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Ed Quillen was born in 1950 in Greeley, Colo., to Dorothy and Ed Quillen, now of Longmont. Formally, he is Edward Kenneth Quillen III, named for his father and paternal grandfather. When he was two, the family moved to nearby Evans, where they lived in a log house his father built.
Ed attended Chappelow Elementary School and then Evans Junior-Senior High School until it closed in 1965 as a result of school consolidation. He then attended Greeley West High School, where he started an underground newspaper, and worked on the regular school paper, until his graduation in 1968.
He attended the University of Northern Colorado (it was Colorado State College when he started) off and on from 1968 to 1974, generally majoring in English. He was editor of the campus paper, the Mirror, in 1970-71, and held a variety of other jobs at the paper.
While in college, he met Martha; they were married in the summer of 1969 and have been together ever since. They have two daughters, Columbine and Abby; both are married and living in Oregon, where Abby has blessed them with a grandson, Ezra Quillen Thomas. Abby has a blog, and so does Columbine.
Ed dropped out of college in 1972 to report for the weekly Longmont Scene, and then reported to the U.S. Army, which quickly agreed with Ed that he was not military material and gave him an honorable discharge. He returned to UNC in the fall of 1973, but left again the next spring without a degree.
In 1974, Ed and Martha went to work for the weekly Middle Park Times in Kremmling; they bought it a year later, then sold it in 1977. For a few months In 1977-78, Ed edited the Summit County Journal in Breckenridge. They moved to Salida in the spring of 1978, where Ed was managing editor of its small daily, The Mountain Mail, until 1983, when he quit to try full-time freelancing. He's been at that ever since, more or less.
He began selling occasional columns to the Denver Post in 1984, and in 1986 became a regular op-ed columnist. He has written for many other publications, and has had a hand in more than a dozen books.
Martha and Ed founded Colorado Central Magazine, a regional monthly, in 1994 and kept it going for 15 years; they sold it to Mike Rosso in early 2009 and he's doing a good job with it.
Ed has two living brothers. Tony is a prison chaplain in South Carolina; Kurt is an engineer in Longmont, Colo. His third brother, Philip, died from complications of muscular dystrophy in 1974.
Ed sometimes mentions the family dogs. He grew up with Jet, a labrador retriever, 1960-73. From 1972 to 1984, they had Jezebel, a collie-Australian shepherd mix from the Boulder County Humane Society. Ted (who started out as Teddy because she resembled a teddy bear) was a chow-husky mix from the vet's office; she lived from 1989 to 2004. In 2005 they got Bodie, likely a shepherd-collie mix, from the vet's office. The houshold also contains several obnoxious cats.
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