Brigham Young University's stout football squad handed the University of Wyoming a whacking 19-0 defeat in Laramie last week, but for the 450 Cheyenne businessmen who frolicked on a special Union Pacific train which carried them to the game, there was plenty of free music and beer to banish gloom. As the fleet 14-car special slipped back into Cheyenne that night everybody was content and all were indebted to Wyoming Eagle Publisher Tracy Stephenson McCraken who footed the $2,200 bill for the junket.
This expensive stunt was a noisy Cample of the showmanship which in eleven years has enabled the bustling but prematurely grey Publisher McCraken to turn a few thousand dollars of borrowed money into an estimated 65% ownership of a strong chain of five Wyoming daily papers worth some $750,000, a directorship in the American National Bank, the vice presidency of Cheyenne's moneymaking Plains Hotel, a growing reputation as a natty, smalltown, journalistic inventor whose technique is spreading through the mountain States.
Tracy McCraken, now 43, has been by turns editor of Humorist "Bill" Nye's Laramie Boomerang, secretary (1923) to Wyoming's Democratic Governor William Bradford Ross, secretary (1924) to the late U. S. Senator John B. Kendrick. From his political connections sprouted his close friendship with Wyoming's present rulers, oil-rich Governor Leslie Andrew Miller and Senator Joseph Christopher O'Mahoney. These three became Wyoming's famed political steam roller, the "M-O-M."
Before 1926 many publishers had tried but none had succeeded in uprooting the die-hard Republican Wyoming State Leader-Tribune. Tracy McCraken bought the depressed weekly Eagle, edged it along seven years until the popularity of the New Deal gave him his big chance in 1933. Then he made the Eagle a free circulation Democratic daily. In a few months he hit on the big McCraken idea: into his morning tabloid he inserted—for paid subscribers only—a four-page section of local editorial comment, fiction, comics. His'best stunt was to run a serial or comic in the free sheet, then switch it to the paid insert. Thus he gradually converted free readers into paying subscribers.
By early 1937 Publisher McCraken's 10,000 paid circulation equaled that of the Tribune and Eagle advertising had the edge 2-to-1. Then Tribune Publisher Deming sold out February 1 to Alfred G. Hill, publisher of the Fort Collins (Colo.) Express-Courier. But by August 1 Publisher Hill was ready to consolidate with the Eagle. Highly pleased, Publisher McCraken popped his paper from his dingy building into the superior Tribune plant.
His winning fight in Cheyenne had not kept both of Publisher McCraken's hands busy. Between 1927 and 1932 he had bought and made daily tabloids of the weekly Newcastle News-Letters and Rock Springs Rocket. These followed the pattern of the Eagle: breezy style, plenty of comics, big, black type and Democratic politics. To keep his papers on their toes, Publisher McCraken made each local manager a part owner.