New Face, New Home

In less than a year, "Ep" (Edwin Palmer) Hoyt had changed the raucous Denver Post from a brawling journalistic hussy to a newspaper (TIME, Feb. 18). Facing his staff the first day on the job, he looked at his watch, announced that, from that moment, the common scold of Champa Street "ain't mad at nobody." By last week, having cleaned house on Champa Street, he got set to move the Post from its squat, gaudy old building. The Post bought the Home Public Market and an adjoining five-story office building, ordered 24 new high-speed presses. Hoyt announced his goal: to make the Post "the best newspaper published any place by anybody in the whole world."

The mere idea of such a goal would never have occurred to underpaid Post' men during the rowdy half-century on

Champa Street. For four decades, Publisher Frederick G. Bonfils and his crony H. H. Tammen, a onetime barkeep, had run the paper like a circus, built circulation with spectacular outdoor shows, cheap insurance tie-ins, prizes for every want ad. The Post earned a million dollars a year, and put little of it into improving its contents.

Calm & Clean. Ep Hoyt, who climbed from lowly copyreader to publisher of the conservative Portland Oregonian in twelve years, was changing the Post's ways slowly, but in one year he had done a lot. His single concession to the old gaudiness was the Post's pink-paper Page One; otherwise the sideshow days were over. By shaking down the crazy-quilt make-up and flamboyant headlines, Hoyt saved 98 columns of space weekly, used part of them for better news coverage, loaded the rest with advertising. Even though Hoyt had increased its editorial staff from 55 to 80, the Post had the most profitable year in its history. The Post had an editorial page for the first time in its life, and it was more judicious than the news columns used to be.

Two of the new staffers are Nisei, the first to work for the Post, which early in the war had rabble-roused against all Japanese-Americans.

Legs for the Empire's Voice. Ep Hoyt had adopted Bonfils' proprietary feeling about the Rocky Mountain area (the Post calls itself "The Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire"). Soon he will have legmen in all of the empire's 13 states. Come the days of unlimited paper, Hoyt expects to reach unimpeded as far as Canada to the north, Mexico to the south; east until he bumps the Kansas City Star, west until he shares newsstand space with the workmanlike Salt Lake City Telegram.

It will be summer before Ep Hoyt's new building is finished, and Hoyt abandons the "Bucket of Blood" office he inherited from Bonfils.* But Hoyt won't break completely with the past. He is going to take with him the Statue of Justice (which has surmounted the Post building since its late proprietors took it from the old Denver courthouse). And across the front of the new building he will paint the slogan that decorated the old: "O Justice, when expelled from other habitations, make this thy dwelling place."

* Scene of an unsuccessful shooting by an irate victim of Bonfils' journalism.

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