The names - and the legends - stretch from poets Eugene Field and Thomas Hornsby Ferril to muckraking journalists like Damon Runyon and Gene Fowler. Veteran Colorado broadcasting heroes Carl Akers, Bob Palmer and Don Kinney are on the membership rolls, as are Denver's pioneer journalist Gene Amole and homegrown political cartoonists like Pat Oliphant. And we know - we just know - that Colorado's adopted prodigal son Hunter S. Thompson must have imbibed something, somewhere along the surface of the bar.

Let's focus, though, on two Colorado boys who, before they made good, had enormous fun being bad in and around the Denver Press Club.

Damon Runyon: King of the Guys and Dolls
Not that it takes a tough guy to write about tough guys, but let's admit that it takes an ultra-vivid, real-life human like Damon Runyon (1884-1946) to do it right. His biographer, Jimmy Breslin, summed him up this way:

"Damon Runyon invented the Broadway of Guys and Dolls and the Roaring Twenties, neither of which existed, but whose names and phrases became part of theater history and the American language. Nicely-Nicely and Nathan Detroit and the Lemon Drop Kid and Little Miss Marker were famous all of the world. He started characters off in newspapers, then took them into short stories, following which they became huge American movies."

Born in time to glimpse the last remnants of the Old West by way of melodramatic barroom gun fights between men wearing spurs and cowboy boots, Runyon was raised in Pueblo, Colorado, by a father who tended toward shiftlessness when he wasn't tending toward newspapermanness at the Pueblo Chieftain.

As with Colorado Beat Anti-Hero Neal Cassady, Runyon was a mini-adult, of sorts, from an early age, writing his first piece for the Chieftain at age 12 and acquiring his first hangover shortly thereafter.

As fast-burners do, Runyon outgrew Pueblo in his early 20s and came to Denver. Arriving in 1904, he briefly worked at the Post before being fired for being... well, Runyonesque. Like any resourceful, self-respecting and hungry journalist, he immediately began writing for the most prominent competitor, the Rocky Mountain News, staying there for nearly five years.

As a dedicated habitué of the Denver Press Club bar, his hours on Glenarm Place were eventually rewarded with his becoming a member of the club's Board of Directors. Jimmy Wong, the legendary club steward, called Runyon "Demon Runyon" because of the writer's effusive love of drink and his effusively bad behavior when drunk.

Runyon grappled with drink and drink grappled with him. In Gahan's, a bar on Larimer Street, Runyon had the ingenious idea of throwing his drink at a much larger fellow drinker, who picked up the diminutive writer by his collar and was choking the literary life out of him when the proprietor broke up the fight.

Another night in yet another Larimer Street bar (in the then-famous and then-standing Windsor Hotel), Runyon tried to mimic his Denver precursor Eugene Field, who once managed to trade a poem for a shot of whiskey. When Runyon tried to repeat the literary feat, the bartender used a vulgarity unprintable in a City of Denver Web site in turning Runyon down.

Luckier as a posthumous Denverite than he was as an actual, breathing one, Runyon today is remembered every year with the annual Damon Runyon prize awarded for excellence in journalism, but if you're looking for a trace of Runyon outside of the Denver Press Club, it's unfortunately going to be a slightly rednecky trace: The pioneer monument at Colfax Avenue and Broadway was originally going to be topped by a figure of a Native American before Runyon raised a ruckus in his column and made city fathers choose victorious anglo Kit Carson instead.

For a man whose fame rests on lively fictional rascals who never seem to be too many steps away from a speakeasy, it's an unusually apropos fact that Runyon was scared straight into teetotalling in Denver: the story involves an outdoor concert at Cheesman Park with two - count 'em - two girls, some prodigious drinking later that night back at the old Standish Hotel, then some good, old-fashioned, blood-curdling screams from the two girls in the wee hours of the morning following by - yikes! - an injection for Runyon from an unnamed doctor. This sort of night would tend to change anyone's outlook in a major way, but for Runyon it meant that he'd never take another drink in his life.

Having turned a rough personal corner, he began - while still in Denver - to sell his gritty, true-life stories to national magazines like McClure's and Harper's Weekly. By 1910, encouraged by their attention, he'd left Denver for New York, where he stayed and wrote the syndicated columns and stories that would become the basis for the Broadway and Hollywood hit Guys and Dolls as well as the Frank Capra film Lady for a Day.

It's hard to understand amid our mass media, but before television existed, some newspaper columnists were as famous as national network anchors are today. Runyon was this sort of celebrity at the time of his death, with friends as varied as Babe Ruth, Walter Winchell and Al Capone.

Jimmy Breslin wrote, "He hated legitimate people and loved thieves," and when one looks up the word "Runyonesque" in the dictionary, it's these lovable, illegitimate losers who come to life in the definition.

Gene Fowler: Pride of the Rockies
Six years younger than his pal and patron Runyon, Gene Fowler (1890-1960) was another truly outsized character who haunted the Denver Press Club on occasionally drink-wobbly legs and haunts it still via outlandish (but true) stories about his life.

Born in Denver, Fowler was yet another talented, whipsmart child who raised himself on Denver streets. With his father famously elsewhere and his mother dead by the time he turned 14, Fowler's love for newspaper work began as a publishing house apprentice - a "printer's devil." Fowler's "Pride of the Rockies" nickname sprang from his claim that Pride of the Rockies flour sacks were his diapers as a baby.

Though he started writing for the Denver Republican in 1912, he soon moved to the Rocky Mountain News where, as city editor, he famously - or infamously - kept a pistol (loaded with blanks) on his desk to keep sleepy reporters vigilant.

After befriending the talented but then-unknown Fowler in the Press Club in 1916, Damon Runyon took him under his wing and encouraged him to come to New York. Like Field and Runyon before him, Fowler wasted no time in making the leap to the big-time.

Though little of his journalism or fiction is now in print, Fowler was famous in the '30s and '40s for a wide-range of work, from columns and novels to screenplays and biographies.

A screenplay-writing millionaire in the Hollywood Hills by the time he died in 1960, Fowler was setting aside time to write about his early newspaper days at the time of his death, and he is remembered fondly on Glenarm Place today.

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