The Press: G for Effort

To the commercial journals that are published in most U.S. cities, Denver’s business weekly bears as much resemblance as sour-mash bourbon to Sanka. Known as Cervi’s Rocky Mountain Journal, after Editor and Publisher Eugene Sisto Cervi, the thriving $12-a-year Denver paper is a sassy, fact-crammed compendium of personals, local business transactions (including almost every new car sale in town) and well-honed gibes at such unlikely targets as the Chamber of Commerce, complacent businessmen, Scripps-Howard’s Rocky Mountain News and the powerful Denver Post. Gene Cervi, 50, onetime Colorado State Democratic Chairman, and a graduate of both Denver dailies, of late has concentrated his fire on Republican Mayor Will F. Nicholson’s hotly contested plan for a city payroll tax. Instead, argues he, the administration should save up to $3,000,000 by eliminating “known, provable and neglected waste at City Hall.”

Last week, on a rare note of bewilderment, Eugene Cervi confessed on Page One that the Rocky Mountain Journal’s antitax campaign had received a mountainous boost; to his office had come a letter from an anonymous “admirer” urging continued efforts to “stop big Nick in his tax campaign.” Enclosed: a $1,000 bill, with the suggestion: “If you can’t go along with my idea, then turn the money over to your favorite charity.”

“Cervi was puzzled,” wrote Cervi. “Was the mysterious sender offering $1,000 as a perverse bribe, a gift of gratitude, prelude to a trap to be sprung later or giving vent to honest outrage?” In a P.S. to the sender, Editor Cervi suggested: “If this is a trick, why don’t you try us out on a $100,000 note?”

At week’s end Editor Cervi happily handed the bill to a three-man committee, which will turn it over to a charity if its earlier owner does not claim it first. To the many Denverites who thought the newsman should keep his windfall, Cervi shook his head and explained: “I’m not in a position to feel that anyone loves me that much.”