Last week, in Wichita, Kansas, the advertising war that had been in progress between the established newspaper and an interloper piloted by two brothers from Denver, flared up in an incident that is, I hope, unique in American journalism. A department store which had given its advertising contract to the newcomer was broken into in the small morning hours, photographs were taken of the empty counters, and were published by the rival print under the caption "Results of Advertising in Our Competitor." To anyone who did not know that the brothers were named Levand, and that they had served their apprenticeship with Frederic J. Bonflls on the Denver Post, this might seem harsh treatment, but the Wichita paper will have to go much farther than this to discourage them.

For the Denver Post is responsible for the most curious breed of men who have ever associated themselves with the publication of a newspaper. When Bonfils came to Denver, and recruited from the Navarre Cafe assistance in the person of Harry H. Tammen, Denver was in for it. For two decades the Denver Post did one incredible handspring after another, and opened a campaign for subscriptions and power which balked at no invasion of privacy or justice. Bonfils was shot at five times, and one lawyer whom he had attempted to blackmail put three bullets each into him and his confederate, but the Post went smashing on. Everyone knows the two famous bylines "Crime Never Pays" and "It is a Privilege to Live in Colorado," of which the first headed each account of the police court, the second every tale of distant tornado or disaster. And high in the history of the headline are Bonfils' own gems, the first, five inches tall, to commemorate a minor psychological convention, screamed out, "Does it Hurt to be Born?"; the second appeared when the round the world flyers were pulled out of the sea off Hawaii "Praise God, They're Safe."

Not so familiar is the lengthy decameron of the Post's civic exploits. Every year the available hunters of Denver go off to the mountains in quest of jackrabbits, and these, in astronomical quantities, are dumped in front of the Post Building for the usufruct of the poor. The Post has always sold coal--its slogan "An Extra Lump With Every Ton" was in Bonfil's best vein. When Denver's physicians announced that most of the jackrabbits had tularemia, and were inedible, when the city sealer declared that every ton of Post coal was short-weight, Mr. Bonfils refused even to be abashed. Did not every paper chute shout "The Denver Post, the People's Big Brother?" Did not the Post Building facade bear in two foot gilt that stirring invitation, "O Justice, when expelled from other habitations, make this thy dwelling place"? Had not Bonfils offered three awards: $25000 for the Denver Post tuberculosis cure, $25000 for a non stop world flight beginning and ending in Denver, $50000 to the man who would insure that the first thing Mars learned about on our planet was the Denver Post?

The Post sent young Brian Untiedt to distract Herbert Hoover in his most crucial White House days. When Silverton, a mountain hamlet near Denver, was cut off from the world by a hundred feet of snow, Bonfils sent an airplane which circled slowly above the outcasts, and then dropped a bag containing five hundred copies of the Denver Post. The domination of the Post, however, was soon challenged by the Scripps-Howard Rocky Mountain News, and the most spectacular of advertising wars began. The Post offered a gallon of gasoline, at twenty two cents, for each want ad, the News offered three, the Post five, the News seven, and chartered a tearoom for the queue waiting to insert copy. Then Bonfils hired Claire Windsor to stand back of the counter in the Post Building and present each advertiser with a cabbage. The result was a Sunday paper of one hundred and forty six pages, sixty of which carried nothing but classified advertisements. And when the Post hired tight rope walkers to attract Denver to its office, and shunted fifty old automobiles down a mountain while barkers gave their leather lungs to Bonfils' glory, victory was assured.

Bonfils himself long regaled the nation's press with his front page italic editorials, invariably headed in mammoth red type "So The People May Know," always referring to other newsprints as "foreign owned," uniformly hectic in tone and quick in results. Such an editorial blocked the construction of the Denver Court House by fulminating against a legal peccadillo in the architects' charter, another on the Denver tramways inflamed a great mob to a lynching mood. Bonfils was the first editor to smell the Teapot Dome disturbance, and the clothespin on his nose cost half a million dollars. When the story broke, Bishop Johnson said of the Post "Denver is the only town in the world where the main sewer enters every home." When a Senate investigating committee had kept Bonfils on the stand for three hours, he stood bolt upright, shook his finger at Senator Penrose, shouted "The Denver Post has the largest per capita circulation in the world!", and would say no more. POLLUX.