Larsen’s stellar career had a humble beginning
By Carolyn Farr

Buzz Larsen

Maybe you should change your major.” That is what Leonard E. “Buzz” Larsen (ex-’50) remembers the director of the journalism school, Gayle Waldrop, gently suggesting to him as Waldrop reviewed Larsen’s academic record.

“I must say that from the information he had before him, Gayle was completely justified in suggesting that I go away and get out of his hair,” Larsen said.

He did not change his major, but he did go on to cultivate a 47-year career as a newspaper journalist, spending the last decade of it as a national columnist for Scripps Howard News Service.

Larsen began attending classes at CU in 1945 after serving in the Army Air Forces. He said that when he first started at The Denver Post in 1950, two CU journalism faculty members, Waldrop and Floyd Baskett, happened to come into the newsroom. Larsen not only had not changed his major, he had managed to land a job at the Post, as a copy boy. Larsen was a football player in high school, and a sports writer from the Rocky Mountain News remembered him and helped him get the job at the Post.

“They came in and happened to see me working there, and they looked absolutely stunned,” he said.

Larsen, 78, eventually left the University a little shy of his degree to focus on his journalism career at the Post, where he remained for 37 years.

“When I was working at the Post and living in Denver, that was the most enjoyable part of my career,” Larsen said.

Larsen was not a copy boy for very long; he soon earned a promotion to reporter. He said he was grateful to work at the Post under editor and publisher Palmer Hoyt.

“Hoyt was a marvelous editor and a thoroughly good man,” Larsen said, noting that when Hoyt came to The Denver Post, the paper was not moving forward, and it did not even have an editorial page. Hoyt was credited with pumping life into the Post, and Larsen was one of the young reporters who provided new blood.

Larsen recalled that Hoyt was the editor during the era of Sen. Joe McCarthy, a time when rampant accusations of officials or educators being communists or “fellow travelers” were being carried by the media.

“The University of Colorado was a big target for communist witch hunts,” Larsen said.

Larsen said Hoyt declared that the Post was not going to publish any more accusations by McCarthy unless they were substantiated, one of the first editors in the country to take such a stance.

At the Post, Larsen worked in an assortment of jobs. He was a Washington correspondent and bureau chief, a columnist, editorial writer and associate editor.

Larsen was recognized with three George McWilliams Awards by the Denver Newspaper Guild for his work. He said he was also nominated by the Post for two Pulitzer Prizes, something he said he found out only after he left the newspaper in 1987.

He concluded his career working as a national columnist for Scripps Howard News Service for 10 years. He retired in 1997 and said he spends time working on his golf game at home in Annandale, Va.

Larsen has watched three generations of his family pass through CU. His sister, Dorothy Larsen, graduated in 1945. Two of his daughters graduated from CU: Susan Larsen Bowman graduated in 1974 from the Arts and Sciences program, and Sally Larsen Carleton (’75) was a News-Editorial graduate. She lives in Englewood. In 2000, Larsen’s oldest granddaughter, Lindsay Carleton, graduated with an English degree, with Larsen in the audience of proud parents and grandparents. “We were in Boulder for Lindsay’s graduation, but we got tied up with ho-de-dos and missed the class of ’50 luncheon,” Larsen said.

larsenlej@aol.com