♪ [Music playing] ♪ >> Hi, my name is Kwame Spearman, I am the CEO and co-owner of Tattered Cover Bookstores.

This year along with PBS 12 we have launched our Leaders as Readers series in which we take our leaders across Colorado and find out how literature has influenced them in their lives and career.

Today we are honored to have Joe O'Dea, Joe is running for the United States Senate for the state of Colorado.

Thank you for being here.

>> Thanks for having me here today, I'm really excited to talk to you about reading, it's a favorite part of my life.

>> I love it.

And so Joe, we had a lot of people on our show and different types of like reading, one thing I really loved is we are going to go deep with Western horsemen, talk to us a little bit about why this magazine is super important to you.

>> Well I think there's a lot of kids that get handed books and maybe they don't like the books and maybe they don't want to read but I only have a certain amount of time in my day, and so with what I do I read a lot of contracts and I read a lot of legislation and I'm reading a lot of news, and I still like to read and get myself in the frame of mind and so I picked up this habit of reading Baxter Black, it's a series called on the edge of common sense, it is in the Western Horseman magazine and has been over for 20 years, he just passed away here in June sad to see him go but there's always something in there that helps me relate to my childhood I grew up with horses, kind of helping around the ranches, across Colorado and so there's always something there that takes me back to my childhood and that's why I like it so much.

>> I really love something that you said, is this notion of trying to find the perfect thing to get people excited about reading, and it's something that we at Tattered Cover totally embrace.

Everyone is unique and different and finding that perfect thing, talk to me a little bit sort of about when you were growing up, what you like to read and sort of how it influenced you.

>> My dad would bring home different magazines, different articles about how to train a horse, how to ride, how to rope, a lot of things that my brother and I were very interested in, and so I always like reading those kind of articles, it just it's something I can relate to, I want to study about it, and I think that's where a lot of kids are, they want to be interested in something and so if you put something of interest in front of them, there is a better opportunity that they will read that.

>> I love it, and so you had an incredibly successful career, mostly on the business side, do you want to talk a little bit about your background and how reading influence that?

>> Sure, I am a fourth generation Coloradan.

I grew up in southeast Denver back when there was mostly cattle in fields out there, not a whole lot of roads.

Helped my parents around the house a lot, my dad had horses, he actually has claimed the family he restarted the mountain patrol for the Denver Police Department here so they would use horses to control crowds, and so we usually have 8 to 12 horses and then that became my brother and my job, we got to ride horses every day to make sure they were in shape and ready to go for my dad and his partners.

I went to Mullen High School, I'm a product of family that got to put me into a different school, a school choice so that super important to me, I believe you know we have a duty to put kids where they can succeed, it should not be dictated by their ZIP Code, the money should follow the child and not the school system, so I am an advocate for that and it made a huge difference in my life, they put me at a place where I could be successful.

From there I went up to Colorado State University where I got most of my construction management degree, my wife and I started a business out of our home, about 1983 and we employ 300 families here CEI constructors and we also own the Mile High Station, and Ironworks Event Centers, Colfax and I25 I hope you come over to a party once or twice.

>> Just a few.

>> Great, we have great events.

There is a great venue, but look, I really think that education is one of the most important things.

Sen. Tim Scott was in town this past week and his quote is that a good education is as close to magic as you can have in America.

And I really believe in that, so I am big on reading and teaching kids to read, my mom helped our daughter read, she started reading at three years old, if you can believe that just because we had magazines laying around the house and we had books laying around the house, so if we want to teach kids how to learn we have to teach them how to read.

And so I'm a big advocate for that.

>> I cannot agree more.

It's interesting, the notion of when you are busy and have a lot of things going on.

A magazine is almost a perfect read because it's condensed and packs a lot of punch and you can get it down to the time you got.

You wanted to I think read a part of Western Horsemen?

>> There's a quote here that I really kind of hit home for me and I can just read it real quick, it's by Winston Churchill and it was written, written an article the Horse Matters, by Baxter Black and Winston Churchill is famous for having said there's something about the outside of a horse that's good for the inside of a man.

And I truly believe that, it's kind of one of the things I grew up with was horses, and you kind of feel like you're on a mini vacation, the other thing that's really cool about horses is it teaches you a team concept and I like being there when a horse matters, when you can't do the job alone, a cow in the bog or race against time, a boulder to move, a detour to take a mountain to cross, a crevice to leap, a war a win, a sweetheart to impress or when you've gone too far to walk back.

And so when you are on the back of a horse, you realize how much of a partner that horse is and there is a trust there's a trust between the two of you and so when I read these articles in Western Horsemen, a lot of them take me back to my childhood and that's really something cool that I like to go back to.

>> I think that's absolutely fascinating and so moving forward, within your career, you set up this sort of amazing organization, did you read leadership books or team focus mentality, how did you evolve as a leader?

>> You know I did, I spent a lot of time reading different self-help books, like how to put things forward and I read a lot of Bible references, Jesus was a leader, those types of articles and those hit home for me.

I tell the group that at my business, you know every once in a while you need to look behind you and make sure people are following.

Just because you think you are leading, and because it's about getting people headed in the right direction, getting them motivated and getting them charged up about something.

So a lot of the books that I read in my business career have been centered around those kind of topics.

>> And what made you decide to jump into the political spectrum having had such a successful business career?

>> Well I did not hit my head, a lot of people have asked me, I did not.

You know I'm just really dissatisfied about the direction of our country and Colorado is headed, and I felt like my wife and I we have lived the American dream here and started with nothing, built a bountiful company that employs hundreds, and we've allowed them to live the American dream and it just seemed like the next step to me that I could give back to our country and so I jumped into kind of get us headed back in the right direction and I really want to move the country forward.

A lot of this partisan bickering annoys me, why don't we solve problems, instead of you know trying to make snippets for the media, and I think it's time to put some adults in the U.S. Senate that want to sit down and do what's good for our country and for our state and move our country forward and that's why I jumped in.

>> So, one of the major areas in which children learn how to read is in schools, you mentioned before that you are a big proponent of school choice, to tie that in to have an encouraging reading amongst children.

>> Yes great as I've been across the state this last year, campaigning right, I have heard from different parents about public education and I've heard about private education and about homeschooling, I've heard about charter type schools, and what I consistently hear is that each kid has its own place.

And so some kids do better at a public type school and I talked to one family that tried to send them to private school but it did not work out.

He just was not in an environment where he felt like he was being challenged so they moved them over to public school in Jeff Co. And he started to excel.

So I think that's the part that we need to embrace it's not so much about all or none or one or the other, it's about each individual kid putting them in a spot where they can learn the best sometimes that's homeschooling, we've got some families I talked to, and they had him in a public school that setting did not work, there was a lot of distraction and they needed to get the kid home where they can really focus on some of his issues.

He was easily distracted, put him in the situation and he excelled.

I'm a big proponent of that, we need to make sure that we can fund that across United States, I think that's important, but is not an all or nothing, as I said every kid has their own individual way of learning, and we need to make sure that we can get them in the spot where they can do the best for themselves.

It starts with reading, the reading is just a big deal, when you find out that some of the school systems are not reading at level, in fact there are 30% at level, and we had a huge impact during Covid, kids are out of classes, they are not able to get the focus that they need and the tutorial that they need, I think that is an important consideration now as we move the country forward.

We have to take it and embrace that and make sure that we catch these kids back up and we need to do that now.

We need to really be active about that, but reading is just critical, what did they say, you learn to read up until third grade and then after third grade you read to learn.

So we need to make sure that you know we can get these kids in the right situation.

>> And something you mentioned earlier that I found very interesting is this notion of a variety of topics, can you go a little bit deeper on this notion of I guess comfort of taking and maybe it was a Montessori approach to reading of hey, maybe comic books are the right answer, maybe graphic novels of the right answer or romance or sci-fi, that's kind of your point of view on reading right?

>> It is and I think it's important to recognize that every kid has a different set of interests.

I had a nephew who was really stubborn.

We gave him books and he didn't want to look at them.

Did not want to open them and give him a comic book and he would not put it down.

In fact now we're reading it out loud and he's 3 1/2 to 4 years old and he's reading out loud as a comic book probably not the best comic book but you know what it's something he was interested in and so he began to excel because that interested him.

I think that's an important point of consideration, every kid does not learn the same.

>> I cannot agree more and it's something we see all the time that there is this notion of there's a list of things you should be reading at certain ages and if you're not reading that then maybe you're not considered a reader and what the beauty of the situation is when you introduce a different book, it's a little outside and you see someone really warm to it and say hey, you like this book, you are actually a reader and the possibilities that are sort of engaged with that.

>> Funny story I got a brother-in-law he's about my age and I said what kind of books do you read?

Oh, I don't have time to read books.

I don't like reading books.

He reads anything that has to do with the avalanche out of the newspaper and he reads it religiously 4-5 hours a day, so he reads, just not the way most people read and I think that's an important consideration.

>> But he's a reader and that is a unifying take away of this notion that once someone feels that way, maybe they'll start reading about the Nuggets or the Broncos or Rockies, and subsequently, he's got the capabilities to do that.

>> Yeah he does.

You just need to make sure that every kid has the right tools so they can read what they want to read.

And I think that's a really important consideration.

>> Let's go a little bit deeper about your love for Baxter Black and in many ways, would you say that's a love for the American West?

>> Well I think it is.

You know the American West has a lot of if you will, there's lots of stories and train robberies and bank robberies, all those things that made the American West something that people wanted to watch John Wayne, they wanted to watch Glenn Ford, all those movies as I grew up, because there was this mystique about the West and how the West was won and how the West was fought, and I just think that some of those stories the travels of people that you know carved out the Colorado trail, and how they got across, and some of their stories about how they lost everything on the way over here, nearly got away with their lives but then started over again.

And I think that's fascinating to me that's part of Colorado, when you go around Colorado and you see all the towns, I've been blessed here in the last year and I've gotten all 64 counties, and you come up over independence pass and you look and see where gold mines were and there were stories written about those various people that populated those mines and made them work, that is really cool, I think that's part of the lure of Colorado if you will.

>> And really no one did that better than Baxter Black, and Western Horsemen describing sort of what he felt was the American West and Colorado seemed a big part of that.

>> Right and the other thing I really liked about Baxter Black was he made what seemed like trivial super interesting right, just going out to catch a calf to do some doctoring and he turned that into a story that crashed a car over a track, through a fence, and then actually pulled in the wife's opinion on you dumb butt, why did you do it that way, those kinds of stories just really catch my attention because it's fascinating to see how he manipulates the English language to make you visualize that going on and so he's just an extremely talented individual.

>> So we talked a lot about Western Horsemen but there's probably a book out there that you feel really speaks to you and if so, what would that book be?

>> Well, about 10 years ago, a friend of mine gave me a book called the Code of the West, and its 10 pages, and it talks about your word and how you must have integrity and if you tell somebody your to do something, you are going to finish it and they do it in a western kind of slang, that's somewhat fascinating to me because I've heard all of those sayings before, and I actually brought about 25 copies of that, and gave it to the people in my office because it talked about your character, it talked about how you know if you're gonna tell somebody something, talk to them and be upfront with them and be direct with them because do not BS me, tell me the truth because the truth will set us free.

And so that is a book that has really helped me with my business career, be direct, don't waste time, and that's kind of the cowboy way if you will, it's a fascinating book.

>> And what exactly are some of the codes?

>> The Code of the West is really simple: live each day with courage, take pride in your work, always finish what you start, do what has to be done, be tough but fair, and when you make a promise, keep it, ride for the brand, that's probably one of the most important ones.

If you're on the team you should be on the team.

Talk less and say more, my dad always used to say God gave you two ears and one mouth.

Remember what some things are not for sale, some things are not for sale.

And know when to draw the line.

Know when to say enough is enough.

Those are just guidelines, and I think if you apply them every day, you come out of that day feeling like you did hard work and you gave your best effort.

So that's why I like that book.

>> And how has that book affected you on the campaign trail?

>> About the same way, people ask me are you going to change your opinion about this or change your opinion?

I am who I am.

I'm going to be Joe, this is how I'm going to govern.

I've been very upfront with people despite the two parties, I don't fall into the party mode, I'm going to buck the party on occasion and go after what's good for Colorado, that's just me.

And I learned that from being a young kid.

You have to be true to yourself.

And so I always will be.

>> Awesome thank you so much for coming and talking to us a little bit about Western Horses and your favorite book.

And thank you all for watching Leaders as Readers and we also want to thank our US senatorial candidate Joe O'Dea for joining us.

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