When Edwin Palmer Hoyt — known to all as “Ep” — arrived as editor and publisher of The Denver Post in February 1946, he was confronted with a publication in a 13-year snooze, an editorial holding pattern, that followed the death of Frederick Bonfils.
One of the first things Hoyt, who had been editor and publisher of the Portland Oregonian, did was to establish an editorial page and rid the news columns of comment. Then he declared the paper’s “blacklist” — people who had run afoul of the paper’s management — dead. He encouraged his reporters: “Write the news. Write it exactly the way it happened.” And “Print the news as fairly as you can.”
At 49, he brought a new energy and outlook. He was a staunch believer in freedom of the press, encouraged his writers to do better and gave the paper a wider worldview. He expansively anointed the circulation area “The Rocky Mountain Empire,” which covered 13 states from Montana to New Mexico.
His goal, he said, was to bring respectability, credibility and vitality to a product that had grown tired. He brought with him what came to be known as “the Oregon gang,” a passel of new editors and reporters. There was a new plant, opened in 1950. He made sure the paper fought with equal fervor red-baiting McCarthyism and the threat of communism.
A friendly, outgoing man armed with a deep, gravelly voice who loved meeting people, Hoyt made himself the face of The Post, giving speeches, attending social and political gatherings and making sure he had his photo taken on the paper’s annual Cheyenne Frontier Days Train, which he revived after its World War II hiatus. He and The Post became deeply involved in the community and improvement programs.
Even in his later years, Hoyt made it a point to leave his office at one end of the newsroom to drop by the city desk to ask what was going on. During his career, he was a director of The Associated Press and the American Newspaper Publishers Association and was on the advisory commission of the journalism fellowship program at Stanford University.
After 48 years in the newspaper business, 25 of them at The Post, and plagued by ill health, Hoyt retired in 1971 and died in 1979 at age 82.
