News

Big deal: Since the Colorado Springs Gazette dropped the Telegraph from its name and soon after pulled out of the Colorado Press Association, the organization has scrambled to fill the over 100,000-circulation category in its annual contest. Years ago, Westword was allowed to compete with the dailies in that slot;…

Early on a Monday morning just before Thanksgiving break last year, somebody stepped onto the campus of the Community College of Aurora with a stack of neon-green leaflets and began plastering them on building walls. The anonymous author of the fliers, which also were inserted into faculty mailboxes, seemed intent…

The Apes of Wrath I don’t know how much Bill Gallo and Robin Chotzinoff are paid to write for you, but it can’t possibly be enough. As for Patricia Calhoun’s “Once Upon a Mattress,” her August 21 column about Keith Weinman–isn’t he the missing link? Thank you, Westword. Mike Cooper…

Leroy Jones does not play the game by the rules. Not when he believes the game is fixed. As a driver for Yellow Cab when it went into receivership, he quickly recognized that the court-appointed receiver was taking everyone for a ride. And so Jones started protesting–loudly and often–that the…

The door of Lonnie Lynn’s house stands open. “Make yourself at home,” he says. “If you’ve been here thirty seconds, you are home.” A couple of crumpled Budweiser cans adorn a chair on the front porch. Summer evenings will find Lonnie there with his young son, Malone, on his lap,…

On June 29 the state commissioner of agriculture, Thomas Kourlis, traveled to Salida to address the Colorado Beekeepers Association. The beekeepers consider themselves an underappreciated group, the overlooked child of Colorado agriculture, and this was the first time the government’s top farm official was paying them close personal attention. They…

Picture perfect: “Are They Innocent?” asked the headline of Sunday’s Rocky Mountain News, a question echoed on hastily printed fliers and posters hyping that day’s edition. But at the end of ten pages (plus a cover with its stand-by-your-man portrait taken at some location the News agreed not to disclose,…

After five-year-old Dustin Redd drowned in City Park’s Ferrel Lake last June while attending a city-run day camp, Mayor Wellington Webb and parks manager B.J. Brooks rushed to name a new playground at the park in the boy’s memory. However well meant, that gesture hasn’t stopped Redd’s family from filing…

The sanctuary of the old Eastside Christian Church, once a place of worship for Baptists, is now something of an altar to outer space. Muted light filtering through 92-year-old stained glass windows gives an eerie glow to the artwork hanging around the room: depictions of astronauts golfing on the moon,…

It was the blackberries, not the cigarettes, that most impressed state senator Ray Powers when he visited sunny Costa Rica for six days this summer as a guest of tobacco giant Philip Morris. A highlight for Powers, who made the trek along with eleven other state legislators from around the…

On Monday morning, Keith Weinman’s voice oozed out of the radio, delivering a pitch about how much “we” enjoy a certain brand of mattress. It was slightly nauseating. And not just because the alleged “business editor” of KOA-AM’s “Business for Breakfast” show has no business shilling for clients. That’s a…

Good Neighbor Sam Ward Harkavy’s gem of an article, “Pipeline to Palestine” in the August 14 issue, about the group of Jewish men who decided they had to act instead of cowering in fear, hit a personal note with me. My father was a Slovak mountain Jew who fully realized…

Sam Sterling’s brief transformation from mild-mannered Denver lawyer to international arms smuggler started with a wisecrack that was meant to be taken seriously. It was the spring of 1947. Screams from the Holocaust were still echoing in the hearts of American Jews, and hundreds of thousands of European Jews were…

In the alley between Josephine and York streets near Cheesman Park, hipsters are assembling, engines are being goosed, and blue smoke is rising into the overcast air. Denver’s scooter chicks are ready to rumble. Behind a dowdy gray Victorian, a dozen self-consciously cool women in their twenties are gathering around…

After more than seventeen years of litigation, Lawrence Wollersheim knows that talk isn’t cheap–not when you’re talking to lawyers and your life’s work happens to involve badmouthing the Church of Scientology. But the price of silence is even higher. Too high, in Wollersheim’s estimation, which is why he says he…

A maverick Denver labor leader has launched a campaign to topple the president of the state AFL-CIO, calling for dramatic change to turn around Colorado’s sleepy labor movement. The dispute over leadership of the state labor federation has also become an issue in Colorado politics, and the chairman of the…

For years, the City of Denver’s seven golf courses have watched newer, more challenging venues in the suburbs hook players and put a divot in Denver’s bottom line. But now it looks as though the city’s courses might finally break par. At the end of last year, former South Suburban…

From his hilltop headquarters above Colorado Springs, James Dobson has issued numerous edicts about how people should live their lives. Now the most powerful religious broadcaster on the planet, warning of the perils of “militant, radical feminism,” is trying to control how Christians throughout the world read the Bible. And…

Making book: Staring out from newstands across the country is the face of JonBenet Ramsey, which graces the cover of a new St. Martin’s paperback named Death of a Little Princess. All told, over 100,000 JonBenet faces were rushed to print–which, coincidentally enough, is close to the number of dollars…