“Every institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
A palm comes down with a thud on a page of the Aspen Daily News, spread across the breakfast counter of the Wienerstube.
“It’s always something,” says Dave Danforth. His agitation is half-feigned, but he is the owner of the slammed palm and also the owner and founder of the Aspen Daily News.
The “something” is a boxed quote about the high level of the Roaring Fork River, which is misplaced in a story about the current presidential race in a 28-page edition of his paper.
It’s early morning and Danforth, 57, is about to commence an interview about the newspaper he began with Mark Shaw and Lee Duncan 30 years ago this month.
In July 1978, he was a thrice-terminated member of local radio news teams. A college drop-out. A 27-year-old mustachioed enfant terrible who believed there was hard news to be reported in Aspen, whether its denizens wanted to hear it or not. And he had an idea about how to dole it out.
Today, Danforth cuts the profile of a dark-haired and slightly sane Ron Paul. He wears a beaten Red Sox hat and the still-agitated pall of a gumshoe reporter who knows, just knows, that if he dug deep enough he could find corruption in the corridors of Aspen City Hall or police headquarters, could sniff out malfeasance and dereliction in a dogcatcher, Boy Scout troopmaster, volunteer tourist greeter, or nun.
His eyes blink rapidly as his mind forms the phrases to verbalize his ever-springing thoughts and never-shying opinions.
Then he begins telling his story:
“I always had this crazy confidence,” he says. “Because I always knew if this thing didn’t work out, I could always go back to being a singing waiter.”
A head for news
Dave Danforth was a singing waiter.
He had dropped out of Yale after talking to a girlfriend in California. She told him they could run on the beach in December there. So midway into his senior year in 1973 he sold his Jeep and bought a plane ticket from New Haven to Los Angeles. There, he indeed ran on the beach in December with his girlfriend and worked as a singing waiter.
Having grown up amid the ice storms of New England, the temperate Los Angeles winters were heaven. In his time there, through what he calls “dumb young luck” he stumbled into broadcasting. In the major media market of Los Angeles, he was filing freelance radio and television reports.
But by 1975, the “ski bum” call beckoned, and he came to Aspen.
As Danforth tells it, he waltzed into the KSPN radio office and got a job as newsman on the spot.
“The radio was the only way to get daily news in Aspen,” Danforth says of those days, when The Aspen Times Weekly was the only print news publication in town. “So the radio was important.”
He chafed under the small market, hands-off mentality toward mountain town politics. But he also freelanced.
When singer/actress Claudine Longet went to trial for shooting and killing her ski instructor lover Spider Sabich in 1976 in Aspen, it became national scandal fodder. The trial, held during the infamous Aspen snow drought of January 1977, created a media frenzy that would not be exceeded until O.J. Simpson’s murder trial 20 years later.
“TV networks, every major newspaper and news magazine sent reporters to Aspen,” Peggy Clifford wrote in her 1980 memoir “To Aspen and Back.” “Sensational images of an immoral, decadent and snowless Aspen flashed around the world.”
Danforth sat among the media throng, reporting on the trial daily and hourly for Time magazine and CBS News. As he tells it, an old editor acquaintance in New York recommended him for the job: “He said, ‘There’s this crazy skier dude I know out there, he can do the job, call him up.’”
That trial — still the only murder tried in Aspen — marked an end to the quaint escape this ski town had been, some say. And, some believe, it marked the beginning of something uglier, greedier — the forebear of a force that brought the first snowmaking machines to our mountains, a force that brought more aggressive development to open space, a force that would trade charm for chic, quaint for rich, mom-and-pop for Dolce and Gabbana.
A force that Dave Danforth says had nothing to do with the news venture he was about to begin.
Whimsy and success
“It was a team,” Danforth remembers. “There were a couple of us — and we were all crazy — and we’re putting out this thing, which when we started it was not a newspaper. We didn’t know what it was but it was not a newspaper.”
The “team” was Mark Shaw, Lee Duncan and Danforth, who, as he remembers it, had a dinner in May 1978 where they decided daily news would do Aspen some good. A one-page sheet of it to start.
Danforth had recently been fired, for the last time, from KSPN radio because, he says, he aired a story against management wishes about a conflict of interest between a local judge and Aspen Police Chief Martin Hershey. The station owner didn’t want to ruffle feathers or scare off advertisers.
Danforth did. In the good name of “hard news.”
“That was my first experience with what I call the ‘news wusses,’ the people who are literally afraid to print the news,” he recalls.
On July 1 he and his boys cranked out the first issue of the Aspen Daily News, typing a few stories on a pre-set two-sided sheet lined around its edges with advertisements.
Then they played delivery boy.
“On the first day we just went around saying, ‘New daily!’,” Danforth recalls, dropping it in every storefront around town. “They’d say, ‘What’s that?’ And we’d say, ‘It’s a daily paper. Another one will come out tomorrow. Goodbye!’ We came out the second day. And then the third day, and the fourth day. And people said, ‘Hey, this thing comes out every day and it’s kind of fun.’”
The paper was free, as it remains today.
“It was unpaid circulation because we didn’t know what to sell a single sheet of paper for,” Danforth says of those early times.
The first edition ran a three-sentence lead story (see insert) suggesting the recent dismissal of the fire marshal was unfounded, the consequence of the marshal being in the way of the current mayor and city manager’s private dealings.
“That (story) launched us right out of the chute because it was so compelling,” Danforth remembers.
The one-page scandal sheet grew an audience. And advertisers.
“We became the fishwrapper, the daily fix,” Danforth says of the early days. “You had to see what (we) were running every day.”
After two months they had broken even on their $1,000 experiment.
The artist-entrepreneur?
A mix of hard news and proletariat advertising rates made the Daily News a profitable venture, it turned out. His co-founders went on to other things but Danforth remained: writing, editing and laying out the paper well into the 1980s.
He stakes the resignation of miscreant Aspen Police Chief Rob McClung among his greatest victories. The City Council election of 1983 was both victory and defeat, he claims. The new council swept into office and recognized coverage by his newspaper as a factor in their election.
With legitimacy at hand, Danforth gave up most of the hands-on duties at the paper and hired management staff for the first time, so he could cover stories beyond the walking beat of a Daily News reporter: He dictated stories from Denver at the state Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. When the Ski Corp. had a monopoly hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1985, he called in stories from Washington, too.
“I’m a writer, not a businessman,” Danforth says, though since those early days he has gone back to get his Yale degree, an MBA from Stanford, and sprouted small town daily newspapers from New Hampshire to California. “I’ve always felt a lot more comfortable on the creative side of things. But business is a necessary skill.”
He counts the great network storyteller Charles Kurault and longtime Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse among his heroes. But a Machiavellian instinct seems to have kept him afloat since those whimsical first days on the Aspen media landscape.
He has nullified the Aspen notion of overhead cost, by buying his first secondhand press in the early 1980s; buying, in 1989, the current Daily News hub on Hopkins Avenue (after much haggling with its previous Spaniard landlords); and buying, at the same time, space for a full-blown professional press room downvalley in Basalt.
Thirty years on
Looking back at the Aspen Daily News after three decades, Dave Danforth refuses to offer self-congratulatory pats on his back. He is also none-to-happy about this masturbatory navel-gazing 30th anniversary edition of his paper — he remains a hard news man who doesn’t want to waste column inches on himself or soft news of any kind.
The only page space he uses these days are in his weekly Sunday column.
Last Sunday he ever-so-playfully raised the specter of impeachment for our current mayor. That may sound insane, as his columns sometimes do. But with his track record of knowing when the fish is rotten — from Rob McClung to Colleen Truden — the man is due his flights of fancy.
He can play the wise man of Aspen: “There isn’t any secret to success. Success is the absence of failure. You just avoid doing anything completely jive-ass stupid.”
He has been known to play the fool at the witching hour at the Caribou Club.
But it seems he may still love most the times when he can play the anonymous journalist:
“One of my favorite yucks these days is to be on the gondola or someplace public. And people are talking about the Daily News and this crazy guy who started it.”
andrew@aspendailynews.com