Death in Denver

The incredibly loud Denver Post blared out last week with the biggest news story of its career. Streaming across eight columns, three big, black banner lines roared: FREDERICK G. BONFILS, EDITOR
AND PUBLISHER OF THE POST,
DIES AT HOME EARLY THURSDAY
Wide black rules bordered every column. The whole front page except one column, which carried the weather report and Arthur Brisbane, was crammed with news of the death, surrounding a large picture of Publisher Bonfils. PRESIDENT HOOVER DEEPLY GRIEVED . . . BONFILS MADE POST A GREAT PAPER. . . . COLORADO HAS LOST ITS GREATEST CITIZEN. There were six more pages of pictures and testimonials.

Frederick Gilmer Bonfils, 72, had visited the Post office on Champa Street for the last time a week before. Troubled by pain in his left ear, he went home to his ornate white stone house on East Tenth Avenue. To the house came doctors, then nurses. Few days later an oxygen tent was brought. That night came a Catholic priest. Before dawn Publisher Bonfils, baptized on his deathbed, succumbed to encephalitis (brain inflammation), result of the ear infection.

Not everyone in Denver mourned. But everyone in Denver and the Rocky Mountain States had something to talk about in the death of the amazing Bonfils, the "Desperate Desmond" of Western journalism, the swaggering, handsome gambler who blew into town after the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 with the Hotel Windsor's amiable bartender, Harry H. Tammen; who rode to power astride the Denver Post which he imbued with his own traits of boldness, flamboyance, unscrupulousness.

From Butte to Albuquerque and from Kansas City to Salt Lake--the territory claimed for the Post's 150,000 circulation--the Bonfils career is epic. Everyone knows that he boasted Corsican descent (his father, a Troy, Mo. judge, changed the name from Buonfiglio) and kinship to Napoleon. Handsome, swarthy, he quit West Point in 1881 and tried his hand at land-trading in the Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas booms. His rough-&-tumble methods brought him, if not friends, a neat pot of money with which he started a lottery in Kansas. Bonfils had taken $800,000 out of Kansas when he bumped into the late Bartender Tammen and was persuaded that Denver was ripe for a killing.

Not because of any journalistic ambition, but because they sought an instrument for power, Bonfils & Tammen bought the doddering Post for $12,500, imported Hearstlings, doctors of yellow journalism, to rake the town for scandal, dish it up in dripping, juicy gobs. As it had for Hearst, the formula worked richly for Gambler Bonfils & Bartender Tammen.

In the next 40 years the Post was to become more & more a phenomenon of U. S. journalism. Unspeakably blatant, it declared itself "The Big Brother of The League of Rocky Mountain and Plains States, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana and South Dakota." It called itself a "gladiator invincible, fearless, determined, with a giant's strength, a philosopher's mentality. . . . The champion of every good, and pure, and noble, and holy and righteous cause. . . ." Sprinkled through its pages (and always over fair weather reports) was the legend "'Tis a Privilege to Live in Colorado." Bloodiest stories and pictures of corpses were sanctified by the watchword: "Crime Never Pays." On October 12, 1931 the Post's streamer read: CHRIS COLUMBUS DISCOVERS AMERICA.

In text as well as in spirit the Post personified Bonfils. A barbecue party given by him got front-page headline type just as big & black (or red) as his attack on the current "worst Governor Colorado has ever had." A two-column story told Post readers how the publisher had landed a 7-lb. trout (which was later alleged to be a pet fish named "Elmer," snared from a preserve). He loudly invited children to write him descriptions of their lost pets. "Big Brother" Bonfils would find them.

The night some missing Navy flyers were found in the Pacific, he wrote the eight-column banner himself: BLESS GOD! THEY'RE SAFE! He scorned foreign news on the front page. Said he: "A dog fight in Champa Street is better than a war abroad." He noisily offered the late Calvin Coolidge the job of editor at $75,000 a year. He permitted the picture of his daughter Helen to appear on the front page of the society section over the caption:

Vivacious, sagacious,
Describe a publisher's daughter,
True blue and gracious
Oh, bless the Gods who wrought her!

There were rascally chapters in "Bon" Bonfils history, passages which lawyers for his enemy, the Scripps-Howard Rocky Mountain News, promised to prove in the libel suit (Bonfils v. News) that was pending when Death came. According to those promises: Some of Bonfils' early land deals were crooked. Big winners in his lottery were confederates. He blackmailed Denver merchants into buying his Post coal. He was horsewhipped into a hospital by a Denver husband. He took $250,000 hush-money from Harry F. Sinclair in the Teapot Dome scandal. And the elaborate house in which "Bon" Bonfils died was the object of particularly horrid whispers--that Bonfils got it extremely cheap from a man who feared publicity.

But the Rocky Mountain News's report of Publisher Bonfils' death did not touch on those stories. Instead it paid tribute to his "challenging virility." For fair-minded critics had to acknowledge that his energy outweighed his rascality, his beneficence atoned for his arrogance.

Upon his $800,000 Lottery stake Bonfils pyramided fat profits from the Post, from the coal business, mining schemes, oil, real estate, Denver's Empress Theatre (burlesque). He used to tell friends that he was worth $60,000,000. Most Denverites think the correct figure was nearer $10,000,000. Bulk of the fortune was tied up in a family corporation, Boma Investment Co. Bonfils, who had visited Africa, named it for the thorn bomas built by natives "to keep beasts out." The Bonfils will, opened last week, left practically the whole estate (amount unspecified) to "The Fred G. Bonfils Foundation for the Advancement of the Welfare of Mankind."

Fat Harry Tammen had tongue in cheek when he chose the inscription for the Post's building: "O, Justice! When Expelled From All Other Habitations, Make This Thy Dwelling Place." Fred Bonfils thus expressed the aim of his Foundation: "Better homes . . . better schools . . . greater morality and more widespread regard for the love of God and the Gospel of Christ."

The Foundation has a $100, 000 fund to send 100 boys & girls to college. Highly publicized have been its standing offers of $250,000 for a cancer cure, $25,000 for an influenza cure.

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