Wednesday Warrior is a century-plus tour, much of it conducted by the nettlesome editor and publisher of one of America's earliest business weeklies. Gene Cervi's Rocky Mountain Journal didn't have a large audience, but it did hold the attention of Denver's political and business luminaries, some of whom read it with trepidation. Cervi didn't go calling, however. He didn't need to. He was well acquainted with his primary targets and, for the most part, remained at his typewriter chastising them intuitively in pieces he dubbed "interpretive reports." So to some, Eugene Sisto Cervi (SIR-vee) was the most dangerous man in Denver. He had his own little newspaper, built around his "Mile High Observations" column where he walloped the high and the mighty. He was an unsparing critic of Denver's two dailies, dismissing the Rocky Mountain News as "one bad, very bad, morning newspaper" and the Denver Post as "one clumsy afternoon paper wishing to be good if it only knew how." He reflected on the financial difficulties that beset the News during World War II and concluded Denver would have benefited if the newspaper had shut down, ceding the market to the Post. "Almost any competent operator could then set in motion, in those postwar years of budding prosperity, a rival newspaper worthy of the spirit of legitimate and constructive competition that makes democracy work," he wrote. And in a speech to journalism students he said: "I ought to be horsewhipped and run out of town by the Denver Establishment, that being the readership I serve...I moralize a lot in my newspaper. I wouldn't give you a nickel for a newspaper whose editor didn't moralize." He described his own paper as "what a newspaper is supposed to be: controversial, disagreeable, disruptive, unpleasant, unfriendly to concentrated power and wary of privately owned utilities." Cervi had his heroes, too, Democratic leader Adlai Stevenson among them. Late in life, Cervi seized the opportunity to provide exclusive and intensive coverage of a lawsuit understandably downplayed by both Post and News. The litigation was a matter of grave concern to the management of both dailies because of its potential to put the Post - and perhaps the News as well - in the grasp of acquisitive press lord Samuel Newhouse. Although Cervi considered a Newhouse takeover likely, by no means did he espouse it. He had an acute distaste for chain newspaper barons in general, and was among a coterie of independent publishers who fought against congressional legislation portrayed as a safeguard of editorial diversity but primarily intended to benefit the publishers of many major newspapers nationwide. What was originally labeled the Failing Newspaper Bill became, when signed into law by President Richard Nixon, the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. Cervi had called it the Millionaire Crybaby Publishers Bill in testimony before a congressional committee and was aggrieved by its enactment. He didn't live to witness the rise and fall of the kind of preservation it provided - or the outcome that made its way to Denver in 2009.
About the Author: I am a native of Wyoming, born in Goshen County in 1932. I grew up in the Nebraska Panhandle, attended the University of Nebraska and graduated (finally) in 1959. I was in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1955, serving mainly in South Korea and Tokyo on the staff of the military newspaper Pacific Stars & Stripes. In the five years following, I worked for the Galveston Daily News, the Lincoln Star and the Omaha World-Herald, in that order. In 1960 I joined the Denver Post as a copy editor. I left the Post in 1965 to work for Gene Cervi as managing editor of his weekly business newspaper, Cervi's Rocky Mountain Journal. Two years later I rejoined the Denver Post and in 1968 began an 11-year stint as a business reporter. I covered several business sectors, including Colorado's oil and gas industry and notably John King's operation. (Mr. King, needing to make a phone call, borrowed a dime from me at his 1976 SEC trial in lower Manhattan and never repaid the loan.) In 1979 I left the Post and joined Richard Zirbel's public relations firm, which served most of the Denver-based oil and gas companies going public at that time. When the industry crash of 1982-83 wiped out many of these companies, I went on my own in office space subleased from Sigmund Rosenfeld's company, Valex Petroleum. I had met Sig in 1970 when he was with Inexco and we became good friends. The mid-1980s were dismal years in Denver, so in 1985 I signed on with Pacific Stars & Stripes for a two-year run as senior editor in Tokyo. After returning to the U.S. in 1987, I worked for the Omaha World-Herald for a while, then taught a journalism course at Metro State College in Denver, then became editor of the Denver Daily Journal, a McGraw-Hill business publication. I retired in 1998. My wife, Gerry, and I were married in 1962. She was working in the Denver Post library when we met. We have two sons and two daughters, all living in or near Denver. My father was a banker in farm communities in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska for 40 years. My brother, 11 years older than I, became a banker and I'm sure I was supposed to become one, too, but a high school journalism teacher led me astray. - Jack Phinney