Like yesterday.

• Author: Wiesner, Pat
• Position: PERSPECTIVE

"I CAN'T REMEMBER EVER SAYING, 'WELL, THAT was an easy year!' about Colorado Business magazine." -Eliza Cross, vice president, Wiesner Publishing, circa 1990s.

I only met Merrill Hastings a couple of times in my life. He was a real powerhouse ill Colorado publishing, having started magazines like Skiing, Rocky Mountain West, Plfinter Sports, Cope and of course, Colorado Business in 1973.

We first met about 20 years ago at what must have been some kind of conference where we spent most of a day sitting together at the same table. AU I remember is that I really liked Merrill Hastings.

From the I the Mountain Division stories to the publishing successes he'd had, I wanted to hear all about it because he was big-time and we were just getting started. You know how it goes sometimes; we got along well, promised we would get together soon, and nothing ever came of it.

A year or so later I saw Merrill in the same kind of circumstance, in a room full of people, and by t he time I got to where he had been, I was disappointed to find him gone.

Somewhere before 1983, Merrill sold Colorado Business to Bob Titsch, a substantial local publisher at the time. In 1983 things were tough in Colorado. We were in full recession as an economy. Titsch was selling out and moving south.

We were lucky because we were a young company that didn't know what a recession was and we had just started a couple of magazines that were hitting home runs. We bought The Press, a screen-printing magazine, Active Wear and Colorado Business from Titsch.

The publishing business was one of those where you might buy three magazines just to get one. We killed Actizz Wear almost immediately. The Press made a lot of money for us for about 12 years and then was sold and subsequently went nut of business when the entire T-shirt business moved to Central America.

Colorado Business has been a labor of love for a lot of competent people ever since. It was never our biggest magazine, far from it. Some years it was our littlest. More than half the time it has seemed like it has been in a lousy market, recession or downturn.

From the beginning we had tough people who. loved the magazine, loved to report and loved to dig out the "story." whether it was about Denver being the-center of t he penny stock business and how you could get upside-down quick when your stock went from 2 cents to I cent; or about the problems and politics. surrounding the new...