Memories of the Rocky Mountain News

It will be a sad day for Denver when the Rocky Mountain News shuts its doors tomorrow. Like a great fighter whose time has past, the News plans to go out with a bang. Tomorrow's edition promises to be one of the best ever as well as a collector's item, but plan to get yours early as only 350,000 will be printed. I wrote for the Rocky for a short time in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I did book reviews for the Sunday paper.

In my opinion the two biggest tactical errors the News made were giving up the Sunday edition in the Joint Operating Agreement with the Post and going away from the tabloid style that made the News so readable for so many years. I was living in Fairplay when I was doing Rocky book reviews and under my byline I was only identified as a freelance writer living in Park County, Colorado. I had had a full time job with the local paper in Fairplay, The Park County Republican and Fairplay Flume. When the Flume was sold (it has gone through a great deal of turmoil and is now published in, shudder, Bailey), and I lost my job there I felt I had lost the best job in the world, a sentiment that lot of Rocky staffers have recently voiced.

I still remember some of the reviews from back then, all for books that have probably been completely forgotten. One was entitled, "The Man Who Kept the Secrets," the biography of Richard Helms, one of the former heads of the CIA, who among other things was alleged to have blackmailed then President Nixon into giving him an ambassadorship after Nixon fired him for not providing a CIA cover story for the Watergate burglars. Another review was entitled "Crazy Money," and chronicled the adventures of a welder who traveled to Alaska to work on the Alaska pipeline.

Probably the most entertaining review I did was for a book that came out in late 1979 called "The 80s A Look Back," that contained a number of hilarious essays and predictions from notables including the late Abbie Hoffman. One prediction was that a microwave satelite accidentally would point a concentrated beam of microwave radiation earthward resulting in a disaster that would henceforth be known as "the cooking of Provincial France."

Another prediction would be that the then oil shortage would be shortlived and in fact such a glut of petroleum would result from new discoveries that scientists would attempt to create food from the stuff. The biggest drawback would be that the foods would tend to explode when cooked.

Still another prediction which still sounds like a ratings winner, predicted that the new network Fall line-up would include a show called "Bikini Squad," which would be described as "a special police unit that would be called upon wherever pretty girls in bikinis were needed to fight crime."