There Auto Be a Law I read with high moral indignation, considerable irritation and an extremely jaundiced eye Tony Perez-Giese’s “Take It for a Ride,” in the February 5 issue, about the need for regulation in the car business. I was one of “them” for three months in 1995, and…
Governor Roy Romer lied. You can read his lips in a six-minute smooch that catches Romer in the middle of a close, personal consultation with B.J. Thornberry, his former deputy chief of staff, in the front seat of a car parked outside Dulles Airport. The kiss was captured in 1995,…
What’s cooking? Artist Martha Keating has already made northwest Denver look better, with projects like the 20th Street Viaduct mosaics that she created with Bob Luna and a host of neighborhood children. Now she’s preparing to inject more good taste into the area–in the form of a bakery she wants…
Even before the accident, Mike Grainger wasn’t quite right. “We called him ‘Mike Grainger, Mike Grainger, Mike Grainger,'” remembers Barb Thomsen, one of his former co-workers at the Burlington Northern railyards in Alliance, Nebraska. “He always repeated everything. He was kind of slow in the head.” But everybody liked Mike…
The hearing has dragged on for two days of testimony from police officers, a special-education teacher and Division of Motor Vehicles investigators. Now it’s time for yet another expert witness: a forensic document examiner who’s been trained by the FBI. He explains how to use infrared lasers to analyze handwriting,…
Pull out! Pull out!: Gosh, is Western Pacific Airlines, that beacon of fiscal brilliance that was supposed to save Denver from big, bad United, really crashing and burning in bankruptcy court? Who could have predicted it? Just because the airline was already losing money hand over fist by the time…
Public Service Company of Colorado wants state lawmakers to approve its self-styled proposal for cleaning up Denver’s air. But the $200 million-plus plan may make consumers gag. Though it’s been wrapped in a green bow for legislators–several environmental groups have even given it their blessing–the bill violates Public Service’s recent…
It’s been nearly four years since a young woman sent by Local 7 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to help organize grocery workers in Alamosa was sexually assaulted by her boss in a room at the Holiday Inn. Two weeks ago the woman, now 24 years old,…
Make no mistake about it, the inmates in the Colorado Department of Corrections are paying dearly for their crimes. So are their families. Just look at their phone bills. One of the privileges prisoners lose when they go to the slammer is their choice of long-distance carriers; their calls to…
When millionaire NHL celebrities like Adam Deadmarsh, Brett Hull and John Vanbiesbrouck take the ice this week wearing the colors of the United States, the media glare will be hot and the cheers deafening. But no U.S. Olympic hockey player will be prouder than an unknown, unpaid defenseman named Merz…
Paper Trained Patricia Calhoun’s “Birth of a Notion,” in the January 29 issue, gave me chills. I didn’t live in Denver in the Seventies, or even the Eighties, so I appreciated learning how far we’ve come and also what we’ve lost. Congratulations, Westword. Larry Smythe Denver I just wanted to…
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…
