It’s Tuesday morning, and Thierry Smith, Denver’s most unlikely radio sports-talk host, is on the air. Sporting a yellow polo shirt and seated in the motorized scooter he’s been forced into by multiple sclerosis, he moves across a variety of subjects. Surgery on John Elway’s arm. (“Just maintenance. Nothing to…

Recently, on an obscure cable-TV channel, dedicated amateur Tonja Roi–the co-host of Cineview–took her best shot: After a clip from the action yarn The Long Kiss Goodnight, in which Geena Davis plays a CIA assassin, a “robber” burst onto the set of the public-access TV show and snatched Roi’s purse…

When the producers of the upcoming fantasy film Warriors of Virtue decided to use the Colorado Symphony Orchestra to record the film’s score, many saw it as a great opportunity to jump-start the struggling ensemble. But now some people are singing a sour note, arguing that the CSO was so…

In the past ten years, the City of Denver has sunk more than $2 million into the old Rossonian Hotel, hoping to lure a jazz supper club into the heart of Five Points. A few weeks ago the city got its club. Only it didn’t open in the Rossonian. It…

Richard Frajola was a bigwig in the world of stamp and coin memorabilia and an expert on Western postal history, so when he moved to Colorado from Connecticut in 1990, local dealers gave him due respect. “Richard is one of the most knowledgeable stamp experts in the country,” says dealer…

On the walls of Henry Pohs’s basement are more than 1,000 underground mining artifacts, as precisely arranged as any museum collection. Here you’ll find everything from clay lamps used in the Roman catacombs to rare pieces from a 1917 St. Louis mining convention. This well-lit subterranean space–a contrast from the…

Now that NBC’s Asteroid has leveled much of Denver (which stood in for Dallas and Kansas City), it’s time to sift through the smoking rubble and unearth some more of our state’s memorable celluloid moments. Hollywood fat cats come here because they like the mountains and because it’s cheaper to…

Jerry Stevens was flying high. He was a successful personal-injury lawyer and municipal judge in Aurora. He had the things that Thurgood Marshall once said were at the root of the law’s mystique: “Power, prestige and influence.” He also had money. There’s a large painting of him that shows a…

Manual High School students talk about commitment to their school with a religious fervor. Many of them paint a rosy picture. Everyone gets along. Race has been overcome. The basketball team’s integrated. Some teachers can’t even remember the last fight they saw, much less broke up. And the school performs…

Roy Phillips has run Texaco stations in Denver since the Seventies, and in that time he’s learned a painful lesson. As a black man, he says, “you can operate stations as long as they’re inside the black community.” Over the years Phillips made a half-dozen attempts to acquire stations in…

Six months ago the Colorado state legislature passed a bill allowing people to make voluntary contributions to the D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) anti-drug program on their income-tax returns. It may be one more victory for one of the country’s most visible weapons in the nebulous war on drugs, but…

Denver police officer Tyrone Campbell is a familiar face in north Denver’s Cole neighborhood. He’s one of the few Denver cops who carries a personal pager for calls from residents and has a souped-up, bass-thumping CD player wired into his cruiser. As he makes his rounds through the neighborhood, kids…

Organizers are touting the upcoming Rocky Mountain Marian Conference, a three-day paean to visions of the Virgin Mary, as a chance for Catholics to strengthen their love for the Virgin and reaffirm their faith in God. But some Catholics are up in arms because one of the keynote speakers, Ivan…

Perry Ayers, founder of the Denver Black Arts Festival, says he’s “the ultimate optimist,” and why not? In the past ten years he’s built the DBAF into one of the largest black-arts events in the nation–and sometimes he’s had to stage it on little more than a wing and a…

The Count of Five Points is playing a tape of himself reading Edgar Allan Poe in a sonorous voice: “From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were–I have not seen As others saw–I could not bring My passions from a common spring– From the same source I have…

After summer-long accusations of incompetence and mismanagement, the federal government has just completed its second audit in four years of Denver’s Weed and Seed anti-crime program. The results have improved this time around, but the audit indicates that nearly one-fifth of the program’s funds are unaccounted for, and it confirms…

Bob and Meredith Norton opened Parker Funeral Home three years ago, hoping to capitalize on one inevitable aspect of Douglas County’s rapid population growth. But they’ve found that their business is deader than they think it should be, and they’re crying foul. Bob Norton claims there’s no mystery. He points…

The day was chilly, Teri Ralya recalls, when she returned to her Arvada apartment in March 1994 to air out the pesticides that had been sprayed there that morning. As she opened up all the windows in her third-story unit and switched on the stove’s exhaust fan, she hoped that…

On July 1, several children in the Baker-La Alma neighborhood were playing in back of the storefront offices of Weed and Seed, a federally funded anti-crime program that pumps money into several impoverished Denver neighborhoods. Suddenly, nine-year-old Ivan Jorgensen was hit under the eye by a rake that another boy…

Volatile black activist Alvertis Simmons says he’s leaving his job of three years as the mayor’s neighborhood-watch coordinator to wage his own fight against the myriad social problems he sees facing Denver. “I’m looking forward to leaving the city,” he says enthusiastically from his sixteenth-floor office across the street from…

Colorado Springs firefighter Tim Casey once was called to a home where he found the brains of a recent suicide–a doctor who’d shot himself with a .44 handgun on his 44th birthday–sprayed across the ceiling. When Casey stopped underneath a light fixture, some of the dead doc’s gray matter dripped…

Six months ago, Parker’s quintessential local bank–the Community Bank of Parker–was quietly bought by a group of investors with ties to Colorado’s largest homebuilder. It’s one more indication that Parker is booming, and the state’s most prominent businessmen are taking advantage. In the past two years, three of Parker’s four…