Boom(er) Times: Shining a light on the Morning Sun

The papers were definitely lighter. The pay might have been a little lighter too.

But it probably wouldn’t have mattered. It was heavy lifting delivering 150 papers in the downtown area of Grand Junction seven days a week, especially the bulky multisection Sunday edition of the “Voice of the Rocky Mountain West.”

So, at the advanced age of 12 or 13, I left my first job in “journalism” for my second. Goodbye crack of dawn deliveries of the Denver Post via single-speed bicycle. Hello Morning Sun, Grand Junction’s “other” newspaper of the Boom(er) Times era.

It was the first of many shrewd career decisions. But by the Time the Morning Sun published its last edition on Sept. 1, 1960, it was time to move on to other pursuits, which then included yard care, bucking bales/shoveling oats/branding cattle out on 21 Road, and, when air conditioning seemed preferable to 100-degree days mowing lawns or in the fields, a job bagging groceries and unloading trucks at the old Safeway that would later be converted into the current Mesa County Library.

First a tabloid, then later a full-sized paper, the Morning Sun began in 1949 as the Western Colorado Reporter. That predecessor publication was started in Rifle by Lyle Mariner, who soon moved it to Grand Junction as a farm-oriented weekly. Later, the Reporter evolved into a weekly version of the Morning Sun.

Then, in 1956, a paper called the Morning Record was started by striking Daily Sentinel workers who were members of the International Typographical Union. The Record and the Sun were joined together eight months later, in December of 1957, to become a daily and western Colorado’s first morning newspaper.

It was the next year when former Colorado Governor Dan Thornton and partners assumed control of the Morning Sun. Thornton had been a successful Gunnison County rancher before becoming governor and had taken on other business pursuits after leaving office. While he stated an intention to move to Grand Junction, that never happened.

Perhaps it was merely business that prompted Thornton to assemble the partnership that took over the Sun. Maybe it was the fact that, as a Republican, he’d often been at odds with Sentinel Publisher Preston Walker. Perhaps it was availability of capital from high-flying Colorado financier Allen Lefferdink, whose empire was crumbling when the Morning Sun finally ceased publication.

Mariner was still the publisher when the 1959 edition of the Morning Sun I’m looking at while writing this column was published. The big headline outlined the possibility of a nuclear blast to extract oil from shale in the Garfield County portion of the Piceance Basin. It’s hard to imagine a more optimistic estimate of available oil from shale than some of those floating around today. But here it is in the Jan. 7, 1959, edition of the Sun.

“Nearly a trillion barrels of oil and inestimable quantities of gas are locked in the hard shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming,” the article said, going on to understate the fact that “(t)he cost of mining the shale, cracking it and cooking out the oil is prohibitive.”

Local attorney Warren Turner was “keenly interested” in any possibilities the nuclear blast experiment would bring. Also expressing optimism was Chamber of Commerce President M. A. Cornelison. “The scientists evidently have something, or else they wouldn’t be making the proposal,” he said.

Hear any echoes of that Boom(er) Times history today?

In that same edition, a furnished four-room home close in on Orchard Mesa with city water and natural gas was for sale for $5,475. If that didn’t suit you, you could contact S.R. Bray and W.R. Bray for other offerings at CH(apel) 2-3647. Or drive down to see them in your used 1957 Ford sedan purchased out of the want ads for $1,595 (if you didn’t first buy the 1929 Whippet offered in another ad).

The big story in the Sun’s final edition was the front page notice of the paper’s closing. But there were also stories of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate later that month as well as an editorial on the political transition about to take place as WWII commander Dwight Eisenhower left office.

“The Old Order Changeth” trumpeted the headline above the opinion piece, where the sentiment in those Boom(er) times nearly a half-century ago was not unlike what we’re reading and hearing today.

And then the last effort at establishing a second daily paper in Grand Junction prior to the advent of the Free Press more than five years ago closed its doors out at the end of Main Street.

“The Morning Voice, The Daily Choice of the Western Slope” was silenced.



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Jim Spehar wishes he’d used his paper route money to buy that Whippet back in 1959. Your Boom(er) Times memories are welcome at jimspehar@bresnan.net.