A visit with the remarkable Charlie Lyons, the Avs’ first owner

I spent a fair amount of time texting, calling and even FaceTiming a man named Charlie Lyons in the past week, and for you younger readers here at Colorado Hockey Now, he was the first owner of the Colorado Avalanche, from 1995 to 1999. But forgive me if I want to live even more vicariously through Charlie after several talks. You might want to do that, too, when you realize that:

Charlie Lyons not only owned the Avs and the Denver Nuggets for several years, but he became a Hollywood film and television mogul, who lives comfortably in the Pacific Palisades near Malibu, happily married to his wife of three decades, with two healthy and thriving offspring who are in their 20s.

His late mother, Anita, was the first-ever female producer of the long-running CBS weekend news show, Face The Nation. Anita Lyons played a large role in the downfall of the despicable Congressman Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. When McCarthy went after famed CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow in one of his communist witch hunts, Murrow retreated somewhat in despair, at one point taking refuge in her apartment to lay low. She assured him that the country was on Murrow’s side, and it wasn’t long after that McCarthy’s reign of demagoguery came to a close.

Charlie was a speechwriter as a young man, for former United States Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. He was an executive in the Marriott Corporation. Charlie is an instrument-rated pilot, who owns his own plane and flies it all the time.

Charlie became friends in 1997 with famed actor Harrison Ford, when the film production company Charlie helped found, Beacon Pictures, made the film “Air Force One”, which helped save the Avs in some ways (story about that here). Since then, Charlie’s family and Ford’s family have vacationed together.