Audio By Carbonatix
part 1 of 2
When the 100 or so members of the Graphic Communications International Union who staffed the production facilities at A.B. Hirschfeld Press decided to go out on strike two months ago, they would have been well advised to look up a fifteen-year-old lawsuit filed against the company’s current owner, A. Barry Hirschfeld. It might have changed their minds.
At the time the suit was filed, Hirschfeld, then 37 years old, owned an apartment complex called Mountain Shadows, in Cherry Creek. In 1979 a former tenant named Rose Fieman claimed that he had not returned $85 of her $209 security deposit when she moved out. Although it clearly was not a lot of money to the printing scion–he was vice president of the family business and had already accumulated a healthy amount of real estate as well–Hirschfeld fought back, asking the judge to dismiss Fieman’s claim.
The judge did, and Hirschfeld earned the right to keep the $85. But he still was not satisfied with the judgment. A week later he ordered his attorney to file another paper contending that he had been wrongly charged a court fee for filing the motion to dismiss the case. Mr. Hirschfeld, the lawyer advised the court, would like a refund. The court agreed, and Hirschfeld got his money back: $5.
Since that time, Hirschfeld, the third-generation president of the printing concern that bears his family name, has gained a reputation in Denver’s rareified circles of the rich and influential as a strict bottom-line businessman. The tactic has served him well: During the past decade he has added greatly to the family’s wealth, estimated today at tens of millions of dollars.
Yet the recent labor strife at the family business has put the 51-year-old Hirschfeld in an unfamiliar and awkward position. For years he has enjoyed and thrived on the accumulated goodwill of his prominent grandfather, A.B. Hirschfeld, and his father, Ed. And Barry himself has carefully crafted a personal reputation as one of Denver’s most philanthropic and financially successful barons, with tentacles of influence reaching deep into the city’s political and business communities.
The recent strike, along with Hirschfeld’s uncompromising response that effectively jettisoned the union from his family shop after nearly nine decades, has forced him to navigate uncharted cross-currents. It has left him caught between a powerful drive to run his business affairs his own way and the residual tug of three generations of family tradition that for years have defined nearly every facet of his life.
This Tuesday morning Barry Hirschfeld is looking incongruous as he grabs hold of the splintering plywood door at what once was the main entrance to the Hirschfeld plant at the corner of Speer Boulevard and Acoma Street. The factory, which has not been used for printing for more than two decades and has been abandoned since 1978, is in terrible shape.
Hirschfeld, however, is dapper as always. His graying hair is swept back. His eyes are pale blue and set over round cheeks. He is not tall or large, but his shoulders are broadened by his trademark double-breasted suit. He wears a bright tie and black, spit-shined loafers. Monogrammed cufflinks flash from his wrists.
He is unfailingly polite. Long years of chatting up the rich and famous at countless cocktail parties and fundraisers in Denver, Aspen, Los Angeles and Washington have left him practiced at paying close attention to guests and finding instant rapport. As the door to the old family press creaks open, he brushes off his hands and flips on a flashlight.
The distinctive terra-cotta symbols of the “alphabets of the world” display that formed an arch around the entrance have been pulled off the building and put in storage. In the middle of the round lobby’s stone-and-tile floor are the faded initials “AB,” curved to form a circle. The foyer is decked in faded mahogany wood paneling that is beginning to peel away from the walls.
Directly across from the doorway are a series of smashed glass cases that once held samples of the company’s work and family artifacts, including the original $35 press A.B. Hirschfeld purchased in 1907. About ten feet up is an empty square frame built into the wood. The prominent space was reserved for a portrait of Abraham Bernard Hirschfeld, Barry’s grandfather.
Directly behind the lobby and off a bit to the right is the founder’s old office. Like the rest of the plant, it has seen better days. One wall is destroyed, and the private bathroom has been stripped. Still, for Barry Hirschfeld it brings back instant memories. “This,” he says, “is my grandfather’s office. This is home plate.”
It is more than a figure of speech. Baseball and printing competed closely for the attentions of A.B. Hirschfeld. He grew up in Cincinnati, home to professional baseball’s oldest team, where he cultivated a passionate interest in the game.
In 1919, when the hometown Reds slipped by the infamous Chicago Black Sox in a best-of-nine series, Hirschfeld was there. He didn’t miss another World Series until he died of a heart attack in 1957. (In 1954 Sports Illustrated proclaimed Hirschfeld baseball’s “No. 1 fan.”)
He had moved to Denver in 1903. After starting–and failing at–two printing businesses, in 1907 he opened the Hirschfeld Press in a basement store at 17th and Larimer streets. Four decades and three relocations later, the business had grown so much that he decided to build his own plant.
He immediately gravitated to the site of the old Broadway Athletic Park, home to the Denver Bears, a team Hirschfeld helped start and partially owned. In 1947 his five-year-old grandson, Arden Barry, whom Hirschfeld called “Slugger,” broke ground for the new factory. It was designed in the shape of a baseball diamond, with A.B.’s desk planted firmly where home plate would be.
From A.B.’s old office, Barry Hirschfeld moves to the left as he continues the tour of the old family plant. The weak light dances and slides to the large room on the opposite corner of the building, where A.B.’s son oversaw the company’s sales operation.
An only child, Edward Hirschfeld, born in 1908, was well aware that he had a lot of ground to cover. “My grandfather was an amazing guy,” Barry says. “You don’t fill those shoes. You can’t even walk in the same tracks. You just walk to the side.”
By the time of his death, A.B. had built the largest printing company between Chicago and California, and at one time or another was a member of eighty civic organizations, particularly among the local Jewish community. He served thirteen years as a state senator, was appointed to the Denver Housing Authority and to the state racing commission, and had acted as a friend and close advisor to Colorado governor Ed Johnson.
Despite his wide-ranging interests, A.B. Hirschfeld’s first commitment was to printing, and he was determined that his work would not die with him. The only time there was any question whether Ed would follow his father into the family business came as he prepared to graduate from college. Even then, there wasn’t much doubt.
“Eddie could play ball,” recalls Barry. “He caught for the University of Denver. He could’ve gone on to the minor leagues, but he was dissuaded by my grandfather, who wanted him to go into the business. I think he somewhat regretted that he didn’t give it a try. But he was programmed to go into the business. His father said, `You’re going to go into the family printing business,’ and he obeyed. He was the most loyal and wonderful son that anyone could have.”
When A.B. died in 1957, Ed took over the business. For years he continued running it from his own office, choosing to leave his father’s old space empty as a sort of memorial. Ed Hirschfeld mirrored his father in many ways. Like A.B., Ed had a prodigious temper. Barry (who concedes that he has his own hair-trigger temper) estimates that his father shattered at least five glass desktops in rages.
Like A.B., Ed also flung himself into local do-gooding and politics. Although he never held elected office himself, he was one of Mayor Bill McNichols’s closest advisors and chaired his successful City Hall campaigns in 1971 and 1979. As his father had done earlier, Ed also served on dozens of community boards.
Even when he tried to distance himself from his father’s shadow, Ed ended up stepping back inside. When A.B. died, rumors questioning his son’s ability to run the growing business percolated through Denver’s business community. To quash them, Ed, looking to make his own statement, simply purchased another large printing press.
In 1973, with the family business thriving, Ed Hirschfeld left behind the Speer Boulevard facility. With his son overseeing the move, he relocated A.B. Hirschfeld Press to a sprawling industrial warehouse building on Smith Road. When Ed died in 1984, Barry immediately assumed the president’s chair. He kept his father’s office unused and exactly the way it was during his life for as long as he could, until the company’s growth demanded more space.
Barry Hirschfeld points the dim flashlight beam upward and nods toward the ceiling. He has stepped into the space between A.B. and Ed’s offices. His light plays off a line of jagged edges hanging from the top of the room like short plaster icicles. The debris is what’s left of a separating wall Ed erected in 1966 to accommodate his son when Barry reluctantly decided to join the company. The job was just supposed to be temporary. But Barry Hirschfeld has been with the family business ever since.
He says he had enormous respect for his grandfather. “I was the apple of A.B.’s eye,” says Barry. “And he was my idol.” But he quickly adds that he had no intention of blindly trailing in A.B.’s footsteps. Rather, Barry says, he had other interests. Ever since he can remember, for instance, he was more interested in sculpting deals and making money.
He began early by building motor scooters with lawn-mower engines and hawking them to neighborhood children. Later, in high school, he’d buy Christmas trees wholesale and sell them to local convenience stores. During the summer he bought and sold fireworks.
At the age of eighteen he bought his first piece of real estate, on the corner of Clarkson Street and Second Avenue. He later sold it for a hefty profit to a bank, which built a home for the elderly on it. “I was always entrepreneurial,” he says. “Growing up I always had something going.”
After graduating from East High School, Hirschfeld moved to California to attend college and play golf, although, he concedes, not necessarily in that order. He worked in the family printing plant during the summers. (How diligently depends on whom you ask. “When he first started, his dad wanted him to work on the presses for a while to learn the business,” recalls Russell Kromminga, who worked most of his 35 years at A.B. Hirschfeld Press as a web pressman. “He lasted about a week. After that he played golf all summer–he never came back in. Then his dad bought him a Corvette and he went off to college.”)
Hirschfeld graduated from California State Polytechnic University-Pomona in 1964. He returned to Denver, and still uncertain of what he wanted to do (and acutely aware of the draft for the war in Vietnam), he enrolled at the University of Denver’s business school, where he completed an MBA in 1966.
One day while he was still at DU, Ed called him up and told him he was looking to expand the plant and asked if he could please help out. Despite his initial reservations about going into the family business, Barry never left.
He retained his fascination with the art of the deal, however–particularly buying and selling land. In 1967 he and his new wife, Arlene, purchased a duplex in Cherry Creek, on Monroe Street and Third Avenue. “My mother and father said, `How can you have the nicest house in the worst neighborhood?'” he recalls. “I told them that the area was in transition, and it was going to be hot.”
He was right, of course, and Hirschfeld’s subsequent real estate investments in Cherry Creek have increased his wealth enormously. (He has since branched out from the area, buying some property downtown; recently he cut a $1 million check to participate in a LoDo condo deal.) Today he is a partner in five office and retail buildings in Cherry Creek with developer Don Oberndorf, who says that Hirschfeld excels at keeping focused on the bottom line, no matter who is across the table.
“Barry is superb at not getting emotionally hung up on a deal,” he says. “He is able to ferret out the important business points, rather than getting personally involved in a negotiation.”
Hirschfeld has also dabbled in other businesses, although seemingly less by any grand design than by a more spontaneous “it-sounds-good-to-me-at-the-moment” attitude. It has occasionally got him into financial trouble.
In the early 1980s an acquaintance persuaded him to invest heavily in an oil company called Mecca Petroleum Corp. that didn’t have much of anything but a name and a plan to strike it big. It didn’t, and Hirschfeld ended up writing a $150,000 settlement check to the bank to cover his personal guarantee.
More recently–two years ago–Hirschfeld got a phone call from a man who’d bought the building next to the old Speer Boulevard printing plant. The man, whose name was Jeff Fryer, wanted to discuss using some of the Hirschfeld property’s empty space as parking. The two began talking, and Hirschfeld learned that Fryer was planning to revive the Denver International Marathon.
Immediately enthusiastic, Hirschfeld, whose son is an avid runner, quickly made more than $50,000 available to Fryer–without checking his background. If he had, he’d have discovered that Fryer had twice declared bankruptcy, including once on the next-door building he currently occupied. Although the race came off beautifully last October, Fryer’s for-profit business venture behind it began unraveling almost immediately afterward.
Within weeks the professional runners began complaining that they hadn’t received their winnings. Worse, the city police officers who’d worked security for the event hadn’t seen their paychecks, either. In all, it turned out that Fryer had stiffed people out of about $200,000. This spring, after it became clear that the cops would not be getting their money from Fryer, DIM lost the contract with the city to stage the race again. (Two months ago an anonymous donor paid the police; Hirschfeld says it wasn’t him.)
More often, Hirschfeld’s intuitive investment strategy has paid off well. In 1982 a salesman who’d just sold a collection of two-way radios to the printing company for use in its trucks met with him to finalize the deal. At the end of the meeting he handed Hirschfeld a phone number.
Hirschfeld asked what it was for, and the man replied that if there were any problems, he’d have to contact him at home; he was leaving the company because it was being sold. Hirschfeld asked if it would be an interesting business for someone–a printer with an acquisitive bent, say. The man said maybe, but it didn’t really matter, because the deal was done.
A couple of days later, however, the deal fell through. The salesman returned to Hirschfeld’s office. Within days Hirschfeld owned Colorado Carphone Corp.
It has since become one of the largest cellular-phone sales companies in the area. Even better for Hirschfeld, the company came with its own twenty-channel system already granted a license by the Federal Communications Commission. Today the licenses are extremely valuable. Purchased for less than $100,000 a dozen years ago, “the company is now worth…a hell of a lot more,” Hirschfeld says.
Two years ago, in its annual rankings of the state’s richest people, The Denver Post pegged the Hirschfeld family fortune at $30 million. Hirschfeld himself insists that number is far too high. Still, with the printing company pulling in about $20 million in business annually, the success of Colorado Carphone and the more than $4 million worth of real estate in Hirschfeld’s name citywide (not to mention the $900,000 assessed value of the family’s “Shangri-La” mansion in southeast Denver’s Hillside neighborhood), it’s as good a guess as any.
end of part 1
