Emperor's New Court

Up to the Governor's mansion at Salt Lake City, Utah rode a cowboy on a pinto pony last month. The cowboy was Denver Post Reporter Robert Fenwick, masquerading in chaps and ten-gallon hat. To amused Governor J. Bracken Lee he presented one silver spur and an invitation to come to Denver to pick up the other one. Twelve times during the month Cowboy Fenwick and his pony (carted around in a truck) repeated the stunt at other state capitols in what Post Editor and Publisher Edwin Palmer Hoyt likes to call the "Rocky Mountain Empire."

This week, with assorted governors, senators, mayors, newsmen and Denverites on hand, Emperor Hoyt formally opens his new court--a gleaming $6,000,000 plant in downtown Denver. The 5,000 guests will wash down Rocky Mountain trout with a river of bourbon, admire the electrically heated sidewalks (guaranteed to melt snow in a jiffy), and watch as cosmic rays start the giant new presses rolling off copies of the Post.

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 it by making the Post responsible as well as robust.

A Baptist minister's son, Palmer Hoyt was a sergeant major in World War I, then a successful writer of westerns (one Hoyt hero: a buckaroo with a revolving glass eyeball). He joined the Portland Oregonian in 1926, in twelve years rose from copyreader to publisher. In 1946 the Denver Post's owners hired him away on a fat, longtime contract.

Vitamin Pills. Hoyt scrapped the Post's old sloppy makeup, insisted on sharper leads and shorter stories, used the space saved on more news and ads. He doubled the editorial staff, assigned reporters to an empire beat 1,000 miles wide and 1,500 miles long. He gave the Post an editorial page, took editorializing out of the news columns, and broadened the paper's intensely regional outlook.

Although the Post is delivered by bicycle, burro and plane daily in every one of the 13 states in the Rocky Mountain Empire, energetic Ep Hoyt is not relaxing. He munches candy bars, swallows vitamin pills, and takes catnaps to keep going 18 hours a day. He traveled 45,000 miles last year, selling the Post to the empire. The hustle & bustle pays off. Last year's gross: $12,000,000 (net: more than $1,000,000). To Ep Hoyt and the Post that is not good enough. They share the old Bonfils motto, still published daily: "There is no hope for the satisfied man."

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