News

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…

Crossing the Line I couldn’t believe my eyes as I was reading the first installment of the arrest saga of Kenny Be (Worst-Case Scenario, June 5). The same thing happened to me on Wednesday, June 4. I was walking to the evening Rockies game from my usual free parking spot…

The passengers have to wait for the driver to stop flirting with the female ticket agent so he can start loading the Tuesday morning bus to El Paso. Mothers keep one eye on their children dressed in their Sunday best while rearranging the luggage around their feet–old Samsonites fortified with…

For Kay Howe, the remote Lisbon Valley in southeast Utah is a place to escape to. Just across the state line from Colorado, the uninhabited valley offers sweeping views of two states. “When you’re up on top of Three Step Mesa, you have a knockout view of the La Sal…

At first glance, or even second, it would seem that Vickie Corder doesn’t have a good feel for bingo. The thirty-year-old Arvada resident recently reported she was down $30,000 from playing Pickles, a lottery-like pull-tab game popular in bingo halls. (An acquaintance says the figure is actually closer to $60,000.)…

A state senator who stands barely 5-6 in his wingtips could be more damaging to Pat Bowlen’s hopes for a new football stadium than the defensive line of the Jacksonville Jaguars was to John Elway last December. Last week Bowlen and the Metropolitan Football Stadium Authority finally admitted that there’s…

Ramsey tough: Peter Boyles’s full-page ad in Sunday’s Boulder Camera and “open letter to John and Patsy Ramsey” earned the radio talk-show host another splash of national publicity–and was a bargain promo deal for his station. That last line about the couple having “led Colorado and the nation on a…