Sept. 8, 1947 – March 23, 2026
Colin Dee Mathews was late to many appointments, but he arrived a little bit early to his own death, at the age of 78, on Monday, March 23, 2026. After managing prostate cancer for the previous five years, small cell liver cancer snuck up and took him quickly. He was surrounded by all of his adoring and beloved children when he passed, at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. He had inherited genes that would have taken him to his 90s, yet from the shock of his first diagnosis and prognosis, he adjusted quickly to making his best day be every day, with his accustomed good humor.
Born on Sept. 8, 1947 in Salt Lake City to Tom and Bonnie Mathews, Colin spent his early childhood in Utah. From his earliest days, he was an outstanding tennis player and skier. The family moved to Sausalito, California in the 1950s, then a run-down fishing village. They made a large circle of close friends including painters, sculptors, Bohemians, writers and photographers. He always regarded Sausalito as his spiritual home. Colin attended Marin Country Day School, where his high grades earned him a scholarship to Andover, the elite private school in Andover, Massachusetts. In the summer he coached basketball at a Headstart program in Brooklyn when his family moved to New York. He went on to Stanford, also with a scholarship, where he majored in English, a natural choice given his family’s love of literature. There he met and married Edith Glassmeyer. After graduating, they moved to Philadelphia where he earned a law degree at the University of Pennsylvania.
Colin spent his early career joining a string of political campaigns, starting with George McGovern’s presidential bid in 1972, and ending with Morris Udall’s in 1976, with a handful of Senate campaigns in between. Colin and Edie lived in Washington D.C and had two children by then, Zach and Hilary, but their marriage ended during his work on the road. None of those campaigns were ultimately successful, which meant Colin also found himself with an employability problem.
So he got a government job, with the help of Lynn Coleman, legal counsel at the Department of Energy. Lynn later helped Colin get a position as a capitol hill lobbyist. He joined Vinson & Elkins, a top law firm in Washington D.C., and shortly made partner.
Those years were to become his high-flying ones. In his second marriage to Jessica Tuchman, Colin had two more children, Oliver and Jordan, as well as an enviable house in Washington D.C., and a farm in Virginia an hour away, where they hosted many parties for Washington’s power brokers. They lived a life of horses and Porsches. But his restless soul, and perhaps his moral compass, steered him away from the lobbying profession, and he tried his hand at business, selling computer systems to the U.S. Department of Defense. His outsized dreams were sometimes impractical, but his enthusiasm never faltered. That venture was met with mixed success, and his second marriage ended in divorce.
Feeling like he had sold his soul to the political, legal and business professions, Colin spent much of his later life working on buying it back in the mountains where he was born. In his third marriage to Paula Craver, the two of them bought The Roadmaster Grille restaurant in Virginia City, Montana, a town where he was elected mayor. But the recovering lawyer tired of flipping burgers after a couple years, and he and Paula turned the operation into a western art gallery, which they called the Creighton Block Gallery. When the local ranchers, motorcycle enthusiasts, and occasional busload of tourists proved an inconsistent customer base for fine paintings and sculptures, he moved the gallery to Big Sky. Courtney Collins helped him in that venture for years, eventually taking over the business, reimagining it as Courtney Collins Fine Art.
Colin was a loving, extraordinary, eccentric, paradoxical man. He was a sweetheart and a dreamer. He loved a bad pun almost as much as a good story. He loved fine clothing and the trappings of wealth, and somehow also labor union songs, Italian opera and country music. In his childhood his family sang hundreds of songs on road trips, with Colin singing the loudest and most fervently, quite off key. Beloved by everyone who knew him for his unfailing good nature and kindness—ski lift operators, raconteurs, card dealers, bartenders, friends and artists, he nevertheless managed to vex more than a few lenders and bankers. His responsibilities, his dreams, and his good intentions were frequently at odds with one another, but in his final years he seemed to have found his way to harmony in that regard. He never failed to make an impression on any and all who knew him. If he disappointed anyone along the way, it was in direct proportion to how much he was adored by them.
Colin’s family is a large and occasionally shifting constellation. He is survived by his wife Paula Craver, for whom he was the principal caregiver for a decade after she fell ill. She now lives with her daughter Caity in North Carolina. He is also survived by his four children Zach and Hilary, Oliver and Jordan, all of whom supported him throughout his illness. He had seven grandchildren, including Paula’s from her first marriage. His older brother Tom and younger sister Annie are heartbroken at his passing, as are his niece Clea Mathews, and nephews Nick and Isaac Aoki. He’s also survived by lifelong dearest friend Kevin Hicks of Bolinas, California, and preceded in death by his adoring parents, Tom and Bonnie Mathews.
“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
