Former Denver Mayor Benjamin Stapleton’s name — which once graced the city’s airport and later an entire neighborhood — has been widely dashed through Denver because of his association with the Ku Klux Klan and its rise to power in the city and state.
He was also known, for a while, for one of the stranger scenes in political — and baseball — history. In his last months in office, the Democratic mayor flung himself face-first in the dirt in front of a crowd of rabid baseball fans. The pitch was thrown by none other than Richard Nixon, the future Republican president.
The story was told with glee in The Denver Post and chronicled years later, shortly after Nixon was sworn in as president, by Chet Nelson, longtime sports editor of the Rocky Mountain News.
The popularity of professional baseball had come and gone in the Mile High City. But in 1947, the minor league team The Bears, had been rebooted at Merchants Stadium on South Broadway, near what is now Exposition Street.
The stadium, which opened just before Stapleton took office in 1923, was “old, splintery, weather-beaten” by 1947, Baker recalled.
But hopes were high when the team celebrated its fresh-start opening day that year.
Richard M. Nixon, a young, obscure California congressman, was picked to throw the first pitch, and Mayor Stapleton, by then in his late 70s and in his last few months in office, would take the first swing.
Nixon pitched, high, hard, fast — filled with youthful zeal. Stapleton swung with gusto. As his bat sliced through the air, he slipped on his dress shoes and fell on his face, sullying his suit.
“His Honor took a swing at the pitch by Congressman Nixon of California and ‘cut’ so profusely he tumbled to the ground,” the Rocky Mountain News reported at the time. “But up he got with a smile amid a big hand from the crowd.”
Nixon’s team was impressed by how Baker chronicled the fall with sensitivity and reportedly wrote a letter saying as much.
Three years after the fall, Stapleton died of a heart attack at age 80.
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Baker remembered him as “one of the best mayors to serve Denver, a great sport even in his elderly years.” Klan membership didn’t seem to sully a reputation back then.
Stapleton, whose nickname was “Ben the Builder,” served from 1923 to 1931 and then again from 1935 to 1947 and is credited with developing the city’s water system and bringing an airport, Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the Valley Highway (now I-25), and the Mountain Parks system to the city.
For years, his Klan membership was a footnote at most, one The New York Times ignored in its obituary.
Not all reviews of Stapleton were glowing.
The same year he face planted, Time Magazine described him as “one of the most powerful municipal dictators in the U.S.” in his first term and “one of the most ineffectual old men in the rambling, shady-city of Denver” in his second term.
“He falls asleep at public meetings, mumbles in monosyllables and exudes a little less social warmth than Marley’s ghost,” Time wrote.
Even Marley’s ghost would be more popular than Stapleton is now, his memory largely besmirched by his participation in the Klan.
The former Stapleton neighborhood is now Central Park. The YMCA tried to rename a facility after a different Stapleton, then reversed course. Walker Stapleton, the former mayor’s great-grandson, won the post of state treasurer, in part because of name recognition. A decade later, he lost the governor’s race to Jared Polis — spending more time than he would have liked separating himself from his family’s Klan legacy.
His ill-fated swing of the bat, however, has been all but forgotten.
