Corinne Hunt had a lot of stories to tell, and some were about princes and presidents and Beatles.
Hunt, 89, who died of congestive heart failure on Sept. 5, was the author of “The Brown Palace Hotel,” which is full of stories from the famed hotel such as how staffers sneaked The Beatles into a freight elevator to avoid 5,000 screaming teenagers in 1964.
There also was the time one room of the hotel was raided by federal agents during Prohibition because liquor was being served. The room was “in solitary confinement” for one year, Hunt wrote, adding that she didn’t know whether the liquor was still in the room. Then there was the murder at the Brown after a quarrel between a Denver woman’s two lovers.
“She was very meticulous in research,” said Debra Faulkner, the Brown’s current historian and archivist.
Hunt wrote about the supposed underground walkway between the Brown and a then-brothel across the street but said she was unable to prove its existence.
Hunt also wrote “The Elitch Gardens Story” and “Colorado Traveler — Historic Inns and Hotels.”
She left at least 10 file cabinets of research, said her niece, Linda Flack of Boulder.
Hunt was asked to write a history of the Brown, which has housed many presidents and other luminaries, and in the late 1970s, she was hired as the hotel’s first historian. She worked there for 21 years. She also became the hotel’s first public-relations person and initiated tours of the storied hotel, which continue today, Faulkner said.
Hunt updated the book on various hotel anniversaries, and it is still sold there, but now it is coffee-table size and called “The Brown Palace: Denver’s Grande Dame.”
Hunt made sure she labeled some stories as legend, unsure of their authenticity. “But some stories are too good to kill, even if they aren’t true,” said local historian Tom Noel, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver. “She was a diligent researcher,” he said.
Hunt, who had no children, “was a hoot — very funny and everyone’s favorite aunt,” Flack said.
Flack watched over her aunt and took her to a gerontologist in May for a checkup. The doctor wanted to determine her mental condition and asked her to write a sentence.
Hunt looked at him and said, “Why, can’t you write your own sentence?”
Corinne Virginia Swan Naslund was born in Stoneham, in eastern Colorado, on June 8, 1922. Her mother died when she was an infant, and she was reared by a foster couple, John and Ebba Naslund, in Scandia, Kan.
She attended a year of college and then worked at a Chicago nursing home, for an optician in Greeley, for Denver’s KTLN radio, as a bookkeeper for Elitch Gardens and for a construction company.
A church friend introduced her to Robert Hunt. They married in 1946. He died in 1989. In addition to her niece, she is survived by a half brother, Cecil Swan of Sterling, and several nieces and nephews.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
