By Vince Bzdek

Editor David Hall, the feisty force-of-nature who led The Denver Post to a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a series debunking the belief that thousands of children went missing in the United States every year, has died at the age of 82.

Hall, of Montclair, N.J., passed away Dec. 31 after a brief illness while on a family vacation, according to the Oakes and Nichols Funeral Home.

When he arrived in Denver in 1984, Hall was determined to return The Post to prominence as one of the nation’s “great and important newspapers.”

“The once proud and powerful Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire was losing a competitive battle with the Rocky Mountain News,” Hall told me in an earlier interview. “The staff was in disarray and discouraged with little leadership. We were flat on our ass.”

Hall once told journalist Jim Carrier he believed that “My beloved predecessors had sissified the newspaper. They didn’t cover the Great Western (Stock Show]! Jesus Christ!”

“I wanted to reestablish the newspaper as the voice of the Rocky Mountain empire,” Hall told Carrier. “I put that title back on the name plate that my predecessors had taken off. I mean, Christ almighty. One of the things I always had in the back of my mind was, ‘What would Palmer Hoyt think?’ [He was the Post’s renowned publisher and editor from 1947 to 1971]. And it was one of America’s great and important newspapers. And I wanted to reestablish that in the minds of our readers and in the minds of the people of Colorado and the Rocky Mountains.”

Hall brought in heavy hitters like Carrier, managing editor Tony Campbell and reporter Diana Griego to boost the paper’s bona fides.

“Diana Griego had been an intern in a Los Angeles Times program,” Hall told Carrier. “I was told by people that she didn’t have enough experience. And I said to them, ‘we have almost no Latino or Hispanic staffers on this newspaper. She speaks Spanish. She knows journalism.’  So I hired her, and we know what happened to her.”

Griego led the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing that a national missing kids program was an overblown scam.

“A first-year reporter on a routine assignment thought the numbers regarding missing children didn’t make sense,” Hall told me in an earlier interview. “Her doubts got to Tony’s desk and he initiated not an investigation by a team of elite reporters,” but a series of daily followup stories by that first-year reporter, Diana Griego, adding other reporters to help along the way.

“The Post exposed the milk carton campaign about missing kids to be hysteria with no basis,“ Hall said. Hardly any of those kids whose faces were featured on milk cartoons were kidnap victims, The Post found.

The Post reclaimed the Sunday circulation lead under Hall and Campbell’s leadership and went on to eventually win the newspaper war with the Rocky Mountain News, which shuttered in 2009. The Post’s staff and size have since been reduced drastically by current owner Alden Global Capital, a development that surely would have Hall rolling in his grave.

“Journalism the cornerstone”

A native of Lebanon, Tennessee, Hall began working for the Nashville Tennessean the day following his high school graduation. His career included stops at the Chicago Daily News and Chicago Sun-Times, where he served as assistant managing editor; the Pioneer Press and the Dispatch in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was managing editor and executive editor; and the Denver Post as editor and senior vice president (1984–88).

Hall was editor of the Bergen Record in New Jersey from 1988 to 1992 before becoming editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In 2001 he was appointed the first Eugene S. Pulliam Visiting Professor of Journalism at Depauw University.

“Excellent journalism was the cornerstone of David Hall’s life,” his obituary states.  

Before David entered high school, a teacher urged him to apply to Castle Heights Military Academy, located in his hometown, according to the Oakes and Nichols obituary. On the first-day school tour he became fascinated by the school newspaper. “He joined the staff and set the trajectory for the rest of his life,” the obit reads.

At the Tennesean, he was part of an investigative team that went door to door in Nashville uncovering evidence of voter fraud, which led to an election being overturned, according to his obituary. As a 19-year-old reporter he was sent by the Tennessean to join a press pool that flew to Texas to interview President Johnson shortly after his retirement.

At the University of Tennessee, he earned a BS in journalism and MA in economics, while editing the school newspaper in both junior and senior years. He twice earned college journalism awards from the William Randolph Hearst Foundation with presentations given by President Johnson in the White House Rose Garden.

He also served in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Vietnam, where he worked on a military publication.

He is remembered as one of the greats by Denver Post journalists who worked with him.

“I had known David in Minneapolis-St. Paul,” Carrier said. “I later edited the Rapid City (S.D.) Journal. He knew that I had become a student of the West. 

“He hired me to become ‘The Rocky Mountain Ranger.’ My first assignment was covering the Great Western Stock Show. But that was only the beginning.”

Carrier recalls Hall saying, “I remember getting a map of the West. And I put my finger up at the Canadian border and went over and drew a line down right past Wyoming and Colorado, and down to the border with Mexico and Arizona and up. I drew a big square on that. And I said, ‘That’s yours.’”

“I do remember he was very skilled at sending personal notes to ordinary staffers when they did something well,” added Jim Bates, a longtime editor at The Post who now works for The Denver Gazette. “It was a management tool I wish I had used a few times. It meant so much to people.”

Hall is survived by his wife of 61 years, Suzanne Lovell Hall, formerly of Columbia, TN; his children Carson (Laura), Matthew (Kristy), and Amanda Goldman (Jeremy); and grandchildren Dylan and Nicolas Hall, of Portland, OR, Frances Hall and Julia, Caroline and Max Goldman, of Montclair, NJ. Also surviving are brothers Gary Hall, Maryville, TN, Randy Hall, Lebanon, TN, and Les Carson, Greensboro, GA.

The family asks that memorial contributions be made in David’s name to The Poynter Institute.