How much does one ten-hour hostage situation cost? Plenty, if you’re talking about the United States Postal Service. This past Christmas Eve day, seven postal employees at the USPS’s General Mail Facility, situated near the old Stapleton airport, were taken hostage by a former postal worker. They were released, unharmed,…
Good fellows: An effort to recruit minority teachers to the Denver Public Schools spearheaded by Denver mayor Wellington Webb hasn’t done diddly to get black and Hispanic role models into teaching jobs at DPS. In fact, the “Mayor’s Fellows” program produced such lackluster results that it’s been given the ax…
Colorado’s future ran headlong into its past on a dusty piece of land north of Pueblo last month. A bulldozer driver preparing the ground for a new Wal-Mart store unearthed a grave site within view of Interstate 25. At first he thought he’d found animal bones. But when he saw…
When Mike Tyson announced last week that he was willing to part with the unabridged, uncensored story of his life for, say, three or four million bucks, you can bet the Pulitzer Prize committee and the people who hand out the Nobels sat up and took notice. Listen. Solzhenitsyn may…
Who knows what compelled the man–if indeed it was a man. Clues are few. One day about ten years ago, someone walked into the First National Bank in Cortez and rented safe-deposit box number 509. Inside it, he placed a battered 1979 Durango phone book, an empty 89-cent box of…
A Big Zero Regarding Michael Roberts’s “Double Trouble,” in the March 26 issue: One would have to be a masochist to call the Jay Marvin radio talk show, particularly if one doesn’t agree with the so-called leftist’s rantings and ravings. The man can’t have a reasonable conversation with anyone with…
The federal law enforcement officer lurking around the downtown studio of KHOW-AM/630 pleads to remain anonymous. Not that he’s doing anything wrong. It’s just that his visit to KHOW isn’t official. He’s on a break, see. His time is his own for the next few minutes, and he’s spending it…
For such a high-stakes game, not many people knew about it. After years of struggle, a cowboy named Glenn Miller and a ragtag assortment of investors lost a potential pot of gold to lawyers bankrolled by the giant Vail ski resort. If it had been a poker game, Glenn Miller…
Captive audience: The bad news at the Arapahoe County Jail is that the video rentals once available to inmates on weekend nights have been discontinued. The good news: We got cable! Yes–in the future, should you find yourself a weekend guest of Sheriff Pat Sullivan and his deputies, you can…
The whole mess may have started with an argument over carpets. Or maybe it had to do with a few hundred dollars’ worth of phone calls. No matter how it began, though, the dispute between Rabah Khatib and Herbert Wasserman just keeps getting more expensive–and the fate of downtown Denver’s…
Plan Jeffco, the citizens’ group that launched a pioneering open-space program in 1972, is working on a plan to ask Jefferson County voters to approve a $160 million bond issue for open space that could halt a proposed Nike plant on South Table Mountain. It would be the largest open-space…
The most dangerous slugger in the major leagues is not Ken Griffey Jr., Larry Walker or Mark McGwire. He is a wrinkled, 67-year-old non-fan named Rupert Murdoch. And it’s painfully clear that the ruthless Australian media magnate means to swing the huge bat just put into his hands more like…
This is a story about Jeff O’Leary trying to write a paper about the Crocker Rocker conspiracy. He’s probably working on it right now. His Metro State class, Advanced Creative Writing, is–or ought to be–a place where hackneyed phrases like “This is a story about…” are not tolerated. But such…
The Killer Inside Us Congratulations are due to Westword and Alan Prendergast for “The Killer and Mrs. Johnson,” in the March 19 issue. Although I do not believe Jacob Ind should be released from prison, I think his story should remind us of what monsters are created when parents do…
“Today, there is a secret plan to deprive the American people of the man they want for their president. It consists of mass-media manipulation, lies, distortions, half-truths, cheap tricks and Soviet-style news blackouts and censorships. The media have insulted the American people’s intelligence by thinking they can decide the presidential…
Standing outside Denver’s Forney Transportation Museum, in a yard filled with antique locomotives, cabooses and passenger cars, owner Jack Forney beams at a small nineteenth-century locomotive painted in splashes of forest green. The coal-powered locomotive would look more at home today in an amusement park than in a busy railyard,…
On the morning of December 17, 1992, a rangy freshman named Jacob Ind was pulled out of his first-hour class at Woodland Park High School by counselor David Greathouse. Concerned about Ind’s emotional stability, Greathouse had arranged for the fifteen-year-old to meet with a mental-health specialist from a Colorado Springs…
It was no surprise last month when a bill giving state regulators the power to fine phone companies that provide shoddy service breezed through the Colorado House. After all, the measure is backed by consumer groups and, in a rare twist, most of the phone companies who stand to be…
Spring ranting: Some of the volunteers who run the gift shop at the Denver Botanic Gardens are feeling pretty damn contrary about the way their garden’s been growing lately. Members of Associates of the Denver Botanic Gardens are steamed about the DBG’s decision to seize control of the gift shop…
The Urban Spectrum, Denver’s black newspaper, is no stranger to writing articles about racism and discrimination. But it now finds itself in new territory: A white male has sued the paper for failing to hire him as an editor. Jim Emery filed suit last May in U.S. District Court, claiming…
While the furniture-smashers of the U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey Team were returning to vain millionairehood in the NHL, and Latrell Sprewell was explaining to his adoring public that the really important lesson in the strangling of P.J. Carlesimo is the one that coaches should learn from it, and Chicago Bear…
Nike Town In Stuart Steers’s story about the Nike Corporation wanting to place itself upon the pedestal of the South Table (“If the Shoe Fits,” March 12), he mentioned that Coors spokesman Jon Goldman had said, “I don’t see these folks offering to have their homes leveled and converted to…
