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Thom Lancy joined the Air Force straight out of Denver’s George Washington High School because he wanted to see the world. “I like adventure,” he says. “I’d rather be launching F-14s off of aircraft carriers than working at McDonald’s.” As it turns out, he didn’t launch any Tomcats. He guarded…

Most days, Jack Eads, 61 and blind, sits in his room at the Barth Hotel in lower downtown and putters around with one of his accordions. That’s something he can do by himself. But his deft touch recently got him in big trouble: A saleswoman at the Walgreens drugstore in…

Descending from the Summit: Reviews of the Denver Summit of the Eight–and the city that hosted it–are still trickling in. Fortunately, the international press ignored some of the more local-yokel activities that accessorized the event, including puffed-up pride exhibited by the two hometown dailies. Camera-toting Denver Post editor Dennis Britton…

At first Ken Kosanke’s research was underappreciated. “We were making these colored balls of fire, and so to see what they looked like, we’d throw them up in the air, because the chemistry changes,” he recalls. “Unfortunately, we had a neighbor whose garage had burned down after it was struck…

Twenty years ago, Fidel Ramos found the living conditions in Canon City’s “Old Max” penitentiary so appalling that he sued the state, charging that the Department of Corrections was inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on its inmates. A federal judge agreed with him, and Ramos’s lawsuit changed the entire Colorado…

Badge Company Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s June 19 column, “Putting the Boulder Police on Report”: Westword’s persistence on the Ramseys and Boulder was a good thing in the beginning. But now, go after the parents or Boulder government and please, let this little child rest in peace. JonBenet Ramsey did nothing…

The Rocky Flats grand jurors are about to get their day in court. Two days, actually: Courtroom C-159 at the federal courthouse, the building that recently hosted the trial of Tim McVeigh, has been reserved for two days this week for a “confidential, closed proceeding.” The grand jurors are about…

“I call it the gargoyle,” says Scott Stone, owner and sole proprietor of the Stone Fossil Co. of Frontier, Wyoming. “It’s one of the most incredible finds ever. I mean, it’s a fifty-million-year-old gargoyle.” Stone has never seen the piece, but, like many others, he has heard about it. He…

In 1975, Colorado’s brash young governor said no to the highway lobby. Newly elected on an environmental platform, Dick Lamm vowed to “drive a silver spike” through plans for a southwest suburban beltway linking I-70 and I-25. Lamm said the highway would foster suburban sprawl and gridlock and that the…

Proponents of the Animas-La Plata Water Project (ALP) in southwestern Colorado have agreed “in concept” to a reduced version of the project that knocks non-Indian water users out of the picture, according to confidential documents obtained by Westword. The Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes, whose tribal councils have…

Patrick Robb’s business philosophy is as unambiguous as the army tanks parked outside his small South Denver home. Taxpayers, he argues, spent a fortune bankrolling the fiercesome weapons of the Cold War. Now that the war is over, it’s time to get some back. “I look at it this way,”…

G-string: This week’s Denver Summit of the Eight has inspired a global village of cottage industries hoping to bask in the reflected glow of the 50-watt klieg lights. On the commercial side, there’s the Faux Show opening Friday at the Art & Artists Gallery, with “repainted great masterworks” from France,…

Financial consultant Richard Daniel has been on the receiving end of more than $30,000 in city contracts the past few years, including the job of selecting a developer to build Denver’s controversial eighth municipal golf course at Green Valley Ranch near Denver International Airport. At the same time, Daniel, who…

Letty Milstein may get her day in court after all–the Colorado Supreme Court. The mother of flamboyant Denver socialite Judi Wolf, Letty has been caught in the middle of a year-long battle over her freedom since her daughter petitioned the Denver Probate Court to appoint a temporary guardian in April…

The Late Shift Excellent story by Karen Bowers about the murder of the security guard (“Graveyard Shift,” June 5). The number of people at the Denver Wastewater facility saying “I can’t believe this” probably hasn’t decreased since the killing, either. Imagine the joyous commute to work (is someone going to…

Everything is going according to plan in Boulder. Not according to the “plan” cited by police chief Tom Koby back in January–back when it seemed like there might actually be an arrest in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, Boulder’s only official homicide of 1996. And not according to the plan…

The town of Laporte sits on the edge of the Roosevelt National Forest, its back turned to the interstate a few miles away, and that’s how it should be. Fewer than ten miles from the heart of Fort Collins, Laporte is the kind of nostalgic refuge from the big city…

This month Letty Milstein gained a permanent guardian–and lost her independence permanently. Refusing 83-year-old Letty the right to appear at her own hearing last week, as well as the right to hire an attorney to represent her interests at that hearing, Denver Probate Court Judge C. Jean Stewart ruled on…

Over the years, the Pikes Peak Hill Climb has survived fatal crashes, inclement weather on the windswept summit and even the oddball behavior of a Texan named Bill Williams, who in 1929 insisted on pushing a peanut up the 14,110-foot mountain with his nose. But a proposal to pave the…

Denver mayor Wellington Webb is taking advantage of the upcoming summit of industrial nations to push a personal agenda that ranges from special-interest politics to the interests of an old friend. While he was in Washington last month trying to line up federal money to help pay for the Denver…