It is certainly not the tallest building in Denver, but there is little doubt that it has as many or more stories as any place in the city.
It’s the Denver Press Club, where reporters—story tellers—public relations flaks and others have been gathering for a hundred years. But the hundred years only counts for its current digs. The club’s genesis goes back even farther!
Press Club members boast that the joint is the oldest such gathering place for reporters, media types and others in the United States. “I can’t explain why we’re the oldest,” said Press Club President Marianne Goodland. But Goodland, a stickler for facts, confirms the club’s first organized meeting of ‘ink-stained wretches’ took place in 1867, “nine years before Colorado was even a state.”
The exact location of the meeting is mostly lost to history. But, as Goodland tells it, “Our first building was along the banks of Cherry Creek, on the second floor of a grocery store.” The store, she says, became a victim of a long ago flood. Its demise, no doubt, was also covered by another long ago reporter.
While the DPC is today on solid footing, it has endured some tough times. As the last century was ending and new one beginning, the media landscape was changing. No bigger symbol of this change was the demise of The Rocky Mountain News, a proud, Western legacy paper. Membership was also in decline. Money, including money for long neglected repairs was also in short supply.
“It was very serious,” said DPC board member, Joe Bovan. The club, he said, “was falling apart.” Bovan, a former legislative reporter, only half jokingly said, “It was a question of whether we had $12 or $27 in our bank account.”
“We had to change our model considerably,” he said. Cost-cutting got serious. It eliminated its full-time kitchen and began renting itself out. “We also ended up targeting new, large events. We became more mission driven.”
A bank loan, a lot of “sweat equity,” people pitching in to make club repairs, and a wholesale philosophical change in how to run the place slowly turned things around.
But changing the business model, bringing the club into a new era, may not have simply pumped new energy into it, but also new life.
But one big time tweak, perhaps more than any other, was introducing The Damon Runyon Banquet, an event that would resonate nationally.
Named for Pueblo native and legendary playwright Damon Runyon, best known for the iconic musical “Guys and Dolls,” the event has become an annual affair honoring a single journalist who has made significant contributions to the craft.
Runyon, the legendary former Denver Post reporter, just may have lent a helping hand and, perhaps, saved the club from joining him in the great beyond.
But credit also goes to the late John Ensslin, a quiet, unassuming gentleman who did his work with consummate professionalism at The Rocky Mountain News. The Runyon event was his idea.
Goodland describes the soft spoken and unassuming Ensslin as an “incredible” and “transformative” club president. Her opinion echoes among those who knew him.
Today, Runyon honorees represent a ‘who’s who’ in journalism. A small list includes famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, the late Tim Russert, Katie Couric and Anne Curry who, while in Colorado, also visited Pueblo, where her father grew up. A 2025 honoree has been chosen, said Goodland, but for now, remains under wrap. (I’m sworn to secrecy.) The event will be October 18th.
To visit the club is to enter a visual time capsule where framed front pages from Denver’s dailies adorn the walls. Stories from ‘The Post’ and ‘The Rocky,’ two rabid competitors, tell the city’s, state’s and the nation’s biggest stories.
A visitor can ‘read all about’ JFK’s assassination, Columbine, Watergate, the moon landing and, of course, the Broncos, the good years and the bad. “It’s not only history,” Goodland said, “but history of how newspapers were produced in those days.”
On another wall hang caricatures of some of the most memorable folks who ever ‘tipped a glass’ at the club. There are the exaggerated drawings of Denver Post editorial cartoonists and Pulitzer Prize winners, Paul Conrad, Pat Oliphant and Mike Keefe, the Rocky’s Gene Amole and Dusty Saunders, Anne Trujillo, a mainstay news anchor at Denver’s Channel 7, television’s Bob Palmer, and so many others who contributed to the foundation of Denver media.
Membership, said Goodland, hovers around 600, though not everyone is a working reporter. Times have changed and, so too, has the club.
“You don’t have to be a journalist,” said Goodland, a writer for Colorado Politics. “Social media has changed all that.” Indeed, the landscape and menu for news gathering is vastly different than in ‘the old days’ when the club was a watering hole for reporters—TV, radio and print. Membership is today a mosaic, from podcasters to politicians.
The Denver Press Club has also been a stop for a gaggle of iconic names over the decades. Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft visited; so too did famous pool shark ‘Minnesota Fats. There’s also a photo of long ago movie star Ginger Rodgers taking a seat in the club’s legendary poker room. Incidentally, said the club president, there’s a game every week.
Stories abound at the Press Club, including ghost stories that more than a handful members swear to be true. “There’s a few,” confirmed Bovan.
There’s the one about the ‘moving glass,’ he said. Two regulars attest to seeing a drink glass “move across the room.” Another is a photograph showing what appears to be a woman “wearing a bunch of roses.” Then, there’s that spooky second floor door that, stealthily, mysteriously, “just slams shut.” It happens mainly at night. The ‘ghost’ is always fodder for conversations, especially around Halloween.
It’s the Denver Press Club where, for a hundred years and counting, a good story is always welcome.
One added note, our very own LaVozColorado Publisher, Pauline Rivera, was inducted into the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame, last September.
