Here’s a startling statement: It’s entirely possible that more people in this nation are familiar with Ken Hamblin than any other Denver-based media figure. After all, his radio program, which airs from 1 to 4 p.m. weekdays, is heard on more than a hundred stations in the U.S., his newspaper…
As midnight draws near for the decade, the century and the millennium, humankind’s most powerful, most undeniable impulse is to make lists. By now, of course, most of the good lists are already taken. Chiseled in stone. Scotch-taped to David Letterman’s ego. Posted on the Internet. Magnetized to the refrigerator…
For years, Coloradans have been wondering: What exactly is the problem with US West? As thousands of customers from Fort Collins to Parker waited for months to get new phone lines, neighbors asked each other why a regulated monopoly with guaranteed profit margins couldn’t seem to get its act together…
Maybe it’s the political message of Johnny Cash’s Man in Black blaring from a back room that keeps blood pumping through the veins of the college students answering phones and pecking at their keyboards inside the Westside Outreach Center. Maybe it’s the sharp chill in the building, where the furnace…
It’s been a bad few months in Broncoland. Things head south from jump street. The two-time defending Super Bowl champions limp through a pre-season memorable mainly for a quarterback controversy (Bubby Brister out, Brian Griese in) that most local media outlets inflate to gargantuan proportions. A number of them broadcast…
Denver’s booming economy this decade has been made possible in large part by bonds. In 1990, voters approved bonds — which pay dividends to the people who buy them and are often tax-free — to fund a new central library. Bonds paid for Denver International Airport. And just last week,…
A group of people who live near the Cherry Creek Shopping Center are holding up the construction of a Nordstrom department store because they believe that the mall’s owner has a history of making false promises to them, and they’ve had enough. The Taubman Company plans to build Nordstrom on…
Mission unprofitableNinety-three bucks will get you a room at the YMCA’s central branch for a week. It won’t get you a bathroom; for that, you have to go down the hall to a public facility or, as one former Y boarder says, you could just piss in the sink. But…
Item: As the millennium approaches, a local exterminator shares an observation: “My phone has been ringing off the hook,” he says. “Yeah. Squirrels.” Confrontation (Part One): “Honey, come in here.” “What?” “There’s a squirrel.” “Where?” “On the fence. Just outside the kitchen window.” “Really? What’s it doing?” “Just standing there…
Today would seem to be the best of times for female journalists interested in covering sports. Networks like ABC and cable-sports channels such as ESPN employ a swelling stable of women anchors and correspondents — and even though too many of them are stuck doing sideline reports while the dudes…
Richard “Buzz” Geller was born in a house on the corner of Colfax Avenue and Adams Street in 1945. He remembers East Colfax as a friendly neighborhood retail strip, the kind of place where grandmothers shopped for fresh vegetables and children walked to the pet store to look at goldfish…
Above Jim Hannifin’s cluttered desk is an award, inked in amateur calligraphy and framed in fake wood. Hannifin tacked the prize to his wall in February 1995, shortly after he moved his business, Ready Temporary Services, to 1915 East Colfax Avenue. Leaders of the local business group Colfax on the…
As a patrol officer working the area south of Colfax Avenue and east of York Street, Larry Carr became frustrated by the number of repeat visits he made to the same crime-filled apartment buildings. Every night, it seemed, the same jerks were causing the same problems over and over, from…
Erik Dyce won’t spend the waning hours of December 31 partying like it’s the end of 1999. He’ll be ringing in the new year in a windowless office in the basement of the Denver City and County Building, bracing for the worst. Dyce will be one of hundreds of amateur…
As the head of a halfway house for hard-to-place parolees, Bob Sylvester devoted a great deal of time and energy to teaching hardcore felons how to stay out of jail. But this week Sylvester himself was in the dock, accused of exploiting and sexually violating the men he was supposed…
Closed callsLast week the state legislature approved $345,000 for new security measures at the Capitol, including gates at the entrances to the drive and the installation of security cameras. Sergeant Don Smith, head of the executive security unit of the Colorado State Patrol, which oversees security at the Capitol and…
My favorite memories are typewritten. In 1970, I pasted this paragraph, with attached fantasies, into my journal: I never went any further with The Night of the Owl, but it seemed permissible to give myself a review in the New York Times, because after all, I didn’t just write; I…
To say that KVCU-AM, known as Radio 1190, is in the bowels of the University Memorial Center on CU’s Boulder campus is no exaggeration; it’s located in the UMC basement at the tail end of a crowded labyrinth of corridors and is so near an open-air loading dock that DJs…
Buddy Bell had been in town all of five minutes when he started talking in riddles. “The situation here can be as perfect as a situation can be,” Bell explained at the October 20 press conference where he was installed as the Colorado Rockies’ new manager. “I understand that no…
He told himself that Lenny was gone, that he would not be coming back, but Robert MacLaren couldn’t make himself believe. He talked to the police and he talked to the doctors, and he saw his little brother lying on the hospital table, ashen skin under a white sheet, all…
Rafael Maldonado came to the United States from Mexico to attend high school in Oxnard, California, in 1985. He received a temporary green card in 1990 when he married an American woman, but his card expired in 1992, and he divorced a year later. Maldonado was afraid that he might…
Like a lot of new house buyers, James and Sonia Mayrath couldn’t wait to move into their dream home. They even took a video camera with them on their trips to the construction site, eager to record the building process as it unfolded in an emerging subdivision in Longmont. Four…
