Remember that girl in the seventh grade you never noticed even though she sat right in the middle of the class?
She didn’t say much. When you think back, though, she was always friendly. She smiled most of the time and had a loud, infectious laugh. You were surprised to find out she got really good grades and was a whiz a math. She was so quiet most of the time.
She died last week. She was Stephanie Takis.
If that name rings a bell, it’s only because you’re pretty clued into the local political scene. Stephanie hailed from Salt Lake City, and she lived in northwest Aurora for about 30 years. If you didn’t know that, you’d think she lived in the same old-Aurora neighborhood here entire life. She was a number cruncher at Fitzsimons and an Aurora City Council rep for four years. She went on to serve in the state House and the state Senate for years after.
She died at home Aug. 5 after a relatively brief struggle with cancer. She was only 63.
When people use the expression, “stay classy,” something that most politicians and public servants just don’t get, they mean, act like Stephanie. She was classy.
Not in the way they mean in the movies. Just the opposite. She lived and breathed her gritty neighborhood and the woes of all of her constituents. She was the people’s representative. No, Stephanie was classy in that she could vehemently disagree with someone, and still make them feel like their opinion, albeit mistaken, was valuable.
I met Stephanie more than 20 years ago when she was on the Aurora City Council. She had a musical, amiable voice, that resonated a little from the long cigarettes she smoked. The voice and the smile were disarming. So pleasant, I figured her a lightweight when I first met her. I figured wrong. Stephanie was always armed with numbers, data and a relentless moral compass very unpopular with the corporations-are-people crowd.
Despite that, she was hardly a partisan. She voted her conscious and not the Democratic Party line.
At a memorial service in her honor this week, recollection after recollection agreed that Stephanie’s smile and laugh were both genuine and lethal. She used them to put everyone she met at ease, and she used them as a petard to finish off an argument she was determined to win. She was the people’s representative armed with the people’s convictions.
There’s very little of that kind of thing left in politics these days. So those who knew Stephanie gathered Tuesday evening at the Moorhead Recreation Center to lament that and Stephanie’s early departure. Her friends and compatriots told funny stories about her convictions and rolling commentary, and they all lifted a shot of Italian limoncello in her honor, the Greek lady’s favorite salve.
Just like most people knew so little about the smiling girl in the middle of classroom, few people knew that she carried the state bills that created the Anschutz Medical Campus and the new VA hospital in Aurora. She worried and lobbied endlessly for struggling and older people who were pushed around by the system, or just plain forgotten, or suffering from the side effects of an overdose of legislation.
While you may not have known much about Stephanie, those who did know her lined up to bemoan the loss of someone who was honest, humble, frank and irreverent. Mayor Steve Hogan, Congressman Ed Perlmutter, Former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, former state Senate President Joan Fitzgerald, her neighbors and lifelong friends and fellow councilmen and legislators all agreed that the basically shy, quiet and smart girl could kick some serious butt on Capitol Hill when it was called for, most often with a smile, a laugh and an unflinching gaze behind thick glasses.
When she stepped down from lawmaking a few years ago, she went on quietly working to get other candidates elected, solve a few community problems and create Aurora Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.
Her legacy is the girl who attracted so little attention to herself and became a woman of great consequence. The achievements she leaves behind weren’t big land deals or airline mergers, but a collection of city and state laws and votes that continue to make big differences in the lives of we little people. Thanks, Stephanie.
Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com
One heck of a straight shoot’en woman that Stephanie Takis. Always appreciated her direct approach on dealing with everything. We will miss her big laugh and beautiful smile up here in north Aurora.