Bill Kostka

Bill Kostka ('56) was inducted into the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame on Sept. 30.

Kostka, who taught public relations for the School for 14 years, said he was "bitten by the reporting bug while studying journalism at CU." For a reporting class in 1956, he was sent to cover the trial of John Gilbert Graham who was convicted of planting a dynamite bomb in a United Airlines plane that blew up over farmland near Loveland, killing 44 people including Graham's mother.

"When I got to district court, the FBI wasn't very impressed with my credentials, but a columnist for International News Service, Jimmy Kilgallen, was covering the trial," Kostka said in a speech at the Press Club Hall of Fame Dinner in September. "He had worked for my father in New York and took me under his wing. Those two days were so exciting that I knew I never would get far away from journalism wherever my career led me."

Kostka was inducted into the Hall of Fame with with a heartfelt and wisecracking introduction from Fred Brown, friend and Sunday columnist for The Denver Post.

"I can't imagine a bigger supporter and patron of the club than Bill Kostka. Bill is a former Press Club president and longtime board member. His spending at the club helped stave off bankruptcy. And he's a fixture in the community, a contributor and a mover and shaker," Brown said.

"I was flattered when Bill asked me to introduce him. But then I thought, well, maybe everyone else is – what's the word – dead."

Kostka has been a member of the Denver Press Club since 1958, and he said he knew all but three of the 35 journalists in the DPC's Hall of Fame – and two of the three were gone before Kostka came to Denver.

"Bill joined the club soon after he went to work at the Rocky Mountain News. He said they insisted it was virtually a condition of employment," Brown said. "He ate here nightly and played pool with the sharks in the basement."

Kostka covered courts for the News. "But, then, three years later, his former News city editor hired him as a writer in the PR office of Martin Marietta in Baltimore. He went from writing about dockets to writing about rockets," Brown said.

Brown noted Kostka's journalistic bloodline. His father, William Kostka Sr., was a managing editor of Look magazine, and his mother was a free-lance writer and columnist for the Post. In 1964, Kostka's father, who had founded a Denver PR agency in 1949, had a stroke and asked his son to come home and take it over. William Kostka & Associates is now Kostka Gleason Communications.

"He has been a lobbyist, entrepreneur and spokesman. He has managed to balance prominent clients like both Coors and Anheuser Busch – quite a trick, that," Brown said.

"His walls are crowded with marketing kudos, Silver and Gold picks, Lifetime Achievement from PRSA, a rack of flack plaques. He's had 95 percent success with public issue campaigns.

"He has handled the slippery – raising Division of Wildlife funds to bring the river otter back to Colorado. And he has handled the sticky – he helped Great Western Sugar when a molasses tank burst and turned much of Loveland into a pecan pie."

In 1977, Kostka was honored as an outstanding journalism graduate of the School.

He and Cynthia Gleason Kostka are the parents of two SJMC graduates, daughter, Jennifer Kostka ('02), and son, William Kostka III ('04).

Jennifer Kostka lives in Denver and writes newsletters for the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses, and Billy Kostka lives in California and works for a video production company. billkostka@coloradoalum.org