Crazytown

Denver, ridden by a newspaper war between Gambler-Publisher Fred G. Bonfils with a morning and evening Post and the Scripps-Howard syndicate with a morning and evening News (TIME, Feb. 14), continued in its crazy aspect of wildcat frontier town. Last week the Post's frantic efforts for circulation included: A spectacle to signalize the Denver auto show: "The next thing on the Denver Post's free amusement program, ladies and gentlemen,* will be a thrilling leap for death by 75 world-famous Autoarabs, the tumbling Gas Anns, the Leaping Lenas of motordom's circus world." Army tanks were obtained to haul many battered motor hulks to an abyss on Castle Mountain. Throngs of Denverites scrambled thither to see the hurtling-into-space, the drop, the crash, the wreckage. A block party on Champa Street (outside the Post offices), with 21 bombs fired, bands playing, revelry--to signalize the opening of a tunnel through the nearby Rocky Mountains (see p. 9). Dance halls threw themselves open. Radio reported a Manhattan prizefight (Delaney-Maloney, see p. 27) and "as a special feature" a death dive --a man hanging by his teeth to a pulley, sliding down a wire from the Post's roof to the street. ,

*Publisher Bonfils knows ringmaster gabble. With his late partner, H. H. Tarnmen, he owned the Sells-Floto circus. The basis of his journalistic technique is a sardonic conception of "the people" as a childish mob to be amused, pampered, bullied, used.