Word: tammen
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Inimitable to Dependable. A struggling frontier-town daily until 1895, when it was bought by Harry H. Tammen, a onetime Denver bartender, and Frederick G. Bonfils, who reaped an $800,000 fortune by fleecing Kansans in a lottery, the Denver Post bloomed under their cultivation into the wildest flower in the Wild West. Its front page was a crazy quilt of blaring headlines, many in red ink, and along the order of DOES IT HURT TO BE BORN...
Despite an impressive contingent of crack newsmen-among them Damon Runyon, Courtney Ryley Cooper, Burns Mantle and Gene Fowler-the paper read like a circus flyer. For an editorial page, Tammen and Bonfils substituted invective, raked up so much scandal-a good deal of it true-that they kept a loaded shotgun in their office to discourage reader complaints. As the Post grew in power and prosperity, its proprietors branched into other fields; the Post became the first and last U.S. daily ever to own a circus (Sells-Floto), run a burlesque house and sell coal...
Talons over Talent. The Wichita battle started in the '20s when the Beacon was taken over by brothers Max, John and Louis (who died in 1953) Levand, who had learned the newspaper business under Publishers Frederick Bonfils and Harry Tammen in the carnival atmosphere (1895-1933) of the Denver Post. The Levands jazzed up the Beacon's copy, said that they would run the Eagle off the streets. The Eagle, under Publisher Marcellus Murdock, fought back with talons rather than talent, screaming: "Since the Levands came here ... a new word has come into use in Wichita...
Performing Chimpanzees. The hoopla is in the great tradition of the late Harry H. Tammen and Frederick G. Bonfils. They ballyhooed the Post to its dominant position in the Rocky Mountains by wild splashes of red ink, trick headlines (DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?), a circus makeup, dancing Indians, performing chimpanzees, and stuffed elephants under glass (they kept one in the business office). In his own four years as publisher, Ep Hoyt has shown considerably more restraint, but he has kept the Post growing in circulation (now 226,866), advertising (double in four years), prestige and influence. He has done...
Love In May. Beau James is the Walker story as told by Gene Fowler, whose biographies of other gifted scapegraces (John Barrymore in Good Night, Sweet Prince; Manhattan Lawyer William Fallon in The Great Mouthpiece; Denver Publishers Bonfils and Tammen in Timber Line) were bestsellers. Fowler writes of "the good old days" (a phrase that seems to mean the '205 now) sometimes as if he had a fistful of firecrackers, sometimes as if his pen had a tear duct. But the material (much of it new) lends itself perfectly to the Fowler flair for the sympathetically lusty tale...