Ep Hoyt & the Hussy

The rich and rowdy Denver Post is a lady with a shady past. For most of her 53 years she was the gaudy consort of a river gambler and a barkeep, helped make them both multimillionaires. But for the last 13 years, having outlived them and their time, she has found life dull. Last week the aging hussy of Champa Street took a tardy fling at respectability, snatched herself a new kind of man.

From the eminently respectable Portland Oregonian, the Post stole solid, affable, eminently respectable Publisher Edwin Palmer ("Ep") Hoyt, who at 48 is still the white-haired boy of Western journalism. The lure: around $52,000 a year. Though friends of both asked what they saw in each other, Ep Hoyt and the Post were sure it was a fine match.

Don't Look Now. The Post's rambunctious history began one day in 1895 when blue-eyed, roly-poly Harry Tammen, bartender at Denver's Windsor Hotel, strolled into the littered city room of the old Evening Post. At his side was a new-found friend, swarthy, wax-mustached Frederick. Gilmer Bonfils (pronounced bonn-fees), a dashing promoter who had just cleaned up $800,000 in the notorious "Little Louisiana" lottery. To weary Postmen playing poker, Harry Tammen drawled: "Don't let us disturb you but we've just taken over this paper."

The take-over was breathless. For decades Bonfils & Tammen stirred up a brand of journalistic dust in Denver's rarefied air which made Hearst look stuffy. They raked the town for every bit of scandal, labeled their sheet "Your Big Brother, champion of every good, pure, noble, holy and righteous cause." Sample causes: crusades against Governors, mudslinging matches with Senators, bullyragging attacks on advertisers, lavish parties for children, sick dogs and horses.

Between such spasms they ran the Sells-Floto Circus, beat the rival Scripps-Howard Rocky Mountain News into grogginess, forced Denver merchants to buy Bonfils' coal. They kept a shotgun in their red-carpeted office (which the underpaid staff called the "bucket of blood"), once were both wounded when an irate reader beat them to the draw. Even that affray was grist for their newsmill. Blustered Bonfils: "A dogfight in Champa Street is better than a war abroad." The maxim was drilled into George Creel, Gene Fowler, many another bright pupil in the Post's hell-for-leather journalism school.

It was charged -- but never proved in court -- that Bonfils took $250,000 from Oilman Harry F. Sinclair to keep quiet about the Teapot Dome scandal, but such hush money would have been mere pin money to him. Before he died in 1933 (nine years after Tammen's death), he boasted that his enterprises, which ranged from mining schemes to a burlesque house, had brought him $60 million.

Financially the Post coasted along nicely after Bonfils' death, making a million or two a year, largely for his daughter, Helen Somnes, the principal stockholder. Editorially, it died a slow death, keeping nothing of Bonfils' circus journalism except the garish typography. By last November plodding Publisher William C. Shepherd was aware that he and the paper were both burned out. Said he: "I've been a workhorse long enough. Now I want to loaf." Month ago Ep Hoyt was offered the job of blowing new life into the paper.

No Newspaperman? He had revitalized one paper before. A Baptist minister's son, he spent 18 months in France with the A.E.F., worked his way through the University of Oregon's Journalism School (whose dean told him he would never make a newspaperman). Married while still in college, Ep Hoyt did janitor work in churches, sports correspondence for the Oregonian, spent summer vacations lum-berjacking in eastern Oregon.

In 1926, landing on the Oregonian for his second copydesk stretch, he got $45 a week, wrote Westerns for the pulp market on the side. After twelve years he was publisher, already deep in the job of restyling the stodgy Oregonian, pepping it up for a successful circulation battle with the Oregon Journal.

He insisted on divorcing news from opinion, a major operation for a paper steeped in the personal-journalism tradition of the Oregonian's founder, Henry L. Pittock, a goat-bearded tyrant of pioneer days. Under Hoyt the Republican Oregonian gave labor, Democrats, Japanese-Americans an even break -- something the Denver Post never did.

A tireless joiner, public speaker and partygoer, Palmer Hoyt gets around like no other Oregonian. He drinks his whiskey and gobbles his vitamin pills with equal gusto. His appetite for civic wheelhorsing has never been sated. He helped bring Henry Kaiser to Portland. As Oregon's first War Bond director, he put the state at the head of the U.S. in sales. His methods became the pattern for the national bond drives. In 1943 Hoyt slaved for six months as OWI's domestic director, fought hard to keep war news flowing free from needless and petty censorship.

Last week in Denver, Postmen held their breaths. Their paper-with-a-past might have a future after all.

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