The Press: From Molly

Like many a town with a war boom, Denver and its newspapers have been worried about how to meet the city’s Johnny-come-latelys. One out of four Denverites (pop. 375,000), a recent poll showed, has arrived since 1940. A good many of them like to pelt the papers with dirty digs at Denver’s manners, its dress, its cops, its way of life. Denver’s anxious-to-please editors printed the gripes, and for a while did not talk back.

Finally one of them turned on the new Denverites. “Mrs. Molly Mayfield,” whose breezy lovelorn column is the top feature in Scripps-Howard’s tabloid Rocky Mountain News, had received a chiding note from the wife of an Eastern oilman. “When Denver women speak,” it sniffed, “it sounds to me like the grinding of a buzz saw. Their voices are harsh and grating. They send shivers up my spine. Even those who have gone to such good Eastern schools as Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Smith, etc., speak in an absolutely rude and unrefined manner.. . .”

Mrs. Mayfield swung back, and last week her reply was the talk of Denver: “I suspect your difficulty is that you haven’t had the chance of meeting the kind of people who do speak well. . . . For, coming to Denver as you obviously have, with a prejudice against people here, you are not likely to be welcomed with open arms. It’s such a shame you had to come here at all. Perhaps your husband can discover oil on Broadway or Park Avenue and you can go back.”

Who Is Molly? As they have every morning for the past four years, Denverites lapped up Molly’s flip and saucy column with their breakfast coffee. More than anything else, “Dear Mrs. Mayfield” has helped step up the New’s circulation from a doddering 40,000 to more than 86,000, challenging enough to keep the Denver Post (circ. 192,991) on its toes. Besides dispensing free advice, Molly collects snapping turtles, pianos and goldfish from people who don’t want them for those who do. During the war she gathered diaper pins for G.I. wives, once collected 500 glass eyes for soldiers. Her column appears on the woman’s page, but Molly cannily lures male readers with subheads like “She Doesn’t Pull the Shades Down”; “He’s Full of Ginger at 72.”

Molly Mayfield’s identity is an office secret. Most Newsmen guess (though she sweetly denies it) that slender, five-foot-two Frances Foster, the Southern-accented wife of News Editor Jack Foster is Molly. Mrs. Foster is an old Denverite. She has lived there six years.