By Ed Otte
It may be the first time that a Fireside Chat at the Denver Press Club was a nostalgic homecoming.

The May 28 event, sponsored by the Colorado Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, featured former Rocky Mountain News sports cartoonist Drew Litton. He returned to Colorado from Texas the week before and his appearance attracted former Rocky colleagues, a former Denver Broncos defensive coordinator, the widow of the Broncos barrel man, and longtime fans.

Drew Litton shows off his craft for a crowd at Denver Press Club.

They all were happy to see Litton again. And he appreciated their affection.

Litton started at the Rocky in 1982 and his “win, lose & Drew” cartoons were one of the newspaper’s most popular features until it ceased publication in 2009.

“I was third on their list” when they decided to add a daily cartoon to the sports section, he said. “The first guy didn’t want to move to Denver, the second guy said doing a daily cartoon was crazy. After I did it for a few months, I understood what he meant.

“The way I came up with ideas? I was clueless until about two o’clock in the afternoon on what I’d do for tomorrow’s paper. The process at the Rocky was I’d take three or four roughs to the sports editors and we’d kick around the ideas. A trick I learned from Mike Peters, who won a Pulitzer for his editorial cartoons and who does the Mother Goose & Grimm strip, was that you put the most outrageous cartoon on top of the stack. After the editors clutch their chests and say ‘we can’t do that,’ they’d say they think the other ideas are OK.

“I had editors who were really hands-off. When you have editors who tell you want to do, it doesn’t work. It’s kind of like making coffee through a lot of filters. The more things it goes through, the worse it is. I was lucky. I say that not just because Bob is here.”

Former Rocky editor Bob Burdick was one of several people who came to see Litton. Another was Joe Collier, the Broncos defensive coordinator in the late 1970s and ’80s who devised the famous Orange Crush defense.

“I wasn’t very kind to (former Broncos head coach) Dan Reeves, I drew him in bed with bunny slippers on the floor. I thought he was in an offensive maze and didn’t know to get out of it. Joe, would you agree with that?”

After 20 years with the team, Reeves fired Collier following the 1988 season.

Another frequent subject was John Elway. Litton portrayed the former quarterback with giant buck teeth. “I learned how to draw by studying other cartoons. With Elway, I guess it came from Bugs Bunny.”

When Litton drew the well-known caricature on an easel, eight people leaned forward or stood up to take photos on their cellphones.

Litton is nationally syndicated, draws for the Colorado Rockies Magazine, Mile High Sports magazine, 9News, Boulder Daily Camera, the Chicago Tribune (“How fortunate it is to get to pick on Jay Cutler again.”) and for the Guadalupe County Communicator, which is owned by another former Rocky staffer, M.E. Sprengelmeyer, in Santa Rosa, N.M.

In June his work will debut in Colorado Community Media’s 23 Front Range newspapers.

“There were 180 to 200 editorial cartoonists in the country when I started at the Rocky. Now, there are 40. That’s a part of the whole meltdown of the newspaper business. I think what M.E. is doing is what is needed for newspapers – strong local content. I’m convinced local media is the way of the future.”

To illustrate the point with recognizable humor, Litton described what he submitted to Sprengelmeyer’s weekly.

“They were having problems with feral hogs in the county. I did a cartoon with hogs dressed in leather jackets on Harley-Davidsons. A waitress says, ‘We didn’t have any problems with them until I told them the green chile had pork in it.'”