John Hopper got a job teaching history at Granada High on the day before school started eleven years ago. His predecessor had quit unexpectedly, leaving behind her students, her classroom and a single piece of yellow paper taped to the desk outlining her courses: world history, government, geography, U.S. history…
Walt Stinson began selling stereos in the West Washington Park neighborhood back in 1972. By 1984, his business was doing so well that Stinson expanded into a warehouse/office building on South Logan Street, just north of I-25. The back side of that structure, with the ListenUp logo painted prominently across…
In its summer edition of the members-only zoo review, the Denver Zoo addresses the unfortunate rampage of Hope the elephant. Hope, who had been performing a daily, and much-hyped, Elephant Walk alongside a baby elephant named Amigo, escaped from a bathing area on June 10 and ran willy-nilly through the…
When former Colorado attorney general Gale Norton was President George Dubya Bush’s surprise pick to be the nation’s new Interior Secretary, enviros quickly labeled her “James Watt in a skirt.” Watt, the controversial Interior Secretary under Ronald Reagan, was a man who had as much of a penchant for putting…
The five most important words in Denver newspapering this past week were not “who, what, why, where and when,” as they should be, but “Invesco Field at Mile High.” That’s because the city’s broadsheet, a paper originally known as the Denver Evening Post, has decided to call the place the…
Losing a queen isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a chess player. “My friend told me about this big guy, Gary, who was playing speed chess on the 16th Street Mall,” says Carey Jenkins, a math major at Metro State and last year’s chess club president at the…
Colorado congressman Scott McInnis has made quite a splash recently, jumping headfirst into the media frenzy over Representative Gary Condit and missing intern Chandra Levy. As anyone with a pulse knows, the married Condit had apparently been playing House with Levy before her disappearance, then lied to the police about…
It looks like Denver can duck its goose dilemma no longer. The Colorado Division of Wildlife announced last week that it won’t be rounding up Canada geese this year — or in future years — from parks, golf courses and ponds and deporting them, as it has done in previous…
While Colorado’s Ocean Journey is awash in financial woes, its founders are doing swimmingly. Back in February, William Fleming and Judy Petersen-Fleming, who created the aquarium and now serve, respectively, as its director of life sciences and its vice president for creative and strategic planning (at a reported salary of…
John Denver died in the water — he crashed his experimental plane into California’s Monterey Bay in 1997 — but he lived in, and for, the mountains. So it’s fitting that a group of climbers is now trying to reach, and then scale, the northernmost — and never-before-climbed — mountain…
Bill Coleman is a hardworking man. He’s reliable and responsible, and he shows up on time. In fact, his previous employers have nothing but good things to say about him. “He’s definitely a people person,” says Merilyn Lyons, special events coordinator for Conoco in Colorado. “I would recommend him to…
Villa Italia Mall, which opened in 1966 on one hundred acres at the corner of Alameda Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard in Lakewood, will officially close on July 15, another victim of bigger and better malls on all sides of Denver. Although it has been suffering since the early 1990s, Villa…
No one likes a backseat driver. They’re pushy and distracting, and even if they’re right, their tone of voice is annoying. The same goes for those LED signs on the refurbished portion of Speer Boulevard that passes through downtown, the freeway free verse that for the last few weeks has…
Vail, whose motto over the last few decades could well have been “Where rich kids come to get drunk and party,” now wants to crack down on drinking and partying (although probably not on rich kids), at least for the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve. Last December 31,…
At 120 feet wide and 80 feet tall, Terabeam Corp.’s new billboard demands attention. And since it appeared on the wall of the Allright Parking garage at 1420 Stout Street, it’s gotten plenty of attention from the Mayor’s Office of Art, Culture and Film, the city’s zoning department, and just…
Denver’s State of the City address came early this year — but not because Mayor Wellington Webb wanted to get it out of the way before he announces whether he’s running for U.S. Senate. No, Webb had determined months ago that June 18 was the perfect date to deliver his…
The Denver cops had their hands full Saturday night as drunk and happy fans of the Stanley Cup-winning Colorado Avalanche poured into LoDo for a night of car-stomping fun. Things got a little unruly, though, and at certain points, the city’s finest no doubt felt as though they were caught…
Baring some skin for the cause of animal rights two weeks ago, Cynthia Lieberman, a Denver resident and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals volunteer, showed up in a cage in Shreveport, Louisiana — where the Ringling Bros. circus was about to hit town — wearing nothing but a…
The Beat goes on and on: Back in the spring of 1951, Jack Kerouac sat down in a New York apartment and in twenty days typed out the manuscript of On the Road, which stretched 120 feet on a single scroll of paper, and fifty years (and counting) in literary…
What do President Dubya, Hustler magazine, the Securities and Exchange Commission, AT&T, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, Boulder and women’s sex organs all have in common? They’re each part of a delightful letter just penned by the Reverend Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, criticizing Bush’s…
Back in 1972, when Louisville and Broomfield were just sleepy little burgs that broke up the empty space between Denver and Fort Collins, no one much cared how a local business drew attention to itself. Why, an enterprising entrepreneur could fasten a life-sized fiberglass giraffe to his roof if he…
For more than fifty years, the Plains Conservation Center has been trying to preserve a remnant of the eastern Colorado high plains. Unfortunately, the organization succeeded — and now a remnant is all that’s left. The center, which once owned more than 1,600 acres of shortgrass prairie near Hampden Avenue…
