COMMENTARY

For years I remember passing up a book entitled “Timberline” on my parents’ bookshelves.

One day I finally tipped it out of the lineup and blew the dust off of the pages.

Turns out, coming from a newspaper family, that this tome had something to offer, especially to our clan, which emigrated to Washington from Colorado in the early 1960s.

“Timberline,” by Gene Fowler, was about the two publishers of the Denver Post, Bonfils and Tammen, and their unscrupulous practices as they took the nearly bankrupt daily from rags to riches around the turn of the previous century.

Reads the cover: “This is the story of a speculator and a bartender who teamed together to run the Denver POST, one of the most sensational and profitable newspapers in America. For forty years, they ruled the Rocky Mountain region, bludgeoning their enemies with incredible promotions and reaping in huge profits from an assortment of enterprises that ranged from owning circuses to uncovering the Teapot Dome scandal. This uproarious book about them is biography, history and an adventure story all in one.”

They were scam artists who, separately, went from one small Midwestern town to another, bilking the rubes out of their pocket change, and more. They would arrive in town, take out advertising and post bills about an upcoming lottery, sell lottery tickets and then, with much fanfare, hold the drawing in the public square.

A schill would be holding the winning ticket, and the trio were on the first train out of town, well out of reach when the townspeople became wise to the sham.

They ran into one another in a small print shop in Denver, and immediately joined forces, taking on a nearly bankrupt newspaper and applying their less-than-honorable ethics to the communications business.

When the Denver Dry Goods department store balked at adding a fourth full-page ad, the following day headlines would read: “Denver Dry exploits child labor.” After a week or so of plummeting sales, owners of the store would agree to the additional lineage–and with a healthy price hike along with it.

One story tells about a day when the printing press was having problems, causing the crew to work triple time to get the early edition on the east-bound train. A sweat-soaked press foreman collapsed into a chair in the publisher’s office, wiping his brow. “We made it, but it was close,” he proudly exclaimed.

“If you can do it that way once, then we’ll do it that way every day,” Tammen replied. So much for a grateful thank-you.

And that’s where the Chronicle publishers are this week. Only, we’re not going to keep to this new and demanding schedule.

In need of a day-surgery procedure, we got with a doctor who worked on Friday—Perfect for our weekly newspaper schedule. Only, in the fine print, the scheduler set one of the two requirement appointments on—guess when?—a Tuesday.

So this week’s Chronicle will appear in your mailboxes and at local newsstands on Monday rather than the traditional Thursday.

Some wags may scoff “Riiiight…it’s hunting season.”

They are right about that, and we may take advantage of the shift in mailing and publishing to go for a walk in the wild, but only if the doctor’s treatment isn’t overly burdensome.