One-Track Minds

Have a Little Confidence In the grim, sometimes goofy race for seven seats on the Regional Transportation District’s board of directors, the key word is “confidence.” At candidate forums and fundraisers, the contenders say that the people need confidence in their elected leaders. They argue that Guide the Ride, last…

It Hertz

Bus driver Glenn Bowen hurt his shoulder on the job, and his workers’ compensation claim against the Hertz Corporation has dragged on unresolved for more than a year. Now that claim may be tied up in another case against the company, one brought by several of his black co-workers. Bowen’s…

Unnecessary Roughness

While Mike Shanahan stumps for Pat Bowlen’s pro-stadium forces, who are scrambling to replace Mile High, former Bronco James “Jumpy” Geathers wishes they’d lobby for one more thing: a ring for his hand. Geathers, a 6′ 7″, 300-pound pass-rushing specialist who spent last season on injured reserve, is the lone…

Off Limits

An uncivil society: Can’t we all just get along? In a word, no. In two words, hell no. This was to be the year of the well-behaved campaign, the one in which special interests held on to their wallets and candidates held their tongues. It was to be a kinder,…

Shy, but Not Retiring

The public, no doubt, would have preferred clear skies and sunshine. But some 600 kids and adults came anyway on this blustery Saturday morning, to search for prairie dogs and chomp on hot dogs at “Wild Things ’98,” hosted by the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and Wildlife Refuge, ten miles northeast…

Run, Barry, Run

There are no distractions. At Barry Fey’s house, the parrot keeps screeching at the dog. The phone won’t stop ringing, and Barry’s beleaguered assistant, Leslie, just can’t find the wallet-sized photos of the first time he won the big handicapping tournament in Vegas. The guy is here to fix one…

Little Grouse on the Prairie

By 9 a.m. Tuesday, several residents of Lone Tree, Colorado’s brand-spanking-newest city, were already lined up at the tidy, tiny civic center, barely an Elway-armed throw from Park Meadows. They were there to do their civic duty, to vote early and avoid the crush of procrastinators who’ll still be puzzling…

The Very Grand Inquisitor

Maria Garcia is a listener of such intensity that strangers at the coffee shop where she’s sitting feel her presence as a prickle on the backs of their necks. With both hands on the table, she sits, listening, making mental notes of everything. If this meeting were work-related, she would…

Letters

Faster Than a Speeding Ballot Kenny Be’s “1998 Overloaded Voter Guide,” in the October 22 issue, was a perfect summation of this campaign season. I plan to take it with me when I vote, because it’s the only thing I’ve seen that makes sense of these ballot measures. I’m only…

Love on the Rocks

The town got its name from the railroad that ran through it and siphoned grain from the white elevators that rise above Colorado’s eastern plains. A steady supply of water lay underground, and so, in 1887, as the builders of the Pueblo and State Line Railroad planned their route, they…

Up to Their Necks

The large hangman’s noose hanging in an engineering room at Denver Health Authority was the final straw for Don Atkinson. The African-American grounds worker says he had been subjected to more than a year of passed promotions, racially derogatory remarks and hostile co-workers when he encountered the rope. “As far…

No Allowance

Freddy Lipton is crusading for $16 a month. The 56-year-old Lipton suffers from colon cancer, but he hasn’t let that stop him from waging a tireless campaign on behalf of Colorado nursing-home residents. Medicaid recipients living in nursing homes receive a personal-needs allowance of $34 a month, which Lipton hopes…

Off Limits

House party: Kevin Marchman, the former head of the Denver Housing Authority who went on to become a public-housing wunderkind in the Clinton administration, apparently had more than family reunions on his mind when he returned to Denver last winter to spend more time with his kin. Marchman, who resigned…

Poetic Justice

This epic poem of a baseball season is drawing to a close. But before Tino Martinez hangs up his spikes for the winter, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa settle into the history books and the game’s financial titans dare to believe that the game’s wronged fans have returned, there’s a…

The Heat Is On

It used to be so simple. Each fall, when the leaves turned and you wanted chile, real chile, the kind that made your sinuses clear and your belly warm, you’d drive past the tracks and beyond the highway to an empty lot in the country, where an old farmer wearing…

Letters

An Old-Age Problem I could not read Stuart Steers “Dying for Dollars,” in the October 15 issue, to completion because of the painful memories it brought back. After a stay in Lutheran Hospital, my mother was transferred to Cedars Health Care Center for rehabilitation in late 1996. I chose Cedars…

Guerrillas in the Midst

The two police officers met for coffee, as they often did, at the Homestead Restaurant in Idaho Springs one cold afternoon in November 1992. Gary Cunningham, who’d worked for the town’s police department for two years, had recently married his fifth wife, Michele. She worked at the Homestead, and he…

Dying for Dollars

Frank and Norma Dougherty lived a modest American dream. It should not have ended in a nightmare. Frank served as a lieutenant colonel in the Army during World War II, then worked for years as a mechanical engineer at the Denver Federal Center. Norma was a homemaker who devoted herself…

Off Limits

Broadcast bruise: Television news is a rough business–especially if you toil for the Channel 4 morning team. Yes, beneath all that sunny bubble and squeak lies a heart of darkness. Or something. The trouble started on September 24, when affable newsbabe Katie Keifer was booked by Denver police for allegedly…

Death Takes a Holiday

Those waiting to see Colorado’s new death-penalty tag team in action will have to wait even longer than expected. The first test of a two-year-old law that takes the death-penalty decision out of the hands of a jury and places it before a three-judge panel has been put on hold…

Lame Dunk

This just in: The National Basketball Association has canceled its 1998 exhibition games, the players and owners remain at each other’s throats over filthy lucre, and the entire regular season remains in grave jeopardy. Hello? Let’s try this again: The National Basketball Association has canceled its exhibition games, the players…

The Big Bang Theory

By now the nation knows that Linda Tripp was worried about her bangs, that Monica Lewinsky was worried about her lack thereof with the president, and that an unworried Hillary Clinton thought her husband was simply “ministering” to a misguided youth outside the Oval Office. We know this because Congress…