From the Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_18355111?source=rss
Two guardian angels — one of them eighth in line to become president — appeared at Paul Sandoval's north Denver home one Friday afternoon.
The Godfather greeted his visitors, but his trademark smile and usual burst of energy were absent.
In their place was an agonizing pain so sharp and so constant Sandoval couldn't eat or work his usual 12-hour days at the tamale shop where he had held court for so many years, engineering congressional victories and appointments to high- profile political jobs.
He was scheduled to see his doctor the following week, but his friends knew he could not wait. One walked into the other room and started working the phone.
"This is Ken Salazar," he began each call.
Ken Salazar, former Colorado attorney general, former U.S. senator and now secretary of the interior for President Barack Obama. Ken Salazar, whose political career was mapped out on a napkin in the back room of Sandoval's tamale shop.
Those calls got results. The staff at University of Colorado Hospital was waiting when Sandoval arrived that day, Feb. 18. After four days of tests and treatment, he went home. When the news came, he and his family at first absorbed it privately.
The city's consummate wheeler- dealer, who grew up delivering groceries with a future mayor and debating a future congressman, has stage 3 pancreatic cancer.
The Godfather is dying. But before he goes, he has some stories to tell.
Rooted in politics
"I'm just a lowly tamale maker," Sandoval likes to say, hands in the air, a huge grin lighting up his face.
But Sandoval, now 66, grew up surrounded by politics. His dad, Jerry, and his uncle, Dave, founded the meatpackers union, Local 85, back in the days "when you needed unions because they could fire you for anything," Sandoval said.
He helped his father write speeches for his successful campaign to become union president, and made the chile
Former Colorado State Senator, Paul Sandoval, left, gets a hug from grandson, Alexander, 7-years-old and waits to get one from grand daughter, Isabella, 9-years-old, as son-in-law, Michael Encinas, stands in the doorway at Encinas house Saturday, May 14, 2011. (Andy Cross, The Denver Post)
for burritos they sold, wrapped in "Vote for Jerry Sandoval, president" fliers. In 1956, Sandoval and his siblings, including Joe, who was a year younger, passed out leaflets for Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who again was challenging Republican Dwight Eisenhower for president.
Two years later, they were passing out fliers for Dick Batterton in his successful run for Denver mayor.
The race was nonpartisan, but everyone knew Batterton was a Republican and the Sandovals were Democrats. It didn't matter. Sandoval learned at an early age it was about the person, not the party.
"Paul and my dad used to stay up all hours of the night waiting for election results," Joe said. "I couldn't handle it; I had to go to bed. But Paul became a political junkie."
Over the years, Sandoval has greeted visitors to his tamale shop with the latest political gossip. If it were election season, he would light up a Parliament, put on reading glasses and pull a piece of paper from his pocket.
"See, look back here, I predicted the race would end up like this and now look at the polls," he'd say, grinning and tapping the numbers and scribbles.
Governors and mayors regularly seek his advice, and he's active in pushing for federal appointments, whether it be a judgeship or a regional director of a department.
He successfully lobbied for first Jerry Wartgow and then Michael Bennet to become superintendent of Denver Public Schools. He fought fellow Democrats who opposed Republican Bruce Benson's appointment as University of Colorado president.
Sandoval and Benson have been friends more than 30 years, a relationship forged by a belief in education.
In 2002, when his wife, Paula, was running for the state Senate seat Sandoval once held, he called Benson, then the state Republican Party chairman. Sandoval told him he didn't want Paula to have an opponent that November. No Republican ran.
Likewise, Benson that year turned to Sandoval for help in the new 7th Congressional District, where Republican Bob Beauprez and Democrat Mike Feeley were locked in a tight battle. Sandoval walked door to door for Beauprez in Hispanic precincts in Adams County.
"And I sent some
Former Colorado State Senator, Paul Sandoval, left, has a laugh with his daughter, Amanda Sandoval-Encinas, right, during a party at Paul's restaurant, Tamales by La Casita June 10th, 2011. (Andy Cross, The Denver Post)
operatives," he said, with a laugh.
Beauprez won by 121 votes.
"I've always called him the Godfather because everybody goes to him," said Sandoval's youngest sister, Bernie Fulton. "The politicians go to him. A family crisis, everybody goes to him."
But like Mario Puzo's Vito Corleone , Sandoval has his enemies.
Rita Montero, a former Denver school board member who tangled with Sandoval over bilingual education and other issues, once described him as "ruthless" and "not truthful" and called him a "mean-spirited politician, with capital letters all the way across mean-spirited," after losing a re-election bid to a Sandoval-backed candidate.
"I don't wish him anything bad, but the way you live your life is the way you die," Montero said recently. "It's karma."
"Wheeler and dealer"
Paul John Sandoval was born June 29, 1944, in Denver on a stretch of Mariposa Street that would become Interstate 25. He was the ninth of Jerry and Camilla Sandoval's 11 children. Two siblings died in childhood.
His New Mexico-born parents migrated north after his dad found work in the mines and on the railroad in Trinidad, and then moved to Brighton. After the railroad job ended, his dad worked at a packing house.
The family ultimately settled in northeast Denver.
As a young boy, his mother used to take him with her to the farm fields of Adams County, where he heard mostly Spanish.
"I started Annunciation Grade School and I could barely speak English," Sandoval said. "Sister Mary Owenita said, 'I'm going to teach you English.' Every day I'd say, 'I have to go sell papers.' She said, 'Well, you have to come afterwards.' That's how I learned to speak English."
Ah, the paper sales.
Before he could speak much English, Sandoval could say "Denver Post — 5 cents." He hustled papers alongside his brothers from the summer after first grade through eighth grade. The 2 cents per paper the Sandovals made helped pay for their clothes and tuition at the Catholic school — $15 a year.
One day, Sandoval's brother Joe recalled with a laugh, the two of them had to track down a delinquent customer at a bar.
"Paul said, 'What about my interest?' The guy said, 'Here's your quarter interest.' I had never even heard that term 'interest' before," Joe said. "Paul's been a wheeler and dealer all his life."
"Joey" and Paul were inseparable, traversing a city where even at a young age Paul seemed to know everybody. He managed to talk bus drivers into allowing them to bring their bikes onto the buses, unheard of in those days.
By eighth grade, Sandoval was delivering groceries for the Gem Market in northeast Denver. A few blocks away, a tall kid named Wellington Webb had the same job at Goodrich Grocery.
The two became friends. Decades later Sandoval would help Webb become Denver's first black mayor.
At Annunciation High School, Sandoval was a member of the debate team, which competed against Holy Family's debate team. Sandoval occasionally was matched against north Denver resident Tom Tancredo , who would grow up to become a congressman and presidential candidate.
"He was a Nixon person and I was a Kennedy person, and we would argue all the time," Sandoval said.
Both boys worked at Elitch's in the summer, Tancredo managing the rides and Sandoval running the restaurant.
Years later, Sandoval defended his high school rival after Tancredo, then a congressman with a reputation as a firebrand on illegal immigration, was called a racist.
"I said, 'You know what? You can say a lot of things about Tom Tancredo. Racist is not one of them.' He just believes completely different. And that's OK," Sandoval said.
"I just remember him always being a gentleman in those debates — early on, and later, too," Tancredo recalled of their high school competition. "The perfect opponent, someone you respect and admire for their clarity of thought and their honesty. You disagree with them entirely on the issue, but a perfect opponent, and that's the way I have always thought of him."
Sandoval graduated from high school in 1962 and got a scholarship to Louisiana State University-New Orleans, where he studied Russian, hoping to go into the foreign service. He lived with his older sister, Mary Baldini, who had moved to New Orleans.
It was the beginning of the civil rights movement, and James Meredith sparked riots in Mississippi by becoming the first black to enroll at the university there. Sandoval and others took a bus to Mississippi to join the protests.
"They almost killed me down there," Sandoval recalled of his beating.
Sandoval returned to Colorado after his mother became ill. He and his girlfriend had a son, Brett Sterkel, but split up.
The next year Sandoval earned his degree in international affairs in 1968 from what he and friends jokingly called "UCLA" — the University of Colorado at Lawrence and Arapahoe.
Angels in action
It was a Friday in February when former school board member Lucia Guzman, now a state senator, stopped by to visit. Ken Salazar arrived about 10 minutes later. They insisted Sandoval see a doctor immediately. Salazar wanted him to get checked by a specialist at University Hospital, but Sandoval's insurance was through Kaiser, and going outside the network required approval.
Salazar called Benson, the CU president, and Wartgow, the former DPS superintendent, who now is chancellor at the university.
The referral came.
"He says, 'We're on our way to the University of Colorado' " hospital, Sandoval recalled. "That's within one hour of him getting here."
Sandoval was so dehydrated the hospital kept him four days. He shudders to think what might have happened had he waited for his appointment.
"That's why I call them my guardian angels," he said of Guzman and Salazar.
The relationship has worked both ways.
Salazar was a senior at Centauri High School when he first met Paul Sandoval in 1973. Sandoval had traveled to the San Luis Valley to talk about bilingual education, an issue so controversial state troopers accompanied him because of death threats.
After Salazar moved to Denver to practice law, the two saw each other now and then at a popular watering hole, Los Padres. Sandoval would be having drinks with House Speaker Ruben Valdez, and Salazar would stop by their table to pay his respects.
Sandoval and Salazar discovered they had much in common. Their first language was Spanish. They hailed from large families with deep Hispanic roots. Both spent time in a seminary in high school because they were interested in the priesthood. And their parents instilled in them a work ethic and a passion for education.
It was Sandoval who rushed to Salazar's defense when Democrat Roy Romer won the governor's race in 1986 and tapped the political neophyte to serve as his legal counsel. Salazar hadn't worked on Romer's campaign, and Latinos who had volunteered wanted one of their own in the cabinet.
Sandoval showed them the attorney's resume.
"I said, 'Look at this.' 'Well, he's never been in politics. He's not this. He's not that,' " Sandoval mimicked. "I said, 'Here's a brilliant man.' "
He followed that sentence with a word well known for its scatological properties. It's a word he uses often — not so much as a profanity but as an emphasis. He draws out the first two letters so it almost sounds like he's saying "shhhhh."
One day in 1997, Salazar went to the tamale shop to talk to Sandoval about a possible political future. They mapped out different scenarios on a restaurant napkin. If you do this here, you can do that there. By the time they were done, the decision had been made: Ken Salazar would run for the Democratic nomination for state attorney general in 1998.
"I used to have hair," Salazar joked during one of his recent visits to Sandoval's house, "before you got me into politics. If I hadn't paid attention to that paper napkin, I'd still have a head full of hair. I'd be doing something else."
It was Sandoval who on election night 1998, after 9News declared Republican John Suthers the winner in the attorney general's race, told Salazar to wait.
"I said, 'Hell no, you're not conceding. The numbers aren't in,' " Sandoval recalled.
Once again, Sandoval's political gut proved right.
Since Sandoval was diagnosed with cancer, Salazar has called him every day and stopped by when in town.
Many legislative yarns
Sandoval met his first wife when he worked for a federal program fighting for fair housing as part of the war on poverty. Sister Mary Helen was a nun who volunteered at the north Denver center. After they fell in love, she left the Sisters of Loreto order.
They married in 1969 and opened a tamale shop at West 44th Avenue and Tennyson Street in 1976. They had four daughters before separating in 1980 and ultimately divorcing.
"She didn't like politics," he said.
What she didn't like was the lifestyle that sometimes accompanies politics: the late nights and the partying.
Sandoval ran for and lost an election to a seat on the Denver City Council in 1971, the first year there were districts and two at-large seats. He came in third in his district.
He became involved in the Chicano Education Project, which pushed bilingual education and voter registration. He hired a young attorney named Federico Peña as the group's legal counsel. It was while working for this group that Sandoval traveled to the San Luis Valley and first met Ken Salazar.
Sandoval in 1974 ran for the state Senate and won. The 30-year-old became the first Hispanic and only the second freshman to serve on the Joint Budget Committee.
Democrat Dick Lamm won the governor's race that year but angered the minority community by not picking a black in his cabinet. As a protest, Sandoval and fellow lawmaker Rep. Wellington Webb left the inauguration as soon as George Brown, the first black lieutenant governor, was sworn into office.
Webb said the two childhood friends have always supported each other's causes, whether boycotting grapes or pushing to make Martin Luther King Jr .'s birthday a state holiday.
One of Sandoval's favorite legislative stories involves Bev Bledsoe, who would serve as Republican speaker of the House for 10 years. Bledsoe loved Mexican food, and when he found out Sandoval knew a little something about that cuisine, he asked the lawmaker to cater his next party.
"How much will it cost me?" Bledsoe wanted to know.
"I'll give you a great deal," Sandoval promised.
"I tell you what, we'll talk about it afterward," Bledsoe said, according to Sandoval.
"Oh, the deals you could cut," Sandoval recalled, laughing. "You can't sell votes and you can't bargain votes, but you can cut deals."
After the party, Bledsoe told Sandoval he'd make sure Republicans passed a Sandoval bill as long as the price tag for the legislation didn't exceed $100,000.
Sandoval jumped at the offer. He called the highway department, asking the cost of erecting sound barriers along a certain stretch of Interstate 70. About $100,000, he was told.
"You see the wooden barriers they have in north Denver?" Sandoval said. "They're still there. They're mine."
The barriers began around Guadalupe Street and stopped at Federal Boulevard, the western boundary of his Senate district. Sandoval made sure of that. If the people west of Federal wanted sound barriers, well, their senator, Dennis Gallagher — now Denver's city auditor — needed to cut his own deal.
"Hola, Pablo"
Sandoval chose not to seek a third Senate term in 1982, but in 1983 ran for an at-large seat on the Denver school board. The same year, Denver elected its first Hispanic mayor, state House Minority Leader Federico Peña.
Sandoval met the woman who would become his second wife at a political event for former New Mexico Gov. Jerry Apodaca in southwest Denver. He and Paula dated eight years before marrying in 1989. For their honeymoon, they went on a cruise.
Paula was ill the first day and spent most of the time in their cabin, so he walked the ship, talking to passengers. With his Spanish, he could understand the Italian and Portuguese, and he remembered enough Russian to converse with those travelers.
The next day it seemed to Paula that everyone on the ship knew her husband.
"Hola, Pablo," one passenger after another greeted him.
Sandoval resigned his school board seat in 1988 after being arrested on a drunken-driving charge. He said he was taking medicines for back pain and migraines and drank on top of that.
He said his doctor told him with his blood pressure he was headed to an early grave. In addition to school board duties, Sandoval was struggling to save an Italian restaurant he co- owned but eventually lost.
Sandoval had earlier sold his tamale shop to a family member, then ultimately got it back it after a legal battle. He and Paula started the shop up again, almost from scratch, slowly building up the clientele. They eventually moved it from Tennyson to a new restaurant at West 36th Avenue and Tejon Street.
No matter the location, it was a gathering place.
"You go to his shop to eat and you see the fire chief, the police chief, a couple of council people," Webb said. "Paul's in there holding court."
Webb recalled the time he got Sandoval an invitation to the White House. The staff in D.C. wanted to know what to put down for his occupation. Webb asked Sandoval whether he should put Denver businessman or former state senator.
"He said, 'Put tamale maker,' " Webb recalled. "They thought I was kidding, and I said, 'He sells a lot of tamales.' "
Webb always feared his friend would get cancer, but he thought it would be lung cancer. Sandoval had smoked for 52 years until he suddenly stopped in January.
But pancreatic cancer? Webb, a survivor of prostate cancer, knew the battle would be difficult.
One day during this year's mayoral campaign, Webb ran into Sandoval's eldest daughter, Kendra. Both were working to get Michael Hancock elected. Call your dad, he commanded. Kendra dialed and handed her phone to Webb.
The voice on the other end surprised and saddened Webb. Sandoval, the guy who went to work at 5 a.m., who never seemed to tire, sounded old, weak, frail. He sounded like he was dying.
"I said, 'I love you, guy,' " Webb said. "He said, 'I love you, man.' "
When the call was over, Webb handed the phone back to Kendra. She saw a tear in his eye.
Small bits of good news
Sandoval has what is termed "locally advanced" cancer of the pancreas. That means the disease has not moved to other organs. However, it also means that the disease is involved with blood vessels in the area, so surgery isn't a good option — at least not right now.
Typically, pancreatic cancer metastasizes to the liver. Once that happens, death is almost certain and not far off.
Sandoval is participating in a study in which the goal, according to his cancer doctor, Colin Weekes, is to combine three medications to see if they can shrink the cancerous tumor on his pancreas and, ultimately, prevent the disease from spreading.
"If we can do that, we can prolong his life and maybe save his life," Weekes said as he stood a few feet from Sandoval's hospital bed on a Friday morning, watching the chemotherapy drugs drip slowly.
He had been the one to tell Sandoval, when he delivered the initial diagnosis, that he likely had six months to a year to live.
"It gives me a window to prepare," Sandoval said. "I'm not afraid of death. Am I going to survive it? No."
As he talked, tears welled in the corners of his eyes. Paula, sitting in a chair beside him, fought her emotions.
"I've accepted it," Sandoval said. "I've accepted that I'm gonna die. I feel bad about my kids and my wife, mostly my wife because I'm gonna leave her and she's going to be alone. I feel sad about that. Can she make it? Yeah, she'll make it. But I'll just be in her thoughts."
But in recent weeks, there's been news that can only be described as hopeful, the first coming in a May 16 meeting with Weekes.
That day, Weekes sat down with the Sandovals to go over the results of a scan done the previous week. The news was moderately encouraging:
The tumor on his pancreas had not spread to any other organs and had actually shrunk some.
Even with that slightly hopeful news, Sandoval started making plans for the worst.
On the day Denver elected a new mayor, he selected a headstone.
One date on the headstone will be 1944. His family and friends hold out hope for a miracle, but on Sandoval's bad days he is convinced the other date on it will be 2011.
But good news has continued to arrive from the doctors, most recently on June 16.
Weekes told Sandoval and his wife that the cancer markers in his bloodstream, which had been declining since he began treatment, had dropped to near-normal levels. Coupled with the shrinkage of the tumor, with the fact Sandoval is eating more and is no longer losing weight, and with the knowledge that he's feeling better and is out walking with his wife daily, it brought a smile to Weekes' face.
There's a long way to go, and the survival rates for people with advanced pancreatic cancer are minuscule. For that reason, Weekes said Sandoval is smart to get his affairs in order, smart to do things like pick out a headstone, smart to consider that his time on earth may be measured now in months.
And yet . . .
"What we know right now is that maybe he won't be that person," Weekes said.
Battling cancer can be an up-and- down affair — as Sandoval experienced between those two rounds of good news.
Joe Sandoval's son got married June 4, but his Uncle Paul missed it. Doctor's orders. Sandoval's blood count wasn't good, and with his immune system so weakened, he couldn't take a chance of being where someone might be ill.
But a week later, Sandoval was up to attending Joe's retirement after 31 years with Denver Public Schools. The party was held on the outside patio at the tamale shop.
Those who had not seen Sandoval in a while were surprised by his appearance. His thick hair — salt and pepper just a couple of months ago — was thin and white. He's dropped 30 pounds. He walked slowly.
All four of Sandoval's daughters — Kendra, Cris, Andrea and Amanda — were there, along with his grandchildren and his former wife. It was Andrea's 36th birthday.
Amanda, who works at the restaurant and is a political science major at Metropolitan State College of Denver, said her dad looked better than he had in weeks.
"The chemo has aged him for sure, but he had that same grin and the tone in his voice when he gets excited," she said. "He was his old self.
"For a while he had this look in his eyes. I don't think it's easy being diagnosed with a terminal disease. But he didn't have that look anymore. It was my dad. It was Paul Sandoval, weaker, but still himself, politicking just like he always does."
On this day at least, the Godfather was back.
Lynn Bartels: 303-954-5327 or lbartels@denverpost.com
Paul Sandoval
Born: June 29, 1944, in Denver to Jerry and Camilla Sandoval, the ninth of 11 children
Occupation: Owner of Tamales by La Casita
Family: Married to Paula Sandoval. Has four daughters — Kendra, 40, Cris, 38, Andrea, 36, and Amanda, 32, pictured at left in a 1980 photo — from his first marriage; and a son, Brett Sterkel, from a previous relationship.
POLITICS
Lost: His first political race, for Denver City Council in 1971
Elected: Twice to the state Senate, in 1974 and 1978, and once to the Denver school board, in 1983
This article has been corrected in this online archive. The name of the nun who taught English to political activist Paul Sandoval at Annunciation Grade School was Sister Mary Owenita.
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