Farewell, Eagle Valley Enterprise: Eagle County’s oldest business folds after 124 years
Special to the Daily
Eagle Valley Library District/Eagle County Historical Society/Courtesy photo
When Editor H.F. Kane printed the first issue of the Eagle Valley Enterprise newspaper in Eagle on May 24, 1901, he promised his readers a news source that would become “a permanent institution in Eagle County.”
Although it published weekly for 124 years, surviving a fire, numerous competitors, and changing times, the Enterprise is no longer a permanent institution. The last issue was published on Dec. 26, 2024.
Trial by fire
Newspapers were vital in pioneer communities. Front pages were splashed with stories of the local economy, murders, political battles, and the Ladies Literary Society meeting. The most popular features were always the community gossip columns, written by correspondents who shared details about their neighbors ranging from who had a visiting mother-in-law to who was recovering from a hernia operation.
Politicians, ranging from county commissioners to governors to congressmen, made time to stop by the newspaper office when they were passing through.
Newspapers had power. The 20-plus-year battle between Red Cliff in Eagle over the location of the county seat was fought in courts, elections, and in print. The fight involved no blood and a lot of ink. Eagle won in 1921.
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Like all newspapers at the turn of the last century, the inaugural Enterprise was a “hot type” operation. Stories were typed out on a Linotype, a complex machine that used molten lead to cast metal letters, which were formed into words, sentences, and columns, then placed on a printing press. The editor needed mechanical as well as writing skills.
The newspaper saw several different owners in its early years and even had a temporary name change when one ambitious editor dubbed it the “Western Slope Enterprise” intending to reach a greater audience.
Veteran Kansas newspaper man Adrian “Ade” Reynolds Jr. purchased the paper in 1918, and it remained in the Reynolds family for the next 54 years. Reynolds located the newspaper operation in a small wooden building on the east side of Eagle’s Broadway (on the west end of the current Town Hall).
The newspaper business is tough, but undoubtedly the most traumatic day in the Enterprise’s existence was Jan. 13, 1932. On a frozen night, a fire started in a building next door and quickly spread to adjacent buildings. A passing citizen sounded the fire alarm at 10 p.m. The volunteer fire department responded, but their fire-fighting equipment froze. It was 25 minutes before water could be pumped through the hose.
Local citizens, worried about their newspaper, wrestled the Linotype, a few cases of lead type, the gally forms and the subscription list out into the street. The building was a complete loss, as were the records, including 30 years of newspapers dating back to its start.
Fortunately, Reynolds had been mailing the weekly newspapers to the Colorado Historical Society, which maintained archives. Those early editions are now accessible online.
The fire wiped out Reynolds’ life savings. The community wanted its newspaper. Offers of help came from townspeople, businesses, and local ranchers. The Glenwood Springs newspaper staff offered to help out with the printing.
Amazingly, the Enterprise printed on time that week. “The Old Home Paper will continue to visit you without a miss despite this disaster which has overtaken us,” promised Reynolds in the following week’s issue. He lived up to that promise, re-establishing the newspaper in a modest stucco building further up the street that still stands today.
The legal notices
The key to a newspaper’s survival in those days was the right to publish the county’s legal notices, as required by Colorado law. The newspapers in Red Cliff and Eagle always battled over the legals because those tiny-print notices were a significant revenue source. The county commissioners designate an official legal newspaper annually, and state law gives preference to paid-circulation newspapers. Most newspapers also had a small commercial printing operation.
In 1933, the commissioners awarded the legals contract to a Red Cliff newspaper. Worried readers asked Reynolds if his newspaper would continue to carry news of the county.
“As to the other news of the courthouse and the whole county, the Enterprise carries more of such in one issue than any other paper in the county does in 52 issues,” he replied. The legals eventually returned to the Enterprise.
Reynolds’ daughter and son-in-law, Marilla and Howard McCain, took over the newspaper in 1949. Howard was the mechanic and press operator. Marilla, a petite, feisty redhead with strong opinions and a knack for writing, handled the editorial. Marilla’s to-the-point writing style in her “Around Town” column made her one of the most widely quoted journalists on the Western Slope. She championed local causes and was somewhat skeptical of the proposed ski resort upvalley.
When Eagle desperately sought a local doctor in the 1960s, Marilla led the committee that built a publicly-funded clinic, then strung a banner across Highway 6 declaring “Eagle Needs a Doctor.” The stunt earned national publicity, and the town did indeed get a doctor.
The McCains worked nonstop. Eagle resident Annie Colby, whose father, Al Hoza, was the local pharmacist, was tasked with dropping off weekly ads at the newspaper. No matter what time of the day or night, she stopped in Howard and Marillia were working at the typesetter.
“You could actually watch them write the newspaper. They came up with all the stories, sold all the ads, and did the printing,” she remembers.
“I remember how important it was to have the Enterprise. Other newspapers came and went, but the Eagle Valley Enterprise always stayed,” Colby adds. Indeed, the Enterprise outlasted several potential competitors in the 1970s through the 1990s. It eventually outlasted its much bigger weekly competitor, the Vail-based Vail Trail.
Modern times
Hard-working Marilla, 58, died unexpectedly in 1972. Howard sold the newspaper to two Front Range businessmen. They and subsequent owners modernized the paper, changing it to a “cold-type” operation involving computers and a photographic process. The newspaper experienced its most successful years from the mid-1970s through the 1990s.
Pam Boyd started at the Enterprise as a beginner reporter in 1984, tapping out stories on a manual Underwood typewriter. She recalls a single day of small-town reporting when she covered U.S Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s news conference at the World Forum in Vail in the morning and ended the day covering the annual American Legion Bean Feed in Bond. Her readers were more interested in the Bean Feed story.
Boyd worked at the newspaper on and off for nearly 40 years. When she left in 2022, she was the editor, and most of the work was handled remotely, with stories transmitted to the printer via the internet.
“You were writing about people that you would see later in the grocery store,” Boyd notes. “You had to be really, really sure you were right.”
Nick Nikolich, a newspaper and ad man from Chicago, and his wife Leslie owned and managed the Enterprise from 1990-1997. The newspaper thrived, averaging 36-48 pages per week and was staffed by the Nikoliches, two or three full-time reporters, a full-time salesperson, and an office administrator. The Enterprise had 2,500-3,000 subscribers.
The newspaper focused on hyperlocal news, and there was plenty of it … quite often more than could be printed, Nick recalls. People still enjoyed the gossip columns but also wanted to know what was going on with the county and the downvalley towns.
“Somebody was always in the office hollering about Adam’s Rib,” recalls Nikolich, referring to a 30 year-plus political fight over a proposed ski area development at what is now Sylvan Lake State Park.
There were many fun moments, like writing front-page features about the veterinarian’s well-known office cat or organizing several thousand people to gather on Broadway for a Valentine’s Day photo to be sent to local troops serving in Desert Storm.
“Small town journalism is the purest journalism you can do. When you’re a reporter for a local newspaper, you can’t escape. If you write something stupid, somebody’s going to tell you about when they find you at a restaurant or on the street,” Nikolich said.
The challenge was always that although the Enterprise primarily focused on downvalley news, the ad revenue was upvalley.
By the late 1990s, the Nikoliches sensed that the Internet was changing the newspaper scene. Classified ads, always a reliable cash cow for any newspaper, were dwindling. Survival required taking the newspaper up to the next level.
Corporations began scooping up small Colorado mountain town newspapers. The Nikoliches sold the Enterprise to Morris Communications, which, after a few years sold to Swift Communications, the parent company of the Vail Daily. In 2021, the Swift newspapers were purchased by Ogden Newspapers out of West Virginia.
The corporate ownership model and competition with the free-circulation Vail Daily was a game changer. The size of the Enterprise staff and newspaper gradually dwindled over the next 28 years. The Eagle Valley Enterprise was a mere shadow of its former self when it folded.
Nikolich, who now lives in Denver and writes novels, predicted that the demise of the Enterprise will leave an open space in the Eagle County news community. But he also acknowledges that it might take people a long time to realize it is gone.
“It was a long, slow death. There are probably not many people who remember when it was a weekly newspaper, intensely covering small communities,” said Nikolich. “You can’t replace it with the Internet. Not even Facebook is that localized.”
The newspaper’s death was not unexpected. The once-lively newspaper dwindled to several pages of legal notices bolstered by a few stories and photos run earlier in the week in its much more dominant sister publication, the Vail Daily.
“The Enterprise was really a casualty of the free-daily newspaper business model,” said Bob Brown, the publisher of the Vail Daily. He notes that other former weekly newspapers in Eagle County, including the Vail Trail and the Avon-based Vail Valley Times, met the same fate in competing with a free-daily newspaper.
“It is very difficult when you are in a primarily advertising revenue stream for a weekly newspaper to compete with a daily,” Brown said. Recognizing the Enterprise’s history, the owners kept it going for many years, in various formats, even as subscriptions and advertising steadily declined. For more than two decades, the Enterprise remained a stand-alone weekly dedicated to downvalley news. For a period in the 2010s, the owners experimented with enfolding parts of the Enterprise into the Vail Daily as a weekly special section.
Brown recalled that the parent company also seriously explored the possibility of operating two daily newspapers, one with an upvalley (east of Wolcott) focus, and the other with a downvalley emphasis. That never happened because there was simply not enough business development downvalley to generate the quantity of advertising needed to keep a newspaper going.
At the end of its life, the Enterprise press run was just 30 copies, 16 of which were for paid subscribers. The final issue consisted of only four pages. The announcement that the Enterprise would cease publication was made without fanfare other than a small ad within the newspaper.
Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute in Colorado Springs, writes a weekly newsletter tracking the local news industry in Colorado. He notes that over 50 newspapers have closed in Colorado in the past 20 years. More than 20 of those shut down in the past five years alone.
“We can attribute local print newspaper decline in the United States to multiple factors including online tech companies hoovering up traditional advertising, hedge fund owners who wipe out newspaper staff in order to increase profits for shareholders, and simply the changing habits in the ways people get their news and information in the digital age,” Hutchins said.
“This local newspaper blinking out in the valley certainly tracks with the trends,” he added.
Over the decades, the Enterprise and its staff won many awards, including general excellence, from the Colorado Press Association.
“It was always a lot of fun,” said Nikolich.
