Back in the day, before reporters ate salads at their desks and spent their lunch hours jogging or doing yoga, newsrooms were full of characters.
They were larger-than-life characters, such as hard-charging Damon Runyon, who had a short stint at The Post before heading to New York, where he’d pen “Guys and Dolls,” or Post reporter Red Fenwick, who once rode a borrowed steed to 13 Western state capitols to present each governor with a gold-plated spur — an invitation to the opening of the newspaper’s new offices at 15th and California.
Slowly, over the years, the made-for-Hollywood characters were replaced by new generations of proper, college-trained journalists, just as the clackety-clacking of typewriters was replaced by the hum of computer keyboard clicks.
When I arrived at The Denver Post in 1998, there were few such characters left.
But there was Marilyn.
Friday night, the Denver Press Club will honor five legends of Denver journalism, characters in their own right, each of whom made lasting impacts on journalism and the communities they covered. They include Paula Woodward, a longtime investigative reporter for 9News, retired Post columnist Dick Kreck, and Marilyn Robinson, an ace cops reporter. The club also will honor, posthumously, photographer Harry Rhoads and Fenwick.
I think I heard Marilyn long before I ever saw her.
“Hey, this is Marilyn,” her voice would boom from behind towering stacks of yellowed newspapers and press releases that surrounded her desk and threatened to one day bury her in an avalanche of news. “You got anything?”
She was making her cop rounds over the phone, checking with agencies throughout the state to scratch up news. Man, could she work the phones, sometimes juggling three receivers at one time as a police scanner crackled in the background.
She loved to report more than write. She always had more notes and quotes than she could ever shoehorn into a 10-inch story. And people told her things they wouldn’t tell anyone else.
Listening to only her side of the conversation as she prodded cops and dispatchers and other sources for information kept us grinning.
“So this is a fresh body? Uh-huh. OK. Was he bound? Don’t know? Was he gagged? Don’t know ’cause you haven’t been there? Oh, you haven’t been there? Well then, how do you know he’s dead? Oh. Oh, geez! I’m gonna stop asking questions now.”
Her days began at 5 a.m. when she started making calls from home. If she waited until she got into work, she’d miss the overnight dispatchers who knew what was going on while the rest of us slept.
“Yeah, this is Marilyn at The Post. You got a body someplace?”
“Yeah, hi, it’s Marilyn. I heard you guys found a head or something.”
By the time her editors would get to work, she had a long list of possible stories. But as Denver grew, and crime seemingly became more prevalent, stories about shootings or even murders didn’t always make a big splash.
So Marilyn learned how to pitch a story.
“Well, this certainly has everything you could ask for . . . romance, sex, violence and a dizzy blonde.”
“OK, you guys. I got one you can’t turn down. A blind epileptic has a seizure in the middle of the street and her dog, Patches, saves her life.”
Marilyn retired from The Post in 2002 after more than 40 years at the paper. Even after all those years, she would print a hard copy of her stories — short briefs or page one scoops — and scour every word she had written and every change an editor had made. She cared deeply about what was written under her name.
On more than one occasion, as the sun dipped behind the Rockies and we were still working a story, I’d call out to Marilyn: How long you gonna be here tonight?
“I’m here until I get the story.”
Editorial page editor Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com.
