DAILY CAMERA
SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2016 | 27T
Daily Camera history Continued from Page 26
angels, saying they violated the separation of church and state. “We don’t want to seem like Grinches,” said Alice Guthrie, operations superintendent for the open-space department. But that’s exactly how national media portrayed city leaders. International media swarmed Boulder after the Camera broke the bizarre story of a “frozen grandpa” in a Nederland shed in 1994. Trygve Bauge, a Norwegian citizen who founded the city’s famous New Year’s Day Polar Bear Plunge, had evaded immigration officials for years despite holding an expired visa. When they finally deported him, his elderly mother called the Nederland marshal’s office for advice on what to do with her father, Bredo Morstoel, whom her son had been storing in a shed on dry ice with an eye toward reviving him one day. The story spawned an awardwinning documentary, “Grandpa’s in the Tuff Shed,” by local filmmakers Robin and Kathy Beeck, who would go on to create the wildly successful Boulder International Film Festival. After a few weeks of panic, Nederland officials calmed down and embraced grandpa — whom Bauge continues to pre-
serve, paying for monthly deliveries of dry ice — and the town eventually started its popular Frozen Dead Guy Days winter festival. But not all was fun and games. The horrific Ballard child abuse case reached its conclusion in 1992, when Michael and Patricia Ballard and their friends, Dennis and Marcia Dunann, were convicted in the sexual assault and torture of the couples’ seven children. But the biggest story of the decade — perhaps the century — was the murder of 6-year-old former child-beauty pageant participant JonBenet Ramsey on Dec. 26, 1996. Police missteps in the initial investigation of what the girl’s parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, reported as a kidnapping ignited a story that would result in books, movies, false confessions, conspiracy theories, a grand jury and the destruction of political and civilservice careers. The Camera prepared three versions of an extra edition for the grand jury’s report. Not long after DA Alex Hunter announced that there would be no indictment, TV reporters covering the story at the justice center were holding up Cameras to their cameras. “It remains the city’s greatest unsolved mystery. The family
Courtesy photo
John Ramsey looks on as his wife, Patsy, holds an advertisement promising a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer of their 6-year-old daughter, JonBenet, during an interview May 1, 1997, in Boulder. It was the Ramsey’s first meeting with reporters since the day after their daughter was found slain in the basement of their family’s Boulder home in Boulder.
being so prominent and the background of JonBenet, being shown off (in pageants) made it irresistible. It just blew up,” says Laurie Paddock, who was by then editor emeritus. “But I think there was too much attention given to the story, and there still is.” If anything, the bludgeoning death of 23-year-old CU senior Susannah Chase just one year later, on Dec. 21, 1997, felt more personal to local residents. That case also endured a false confession and remained unsolved for more than a decade. But thanks in part to Google, a DNA hit eventually led to the arrest and 2008 conviction of Diego Olmos Alcalde in the killing. And though it occurred some 40 miles away, the Camera sent reporters and photographers to cover the 1999 Columbine High School shooting aftermath. Riots erupted on University Hill in 1997 for the first time since the Vietnam War era, as students set couches on fire and left just about everyone else scratching their heads over what it was all about. On the local arts front, author Jon Krakauer penned two monster nonfiction bestsellers. “Into the Wild” (1996) explored the strange and moving story of Chris McCandless, a young man who disappeared into the wilds of Alaska and eventually starved to death. A year later, Krakauer published “Into Thin Air,” a detailed history of his harrowing experiences during the deadly 1996 climbing season on Mount Everest. Although the band had been around since the mid-1980s, Big Head Todd and the Monsters didn’t hit the big time until they released their platinum-selling “Sister Sweetly” in 1993, when they were living in Boulder. In 1992, the Dairy Center of the Arts was founded on the former
The Camera hit the streets with this extra shortly after the grand jury concluded its investigation into the death of JonBenet Ramsey on Oct. 13, 1999.
site of the Watts-Hardy Dairy, featuring galleries, performance spaces and theater screens. Boulder and the Camera embraced the most successful era of Denver professional sports. The Colorado Avalanche — formerly the Quebec Nordiques — moved to town and promptly won two Stanley Cups. The hard-luck Broncos finally won two consecutive Super Bowls in 1998 and 1999, throwing a big, orange, 0-4 monkey off their backs and sending quarterback John Elway off to heroic retirement. In 1992, Harold Higgins took over as publisher of the Camera from John Dotson, who left to take the helm at the Akron Bea-
con-Journal. Executive editor Barrie Hartman steered the newsroom until 1995, when he became editor of the editorial page. Then, in 1997, the Knight-Ridder chain that had owned the Camera since 1974 traded the Camera to the E.W. Scripps Co. for two California papers. “I’d spent my career writing about players being traded, and I walked in one morning and heard we’d been traded with a typewriter to be named later,” Neil Woelk says with a laugh. “I think that tells you how valuable the paper was.” Scripps brought Colleen Conant from Naples, Fla., to replace Harold Higgins. See HISTORY, 30
Congratulations to the Daily Camera for 125 years of keeping our community connected.Your support since the beginning — at the launch of “I Have a Dream” in 1990 and over the subsequent 25 years has allowed us to help more than 800 youth from low-income backgrounds achieve in school, college and their careers — helping Dreamers become achievers, one child at a time.