The money and effort government spends in the name of economic development is supposed to bring a community new companies and additional jobs. But did economic development actually cause Fort Collins to lose $300 million worth of new investments? Last week AT&T announced that it was putting its NCR Microelectronic…

part 2 of 2 As anyone familiar with rocketry knows, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This week in Argonia, that particular law of physics appears in the shape of Rick Wills. Wills, who designs airplane cockpits for the Air Force, is the owner of Midwest…

part 1 of 2 To many people, Dennis Lamothe would seem to pose an unacceptable risk. For starters, on this scorching Saturday morning he is busy loading three solid-propellant motors inside his very large–two stories high, 350 pounds–homemade rocket. The motors are encased in shiny aluminum tubes. They weigh about…

For anyone who has ever attended a local government planning meeting, it is a familiar sight: A developer or lawyer wheels in a stack of boxes, crammed full of what are presumed to be crucial documents necessary to make a convincing case to decision makers. Not necessarily, it turns out…

When he was booted from school, Terry Hamburg did what any student these days would do. He sued his teachers. Except that Hamburg was no ordinary student. At the time he was shown the door, he was in the final months of the family-practice residency program at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical…

An economics magazine used as a teaching aid by the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs is giving the school a crash course in accounting. This spring, The Margin, a nine-year-old journal owned by the university, folded. Its demise has left UCCS holding title to several thousand back issues, its subscription lists–and…

Chet sits in a plastic-belted lawn chair facing the Washington Park tennis courts, classically dressed: white shirt, pocketed shorts, a white cap settled high on his head, smooth-soled canvas Converse sneakers, Jack Purcell edition. Next to him is a blue plastic bag. The handle of an off-the-shelf wooden multi-ply Cragin/Garcia…

Accountants do it when they crunch numbers on their relatives’ tax returns at no cost. Lawyers do it when they handle a friend’s legal advice for free. Car mechanics do it when they perform a valve job on a girlfriend’s car, no charge. When it comes to doctors and nurses…

It has been just over a year since Colorado legislators gave the go-ahead for amateur reformers to dabble in public education. The Charter Schools Act, which was signed into law last June, for the first time permitted parents and other community members to conceive, develop and operate their own publicly…

part 2 of 2 In small towns, the collective memory is a living, breathing thing, almost separate from the people it grows from. A single bit of off-center behavior can embed itself in the recall of the community and define a person’s personality for the rest of his life. For…

part 1 of 2 Every generation or so–most recently in 1976–the Bijou Creek, which runs north through the eastern plains from Colorado Springs, pours into the South Platte River in such volume that it causes the river to run backward. Its waters swell and cascade over the railroad embankments and…

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…

part 2 of 2 Three generations is what passes for old money in Denver. So it’s not surprising that along with the Hirschfeld name and the family’s tremendous wealth comes a great deal of accumulated power and influence. Much of that influence has been used in the traditional ways of…

In most places the disappearance of a low-level city panel would register barely a blip on people’s personal radar screens. But most places aren’t Colorado Springs, where every civic move seems to be invested with enough meaning and symbolism to provide work for a generation of laid-off Kremlinologists. The panel…

Joseph C’de Baca is taking on some very smart people–7,990 of them, to be exact. That’s the number of children in Denver Public Schools’ gifted and talented program, which C’de Baca, an industrial education teacher at Hamilton Middle School, says is disproportionately white. C’de Baca isn’t the first to claim…

In the 1981 cult movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, a Kalahari Desert bushman stumbles onto a Coca-Cola bottle tossed from an airplane. As the bottle passes from person to person, each interprets it as something different and finds a way to use it for his purposes. In Colorado Springs,…

part 1 of 2 By all appearances, Dave Spinks is an excellent principal. He moves through his bustling one-story school easily and informally. He greets each child by name and can spin a personal minibiography in a few sentences. His school’s staff-to-student ratio–about one-to-ten–is something that most private colleges can’t…

part 2 of 2 It is a Wednesday evening at the Stony Creek Elementary School library, in southern Jefferson County, and about twenty parents have gathered to discuss what to do about the district’s plan to splinter Stony Creek’s much-praised inclusion program. It is, they agree, just another example of…

The break-in at the small South Broadway office a month ago had all the sinister overtones appropriate to what would turn out to be Richard Nixon’s final weeks. In fact, a Denver police detective recalls the phone conversation that put him on the case: “The guy called up and said,…

part 1 of 2 If every physician wound up with patients like Charles Stevinson, medical school might not seem like such an onerous obstacle. That’s because Stevinson, whose car dealerships and real estate have made him a millionaire more than a hundred times over, has taken the physician-patient relationship to…

part 2 of 2 Most physicians who are honest with themselves will acknowledge that cancer can be a capricious disease and that claiming success for cures or remissions is an inexact science. Add to this the fact that many terminal patients go to oncologists with the expectation only that they…

Three weeks ago, Herschel Caldwell, the owner of a small newspaper company called Focus Journals Inc., filed for protection from his creditors under federal bankruptcy laws. The filing came as little surprise to, among others, Oliva de Castanos, a former editor of Caldwell’s Denver Medical Journal, who had been trying…