Robert "Bob" C. Ide

Robert Curtis Ide (Bob) passed away on Friday, March 15 in Boulder, Colorado at the age of 91.  He was a well-loved and respected figure in Boulder County for many decades.

Bob was born on November 6, 1932 at the family farmhouse in Union County, Iowa which had been built by his ancestors who settled there in the 1860s.  He attended country school with his brothers and cousins at the ‘Ide School House’ through the eighth grade.  As a boy, Bob worked the farm when teams of draft horses were just beginning to make way to more mechanized farming, and he always loved being in the outdoors and hunting.  He graduated from Creston High School in 1950.

Bob had visited and enjoyed Colorado as a teenager, and after high school he moved to Boulder and enrolled at the University of Colorado.   In 1953 he was drafted into the Army, where he served for two years including a tour of duty in French-occupied Germany.  He received a Good Conduct Medal, Army of Occupation Medal (Germany), and the National Defense Service Medal.  He graduated from the University of Colorado in 1959 with a B.S. in Finance.

Always an entrepreneur with long term vision, Bob started and ran several businesses around Boulder as a young man and student including window washing, extermination, and a successful janitorial service.  His depression era farm roots gave him thrift, enterprise, and an uncommonly low time preference.  He had stints early in his professional career working in the insurance business (including a year spent with his young family in Chicago) and with Transamerica Development Company’s Colorado office.  In the mid-1960s, he purchased a motel in Boulder and moved it up Boulder Canyon to an old mining claim he had purchased just south of Nederland, naming it the Rocky Mountain Lodge.  During the move of the motel, they had to stop traffic on highway 119 while he cut the eaves off the roof so it would fit through the tunnel.  Bob’s kids have fond memories of helping out at the motel and wandering freely in the mountains.  While working with Transamerica in the 1970s, he brokered the sale of the storied Caribou Ranch near Nederland to a well-known rock music group’s producer.  His prolific independent real estate endeavors eventually became focused mostly around Broomfield, Colorado, where he acquired land and developed several industrial parks from the 1970s through 1990s.  In later years, he got a kick out of delicately cajoling the younger generation on how to more creatively approach their negotiations – often recounting stories from his own colorful escapades.

Bob met his wife of 67 years, Mary Margaret (Merritt) Ide, at the well-known “Sink” on University Hill while they were attending CU, and they were married on January 26, 1957 in Glendo, Wyoming.  Soon after marriage, they lived in CU’s ‘Vetsville’ G.I. student housing which consisted of a Quonset hut.  They raised their three children in Boulder and never gave a thought to calling anyplace else home.

Bob’s affable style, humility, good humor, loyalty, honesty, and un-selfish approach to the way he always conducted himself was one-of-a-kind: something that we who were close to him aspire to carry on as his legacy.  He was quietly persistent but joyful, and never took the hard times too seriously - just as he stayed uncommonly grounded during the good times.  During family ski vacations at the Colorado Arlberg Club, you often got the sense that Bob could relate better with the working staff than he could with his fellow members.

Bob is survived by his wife Mary; brother Roger (Jean) Ide and family; daughter Jennie (Larry) Murphy; sons Robert (Cathy) Ide and Jim Fritz (Patty) Ide; grandchildren Maggie Murphy, Lorin Murphy, Matthew (Hanna) Loucks, Mary (Mike) Cummings, Holly (Kyle) Roberson, K.T. (Kellen) Smith, Clint (Amy Iberlin) Ide, Austin Ide, Audrey Ide; and great-grandchildren Zachary, Scarlet, and Quincy Loucks, Waylon, Sutton, and Townes Lee Smith, Rory Roberson, and Mia Ava Ide. Bob is preceded in death by his parents Fritz and Helen Ide, brother Russell Ide and family, and grandson Marc Loucks.

A brief military ceremony with will be held to honor Bob’s service at 2:00pm on May 18, 2024 at Green Mountain Cemetery in Boulder; immediately followed by an informal memorial gathering at Frasier Meadows Manor, where Bob and Mary lived together for 27 years.  Further details/updates will be posted here on this obituary page. 

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”  --Marcus Aurelius

To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Robert "Bob" C. Ide, please visit our floral store.