Business bluster still alive.

An editor gets dozens of calls from marketing professionals each week. Write about this, write about that, they plead.

About a month ago, I got a call about one of our state's marketing legends.

Buffalo Bill Cody was perhaps the biggest and best blusterer in Colorado history.

And like many of the subjects boasted about by today's public-relations promoters, Cody could claim some truth to his tall tales. That's why his Wild West Show, which is featured in an exhibit at the Colorado History Museum through May 28, was world-renowned and seen by millions over a period of some 30 years.

Having seen a preview of the exhibit, it occurred to me to take a measure of the state's market for marketers.

I can think of only one who rises even to the kneecaps of Cody's stature, but I wondered why all the talk of a slowing economy hasn't put any brakes on the pace of the pitchmen -- and women -- who e-mail, phone and fax me about their clients.

After all, most of the reporting on the dot-com crash has focused on cash-eating marketing schemes -- like multimillion-dollar Super Bowl commercials -- as a primary sin of virtual companies without products or profits. Conventional wisdom in media circles holds that whenever the economy turns south, public relations people and other marketing types are often the first to be let go from struggling companies.

But Martha Cusick, president of the Colorado chapter of the American Marketing Association, said the group's membership of 300 professionals has been steady at that level for at least the last three years, when she has been most closely involved in AMA. She said experience in other parts of the country suggests that if the local economy were turning sour she might see more new members joining AMA in order to find new jobs.

She also said the market is as strong now as it has ever been.

"There's a lot of work out there," said Cusick. "Economists and analysts think that Colorado is at last diversified enough to weather a downturn."

Mary Banks, director of the career development office at the College of Business at CU Boulder, says the market for CU marketing grads is healthy despite the dot-com turnout.

She said about 10 of 65 MBA graduates at CU Boulder this year are looking for marketing positions, and 9 percent of 76 graduate students in the 2002 class have indicated an interest in those jobs. And she doesn't anticipate a problem for any of them.

Gerry Freeman, the elder statesman of the Colorado PR community, and the only PR man I know whose powers of exaggeration could even come close to Bill Cody's, ranks Buffalo Bill, P.T. Barnum and Frank Lloyd Wright in a pantheon of the nation's greatest self-promoters.

Visiting the museum show will give you a sense of how Cody played the game when the West was young. But don't leave the exhibit thinking Bill's practice is a dying art. The dot-com slowdown aside, Colorado remains fertile ground for the well-placed pitch.