March 23, 2007

Colorado's Own Damon Runyon

By Stan Dyer

He was born Alfred Damon Runyan on October 4, 1884 in Manhattan, Kansas, but he grew up in Pueblo, Colorado. When he was twelve years old, he was expelled from school, and followed his father into the newspaper business. Somewhere in there, he dropped "Alfred" and changed the spelling of his last name to "Runyon". By the time he was 15, he was a full-fledged reporter for the Pueblo Evening News. Later, in 1908, he worked for the Denver Post and was director of the Denver Press Club. In 1911, he left Denver for New York to work for the Hearst daily "New York American".

New York is where he really made a name for himself, but it was as a journalist. The books were a sideline. As a journalist, he wrote the lead article on Franklin Roosevelt's first inauguration in 1933 and later became a member of both the Writer's Wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He wrote 29 books and had 10 stories turned into film. One of his most famous stories is "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" taken from the 1932 collection "Guys and Dolls" that was turned into the musical, "Guys and Dolls". The distinctive New York characters he created inspired the adjective "runyonesque" to describe all similar characters.

On December 10, 1946, he died of throat cancer at the age of 62. His ashes were spread over Manhattan from a plane flown by WWI flying ace, Eddie Rickenbacker. "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet".