24T | SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2016
DAILY CAMERA
Daily Camera history Continued from Page 16
from the Boulder-based Rocky Flats Truth Force were arrested for trespassing at the site. In April 1979, just weeks after the Three Mile Island disaster, musicians Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt played for 15,000 protesters. Another 15,000 gathered in August, this time to show support for the plant. The CU Buffaloes football team fell into mediocrity after rising through the late 1960s and early ’70s. But like the rest of the state, Boulder swooned to “Broncomania” in 1977 when Denver’s previously hapless NFL team rode their vaunted Orange Crush defense to the Super Bowl, where they lost to the Dallas Cowboys. And on Memorial Day 1979, Ric Rojas won the first Bolder Boulder 10K, started by Olympic marathoner Frank Shorter and Bank of Boulder founder Steve Bosley. Although he had written two best-selling novels, titan of hor-
ror Stephen King didn’t draw much notice while living in Boulder in 1974-75, where he penned his Colorado chiller “The Shining.” The city earned fame as the hometown of Robin Williams’ quirky alien in the immensely popular “Happy Days” spinoff, “Mork & Mindy,” which ran from 1978-82. On Sept. 25, 1979, physicists David Hummer and Randolf Ware joined their friend Alvin Nelson to start the Boulder Beer Co. in a “goat shed” outside town, Colorado’s first microbrewery and only the 43rd licensed brewery in the nation. Hummer had come up with the idea following a sabbatical in England, where he found the brew far superior to the fizzy yellow stuff peddled by America’s industrial brewers. The Camera bought a new press in 1973, a Goss Metro Offset that would print Boulder’s news for the next four decades. In 1974, CU journalism dean Mal Deans initiated a fruitful
Bolder Boulder / Courtesy photo
Frank Shorter crosses the finish line as he wins the 1982 Bolder Boulder.
intern program with the paper that continues today and led to the hiring of such notable journalists as Rick Reilly, who went on to Sports Illustrated and ESPN. And in 1974, a merger put the Camera in the stable of Knight-Ridder, a chain with a combined circulation of some 3.5 million readers of such notable papers as the Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer and San Jose Mercury News. J. Edward Murray replaced Norm Christiansen as publisher in 1976.
1980s
The new decade got an ugly start with several highprofile murders. In 1981, Mary Ann Bryan was dragged out of a Longmont pharmacy at gunpoint and later found dead in a field near Niwot. Her ex-husband, Herbert Marant, had hired “Tattoo” Bob Landry to kill Bryan in a custody dispute. Their trial was moved to Durango due to publicity, where both men were sentenced to life in prison for the murder. In 1982, 3-year-old Michael Manning was killed in a beating by his ex-prostitute mother’s boyfriend, Daniel Arevalo. Elizabeth Manning described what happened in a police interview, but her testimony was excluded because she had not been read her Miranda rights. She served a short sentence on child-abuse charges, and Arevalo served a 10-year prison term for the crime. In 1983, CU student Sid Wells, boyfriend of actor Robert Redford’s daughter, was found shot to death in his condo. Police theorized that the crime was related to cocaine and arrested Wells’ roommate, Thayne Smika. DA Alex Hunter and a grand jury later declined to indict Smika, who disappeared after his release. On the strength of new
evidence, current DA Stan Garnett issued a warrant for Smika’s arrest in 2010. A momentous shift for the Camera happened to coincide with one of the biggest national stories of the decade on March 30, 1981, when the paper returned to morning publication for the first time since 1893 and President Ronald Reagan was shot in New York City by John Hinckley. “That happened about noon our time, and would have been in our evening paper,” recalls Sue Deans, then city editor. “So we had a lot of people calling us to find out what was happening.” Newsweek published a story in 1980, “Where the Hip Meet to Trip,” that described Boulder as a rip-roaring party central, where pounds of Columbian cocaine arrived daily, offices
closed early so everyone could get drunk at Friday Afternoon Club down at the Harvest House, and the jail was as posh as a country club. “Many people saw red,” Laurie Paddock recalls. “The Daily Camera asked for reactions and forwarded about 120 letters to Newsweek.” There was some truth to the city’s reputation: A 1984 Camera survey found local residents were 50 percent more likely to have used cocaine than the national average. Up at CU, the news wasn’t much better, as the athletic department slashed seven “minor” sports to eliminate a $1 million deficit. The football team rose to the top of Los Angeles Times writer Steve Harvey’s infamous “Bottom Ten,” and the NCAA put the football team on See HISTORY, 25