiar with Lake City and owned a small Bluff Street seasonal home where he and his wife, Pat, spent portions of each summer.

Silver-tongued, the medical center volunteers negotiated with Dr. Fisher and he agreed to serve as the sponsoring physician at the medical center when it opened in summer, 1975.

A placard printed by The Artists; Workshop proudly proclaimed that the new medical center was “Open All Year,” its summer hours 9 to 12 and 1 to 4 daily, Thursdays and Saturdays 9 to 12.

Similarly landmarked, it was Bob Maurer who prepared posters for the organizational meeting of Hinsdale County Historical Society in October, 1973.

Encouraged by the Maurers and history professor Dr. Harold M. Parker, it was at the Maurers’ Artists’ Workshop Print Shop that Jim and Carol Bishop issued their first edition of the Lake City PIONEER Newspaper in July, 1976, Lake City’s first weekly newspaper since the Lake City TRIBUNE ceased publication in 1948.

The Maurers, together with Dr. Harold M. Parker, Jr., at Community Presbyterian Church, were instigators of the first Lake City Arts & Crafts Fair in 1976. Initially held within the fenced yard at the church, the popular arts fair quickly outgrew that space and spilled out onto 5th Street and adjacent portions of Silver Street.

The arts fair was later taken over by Lake City Arts and continues as a July mainstay in and around Lake City Park.

From an art and history perspective, Maurers’ watercolors mirrored a changing Lake City, a portion of their art focused on landmarks such as Edie Swanson’s Christmas shop with adjacent false-front Silver Street business buildings, and the derelict Hunt-McCloughan house across from Lake City Post Office which is now the location of Ben Hake’s Back Country Base Camp. Scenics and wildflower paintings by the Maurers were also favorites, all-time best sellers with numerous colorful renditions being peak wildflower bloom at American Basin.

 For Hinsdale County Historical Society, Bob Maurer crafted charcoal chapter heading sketches for its “Cemeteries of Hinsdale County’’ book in 1986. His work for SILVER WORLD Publishing included the large-scale, highly detailed wall map “Downtown Lake City: A Nineteenth Century View” in 1983. Familiar to newspaper readers will be the SILVER WORLD’s masthead with eagle perched on a globe; Maurer hand-created the paper’s first masthead in 1978, updating it with a revised banner, and eagle-on-globe insignia in 1988 which continues to present.

Starting in the early 1980s, the Maurers began wintering in Grand Junction where they continued to paint and offer private and group art instruction. With Grand Junction’s economy impacted by the oil shale collapse, in 1985 Bob and Lydia moved briefly to the Chicken Farm Art Center in San Angelo, Texas where they once again opened an art gallery and offered private instruction. Significantly, it was in 1986 that Maurer, a traditional pen and brush-in-hand artist throughout life, branched out into computer design with his first Apple Mac Plus.

They returned to Colorado in 1990, setting up shop with a small home studio and art gallery in Gunnison at 314 N Pine Street. He and Lydia were also involved with Paragon Art Gallery in Crested Butte, an innovative 14-member cooperative in which artists exhibited their artwork and gave back to the community by donating their time keeping the gallery open and returning a portion of their art sales.

 In 2011 Bob assisted in the formation of what is today Gallery 126 on Main Street in Gunnison. The Artists’ Workshop residence and gallery in Lake City was sold to Leo Jo Lowry, Ulysses, Kansas, and her late husband, Sam Lowry, in 1980 and rechristened under its present title, World of Gems Creations.

After 49 years’ marriage, Bob was widowed in 2007 when his wife and muse, Lydia Holtz Maurer, died shortly after being diagnosed with cancer.

 Over the course of his art career, Bob Maurer is credited with more than 1,200 oil, acrylic, pen & ink, and watercolor paintings — many placing first in art shows and competitions. His artwork has been displayed at Denver Art Museum, the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and in private and corporate collections throughout the United States and abroad.

 Awards include the 2006 “Wildflower Medley’ poster for the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival, Arts for Parks Competition National Winner; he was also recipient of Life Drawing Award from Cartoonist and Illustrators School, Alexander Medal from Fine Arts Federation of New York, and, in 2019, he placed third place nationally in the Veterans’ Art Competition.

 Even with Alzheimer’s and dementia, Bob continued to draw and express himself artistically. Surrounded by family, he died peacefully at the age of 96, on May 23, 2024, at Aspen Ridge Alzheimer’s Special Care Center in Grand Junction.

 He is survived by his four children and their spouses, Marc and Kathy Maurer, Kim and Fred Spirek, Lisa and Jerry Blood, and Toby Maurer; grandchildren Tifanie, Traci, Jasen, Jessica, Amy, Patrick, Daniel, Kristopher, Christianna, Michael, Gillian, and Juliana, and 10 great grandchildren.

Bob will always be revered for his outstanding artistic talents, dedication to his family, love of sharing his gifts, and his unwavering spirit.