by James Bowie
Former Glendale City Manager Veggo Frederick Larsen II died at age 61 at his residence in Palmetto, Florida. The cause of death was not reported other than it was “unexpected.” He was city manager of Glendale in tumultuous times from October 1999 to May 2002. After leaving Glendale he joined a recycling firm in Texas. It does not appear that he was employed at the time of his death.
Larsen was born to a prominent family in Hamden, Connecticut, and was a graduate of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He had two brothers and two sisters. The sibling he was closest to, Eric Larsen, passed away several years ago. His grandfather and namesake, Veggo F. Larsen, was president of the Connecticut State Golf Association in 1956 and 1957 and helped to instill a love of the game of golf into his grandson. His father, Edwin Veggo Larsen, was a real estate developer and predeceased his son by less than two years. Prior to becoming the city manager of Glendale, Larsen was in the real estate business in Colorado and then the New York area.
In the spring of 1998 the Glendale businesses and residents formed a political group called the Glendale Tea Party and swept its slate of candidates to office in the City Council. That fall a new city manager was to be chosen. Chuck Bonniwell (publisher of the Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle) was an old friend of Larsen and proposed him for city manager.
Larsen described his selection in an article in Westword concerning the initial get-together of the six city manager candidates and city officials: “When Chuck’s girlfriend shows up and gives me a big hug. Oh, they knew. They knew there was a rat in the woodpile — they just didn’t know which one.”
Bonniwell’s remembrance of the event was somewhat different. “I supported him along with a majority of the City Council. They were not really any hidden agendas. He was the leading candidate for the city manager position, but he certainly could have unimpressed the council members in which case they would have chosen someone else. Veggo always had a wonderful way of making the mundane seem very fun and dramatic.”
Larsen later led a highly publicized revolt against his original supporters. In 2002 Bonniwell and other members of the Glendale Tea Party supported a new set of candidates who prevailed at the ballot box in 2002 and fired Larsen. Bonniwell noted, “Veggo was an immensely engaging and intelligent individual who could have been an extraordinary city manager in Glendale or anywhere else. But he never wanted to be beholden to anyone, which is fine, but in the end it meant he never worked for or with anyone for very long. He had a job he could have retired at many years later. Instead he was on the street once again looking for employment after just three plus years.”
Former Glendale Mayor Mark Smiley remembers Larsen’s extraordinary gift with words, “He was a National Merit Scholar in high school and was always making up palindromes [words or sentences read the same forward or backward, i.e. civic] when he got bored at City Council meetings. He could be wonderfully fun.”
Present mayor of Glendale and Colorado gubernatorial candidate Mike Dunafon remarked, “I always liked Veggo even after he stabbed everyone in the back. He had everything going for him, but could never quite put it all together. He was missing that piece that makes very talented people successful, which is to see things from more than one’s own limited perspective, no matter how bright you are.”
One of Larsen’s accomplishments while city manager of Glendale was to establish a relationship with the city of Playa del Carmen, Mexico, which became the official “Sister City” of Glendale in 2004. He got the then Glendale Fire Department to donate a fire engine, that the department was in the process of decommissioning, to Playa del Carmen. He even drove the truck down to the Mexican city, a distance of almost 1,700 miles.
Bonniwell summed up, “Veggo was a little like Andy Dufresne in the movie Shawshank Redemption with Playa del Carmen being his Zihuatanejo. Unfortunately, like all of us to a certain extent, the bars of his Shawshank Penitentiary were imposed on him by his own mind. Unlike Andy Dufresne he never really escaped that self imposed prison.”
Larsen left 75 percent of his estate to the “Make a Wish” Foundation.