John Denver fans stand by their man

Mistakes were made.

Bill Maxwell did not take a chain saw to his Magnolia neighbor's deck last week, as I reported in my column the other day.

Instead, Maxwell hired a finish carpenter to trim the deck to the legal property line with a reciprocating saw. Maxwell just watched.

The fence they took down to do the job is back up, and while there are no Tom Collins-and-Twister parties planned for Maxwell and his neighbors, the worst seems to be over.

So call off the lawyer, the friends, the sister, the mother.

And, for the love of God, call off the John Denver fans.

I made a bigger mistake when I invoked the name of the late singer as another frustrated man who had taken to wood-cutting to settle a score.

I wrote that Denver, after his divorce, sawed his home and everything in it in half. The backlash was like a Rocky Mountain avalanche: high and mighty.

"You obviously have no knowledge of Mr. Denver's divorce settlements," wrote Pamela Beasley of Garland, Texas.

Well, Pam, I was going to take a night course, but . . .

"For some reason," wrote Mary Joy Scully, "People like you love to tear down good people like John Denver."

People like me? They do? You'd never know from my reading my e-mail.

"(Denver) didn't cut in half EVERYTHING," wrote Margit Voell, all the way from Euskirchen, Germany. "Only the bed and the dining-room table."

People, you fill up my senses, and not like a night in a forest. More like on a bus with the touring company of "Up with People."

I mean, you're all very nice, but I just can't take it anymore.

So I took the time to bone up on the former Henry John Deutschendorf Jr.

Born on New Year's Eve 1943 in Roswell, N.M. (That's home of Area 51, a top-secret Air Force test site rumored to have housed alien remains. That's all I'm saying).

Air Force brat. Overbearing father. Wrote "Leaving on a Jet Plane" for Peter, Paul and Mary. Went solo in 1969. Mixed with The Muppets. Kissed George Burns.

His 1972 greatest-hits album sold more than 10 million copies. Died in 1997, when his experimental plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Ranks as one of the five top-selling recording artists of all time.

Lest I make another grave mistake, I quote from Denver's 1994 autobiography, "Take Me Home," on what I will from now on refer to as "The Aspen Unpleasantness."

Denver got mad when his ex-wife, Annie, cut down some trees on their property, "And that's when I got the power saw going . . . ," he wrote.

"First I cut off a corner of the kitchen table and then I cut up the dining room table . . .

"Then in the same manner, I descended on the bedroom. . . . I sawed the headboard all the way across until the sheets got entangled and the saw jammed."

So there you have it.

Janet Huston of Winston, Ore., said that once I learned the truth about Denver, "perhaps you might be inspired to write an entire series of articles."

Janet, I miss John, too, but I think we all need to move on. And quickly. Please.

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in The Times. Her phone number is 206-464-2334. Her e-mail address is nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. Thank God she's a Jersey girl.