From wowtown to cowtown. Just a week ago, Denver was recovering from the largest collective hangover on record. On Super Bowl Sunday, in a wannabe major-league “riot,” crazed Broncos fans fueled by Jell-O shots looted an athletic-goods store. (This is Denver, after all.) On Monday, thousands of slightly more sober…
Making book: Oprah’s book club it’s not, but KHOW-AM now has its own recommended reading list, with the picks of four talk-show hosts on display at both Tattered Covers. Not surprisingly, Dr. Laura’s choices are all books and tapes by Laura Schlessinger, who happens to be the good doctor. Surprisingly,…
One night in 1968, a 29-year-old Phil Anschutz sat in the bar of the Casper, Wyoming, airport cutting the biggest deal of his life with an oil wildcatter named Jeff Hawks. Outside, in the direction of Gillette, the sky was on fire, the result of an inferno that had erupted…
Anyone else would surely have given up by now. Here it is, a beautiful Saturday afternoon, the powder steadily accumulating on the Copper Mountain slopes, creating the kind of ideal conditions that serious shredders only dream about. But Tim Gill is stuck teaching a rank amateur the basics of ‘boarding…
Writers for Soldier of Fortune magazine probably don’t complain too much when editor/publisher Robert K. Brown monkeys with their stories. After all, how many editors keep a pair of Soviet assault rifles next to their desks? Brown grabs the rifles to emphasize a point. “The anti-gun forces are fucking irrational,…
Susan Barnes has made some pretty powerful enemies over the past five years, including countless officers and enlisted men in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, Washington politicos and the presidents of a couple of right-wing think tanks. She’s been accused of being a “femi-Nazi,” of ruining careers, of…
Bill McCartney has never been able to stop thinking about men. When he landed in Boulder in 1982 as the new coach of the University of Colorado’s moribund football program, he had a wife and four kids. But he had to find some young men to make his dreams come…
Nita Gonzales has shot her mouth off so many times–and gotten in trouble for it so many times–that she doesn’t know where to start. But there was this one time at Annunciation School when she first got a taste of what lay ahead for her as one of Denver’s most…
Paul Stewart, founder and curator emeritus of Denver’s Black American West Museum, stands before the third group of schoolchildren he’s seen today, this time at Greenlee Elementary School, where the students are mostly Hispanic. He’s here for an assembly celebrating Martin Luther King Day, just another in a long line…
Dottie Lamm, currently a candidate for the U.S. Senate, is known throughout Colorado because of her husband. That may be her biggest blessing–or her biggest curse. The frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Dottie Lamm seems likely to face incumbent Republican senator (and turncoat Democrat) Ben Nighthorse Campbell in November. That…
Sage Douglas Remington marches to a different drummer. A Southern Ute drummer these days–but that’s just one of the beats that’s driven him over the years. Remington, 48, came to activism early in life. “My father worked very hard and taught me the value of hard work and to also…
When Barry Fey sold his interest in the concert firm that bore his name late last summer, a lot of his competitors figured that, career-wise, he was as good as dead–but the old cuss won’t lie down. Since then, the man who was Denver’s most successful, and most feared, promoter…
It’s a typical morning for Essie Garrett, in that she ran the five miles to her job at the Emily Griffith Opportunity School, where she has been in charge of the refrigeration department for fifteen years. As usual, she’ll run back home at the end of the day, her backpack…
1977: Colorado is in the grip of a severe drought, yet permits for construction of new homes top 20,000 annually, to better accommodate the thousands of immigrants inspired by John Denver’s lyrical vision of the state (1973’s “Rocky Mountain High”) and James Michener’s bestselling novel Centennial (which celebrates the state…
It seems impossible–doesn’t it?–that on the first day, he was terrible. Facing the Pittsburgh Steelers at Three Rivers Stadium, he completed just one of eight passes for a measly fourteen yards. He got sacked, hard, four times, and by game’s end looked like a deer in the headlights. Because those…
Clarissa Pinkola Estes is thinking about what story she would tell to residents of Denver in 1998. She settles on “Stone Soup,” an ancient tale–but not an ancient idea. The people are starving–for soulfulness, for spirit–and they shut their doors and live behind them, and what little they have they…
Noel Cunningham is almost too good to be true. The owner of two of the town’s best restaurants, Strings and 240 Union, and the driving force behind several charities that have raised more than a million dollars in Denver, Cunningham is one of the few people in the back-stabbing, chef-eat-chef…
Denver’s art scene has witnessed momentous changes over the last twenty years, including the establishment of a contemporary-art department at the Denver Art Museum and the tremendous expansion of both public and commercial gallery scenes. But the most important development was the rise of the alternative spaces, which grew into…
He lurks in the bad dreams of hungry prosecutors and hidebound judges, a caped avenger in bolo tie and maroon beret. The cameras catch him exiting the courtroom in the eye of the media whirlwind, a feisty bantamweight with a large voice–a voice so thunderous when raised in outrage that…
December 31, 1997, 6 p.m.: The Merc fills slowly at first, but you can already feel the heady air of celebration wafting through the murky dining room, with its darkly polished honky-tonk bar, fringed dancing-girl lamps and Dede LaRue’s neon-encircled papier-mache circus animals crashing through walls. People nest in the…
Against all odds, Bob Cote finds himself in a suspended state of grace. “How else to explain why I’m here?” he wonders. “It’s been a series of miracles.” More than merely being here, though, these days Cote, the ex-alcoholic president of Step 13, a shelter for homeless men on the…
The December 1979 opening of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ first production was billed as the “Dawn of the Denver Decade.” The DCPA was going to make Denver the Rocky Mountain entertainment equivalent of New York City, with touring productions of Broadway plays and musicals sharing the complex…
