Texas Guinan * Texas Guinan: Texas Guinan: Harry Tammen

TEXAS GUINAN was a witty and savvy businesswoman. She was also smart enough to recognize a snappy phrase and claim it for her own. So let's follow her footsteps from Waco, Texas to the Rockies.
• • In 1900, the Guinan clan moved to Denver, Colorado and 16-year-old Texas occupied herself with the local amateur stage productions and she also played the organ in church.
• • When she was 20 years old, Texas Guinan married John Moynahan, a cartoonist for the Rocky Mountain News, on December 2, 1904.
• • No doubt she was familiar with the widely circulated Denver Post, a newspaper co-owned by Harry Heye Tammen [1856 — 1924], the wealthy philanthropist, well known for his cheery salutation.
• • "Hello, Sucker!" • •

• • In 1895 Harry Tammen formed a partnership with Frederick G. Bonfils (whom he had met at the Chicago World's Fair), whose nickname was "The Napoleon of the Cornfields." These two took a struggling local paper, renamed it Denver Post, and became the co-owners as well as co-editors. Their publishing enterprise flourished and brought many opportunities their way. Harry Tammen's business successes made him very rich indeed.
• • "I figured the luckiest words I ever uttered in my life were those two — — 'Hello, Sucker!' — — to my pal, my partner, my buddy Fred Bonfils. And if they were good enough for him, they were good enough for anybody," he explained a reporter from Variety in 1924.

• • Texas decided to bring the catch phrase to the East Coast and it soon became her personal greeting.
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• • The legal battles fought by Mae West and Jim Timony are dramatized in the play "Courting Mae West: Sex, Censorship, and Secrets," set during the Prohibition Era. Texas Guinan is in some scenes, too. Watch a scene on YouTube.
• • Website for all things Mae West — http://MaeWest.blogspot.com

• • Exciting Texas Guinan news is on the horizon. More anon.
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