Ted Graham

Ted Graham defied expectations throughout his life, never particularly interested in living according to convention or other people’s opinions. Born November 18, 1948, in Deerfield, Kansas, to Alice and Leonard Graham, Ted spent much of his childhood in Delta County, Colorado. He died quietly in Denver on August 14, 2026, at the age of 77—a surprisingly understated ending for a man who spent most of his life doing things on a larger scale.

Quite literally, larger than most at 6'7", Ted was difficult to overlook. His height sometimes attracted people and sometimes repelled them, and Ted collected an assortment of interesting and offbeat characters wherever he went.

He traveled widely and experienced as much of life as he possibly could until he couldn’t. He crossed most of the contiguous United States by motorcycle, worked on a fishing boat in Alaska, traveled with his family to Hawaii, rode through parts of England and Scotland, motorcycled across New Zealand’s South Island, and went helicopter skiing in Canada. His life included a variety of jobs in a variety of industries before he landed at Metropolitan Insulation Supply and owning Ted’s Custom Cutting, a fiberglass and foam insulation cutting business he operated successfully for approximately fifteen years. He and his brother designed the Sill Seal Saw, an accomplishment of which Ted was particularly proud.

Ted graduated from high school in 1966 and never pursued formal higher education, a fact that bore little relationship to the breadth of what he knew. He was a voracious and indiscriminate reader, interested in biographies, crime novels, history, science, science fiction, and nearly anything else that might teach him something new. He knew more about the Gilded Age and the turn of the twentieth century than probably many of the people who lived through it. He had an unusual ability to connect seemingly unrelated facts and make enormous inductive leaps between them. He remained intensely curious throughout his life, following current events and looking for opportunities to understand more about the world around him.

He was equally interested in stories. Quite the raconteur and the author of many “Too Tall Ted’s Too Tall Tales,” Ted entertained generations of adults and children with stories that became more entertaining—and occasionally less tethered to strict factual accuracy—in the telling. He remembered nearly every joke he ever heard and lyrics to seemingly every song, retrieving either one as circumstances required.

Music was another lifelong interest. Ted taught himself to play both piano and guitar. Among the pieces he was proudest to have mastered were Dire Straits’ *Sultans of Swing* and Rachmaninoff’s *Prelude in C-Sharp Minor*, a pairing that captures something essential about the range of his interests.

Ted could be stubborn, funny, peculiar, complicated, enormously generous, and sometimes all of those things at once. He was both a dreamer and a survivor. His generosity was often practical rather than ceremonial. When Ted’s Custom Cutting needed workers, he went to a homeless encampment and offered people not simply work, but a place to live while they got established. One man took him up on the offer. Over the years that followed, Ted helped him reconnect with the systems and resources he needed while giving him something even more fundamental: steady work, dignity, and the freedom to remain himself without judgment or demands that he become someone else first.

Ted married Mary Boyce in 1971. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1980, but they remained connected through their daughter, Alexandra, and later in life they supported one another's lives. In 1989, he married Karen Garfunkel Graham, with whom he shared his life until her death in 2005.

Ted was preceded in death by his wife, Karen Graham, and his parents, Alice and Leonard Graham. He is survived by his daughter, Alexandra Graham; Mary Boyce Smith; his brother, Max Graham; his sister, Susan Lawler; five nieces; and the many friends and characters whose paths crossed his over the course of an unusually full life.

A celebration of Ted’s life will be held in November, with details to be announced. 

He planned to go out with a bang.

Instead, he died quietly.

The life before that was anything but.