He was a rugged son of the Midwest and a zealot for the University of Wisconsin Badgers who earned a degree in business but forged his reputation as an unafraid muckraker, challenging the powerful and exposing financial schemers wherever he could sniff them out.
More than once he agitated influential advertisers, prompting demands that he be fired or otherwise tempered. He received more death threats than he could count but refused to alter his approach to his craft. The story, which made national news at the time, unfolded in a series of reports in the San Diego Union before Bauder authored “Captain Money and the Golden Girl.”
“He knew the markets. He knew filings. He knew the SEC, and he knew about financial scams and how they worked,” he said. “One of his best lines was, ‘Most thievery is legal.’”“Nothing was beneath him,” he said. “If you asked him to sweep the floor, he would sweep the floor and come back with a story about rip-offs in the cleaning industry. He had an insider’s knowledge of corporate complexity and an outsider’s outrage.
“The next weekend I was out on a date, and my roommate at Northwestern said there had been a call for me,” she said. “This was the 1960s, and there was one telephone for each floor. She said this nut had called, and he said he’s madly in love with you.” She followed him to Ohio when he moved to the magazine’s Cleveland office, and Bauder set to work unmasking grifters, flim-flam men and other financial reprobates in three-piece suits.