part 1 of 2 Dan Frantz remembers The Gaze–that piercing, dark-eyed stare that made prodigies tremble and old tenors sing their lungs out. The Gaze is as vivid to him now as it was three decades ago, the first time he saw Antonia Brico. Frantz was twelve or thirteen years…
How the West is run: Yee-haw! Colorado’s 1996 campaign is shaping up to be quite a horse race. The latest to explore a bid is Wes McKinley, rancher, trail guide, cowboy poet and foreman of the state’s first special grand jury, convened in 1989 to investigate alleged environmental crimes at…
If you thought Paul Weissmann, the 31-year-old bartender candidate for U.S. Senate, was just another “Mr. Smith” trying to go to Washington, it’s probably time to take another look. Jimmy Stewart may have ended up in Washington as a stooge-turned-crusader in the 1939 film, but Weissmann is nobody’s fool. He…
Eighteen months ago Jim Kleber, long suspected of killing his wife, Lois, in 1992, seemed on the verge of confiding what her family wanted, yet feared, to hear: where he’d hidden her body. “I just want to do the right thing,” Kleber told an Arvada police investigator. Now, however, his…
Colorado’s fast-growing wine industry revels in the image of romantic Western Slope vineyards and tasting rooms perched on mesas. But a nasty dispute has many Colorado vintners treating one of the state’s largest wineries like a jug of Ripple at a society soiree. Rick Turley, owner of the Palisade-based Colorado…
Jailhouse Blues Karen Bowers’s “Hard Time,” in the October 25 issue, is Pulitzer material. She writes about the common criminals–the prison guards, wardens and judges who get paid with tax dollars to run modern-day concentration camps. State officials who allow and encourage rapes among prisoners are heinous crime offenders, and…
It’s Friday afternoon, one of the busiest times for any airport. But at Denver International Airport’s Concourse A, the throngs of business travelers who should be celebrating the end of a long week are nowhere to be seen. The hallways are mostly empty, only two airplanes are parked at the…
part 1 of 2 James Mervin, Colorado prison inmate No. 56225, was moving again. Over the years, he’d learned to pack quickly, tossing his meager belongings into a box so as not to upset the guard waiting to escort him to his new home. He didn’t think much about it…
part 2 of 2 If Hilton had named Gray as his attacker, says DOC legal counsel Brad Rockwell, Gray would have been slam-dunked into solitary to await a disciplinary hearing. But since Hilton had not yet named his assailant, Gray stayed where he was. On July 20 Gray was given…
Demo derby: When Colorado’s Democrats gathered on October 14 for their biennial issues conference, state party chair Mike Beatty, scheduled to deliver the opening speech, was missing in action. He finally appeared in time for lunch (where Don Fowler, head of the Democratic National Committee, was the speaker) and offered…
Frankie Accardo, the philosopher, was continually baffled by people who diluted their whiskey with water. “That’s alcohol abuse,” he’d say. He also wondered about men wearing bright plaid sports jackets. (“What’d the guy do? Shoot a couch?”) And he had no use whatsoever for five-year-olds. “Everybody out here knows an…
The Jitters coffeehouse in lower downtown bills itself as Denver’s first “on-line cafe,” offering customers hourly rental of a bank of computers linked to the Internet. Now the cafe’s owner is feeling jittery about an encounter last month with a man he believes may be linked to the terrorist group…
When the elevator doors close at the State Capitol, paranoia can set in. The first thing a patron sees is this ominous sign: “This Area Now Under Camera Surveillance…Vandals Will Be Prosecuted.” In an upper corner of the elevator hangs a camera. Please take a closer look. And relax–unless you…
Fred Kummer, the developer Denver just agreed to give $25 million to subsidize the Adam’s Mark Hotel, lost a $5 million federal racial-discrimination suit in St. Louis ten months ago. But city officials in Denver–which has one of the most prominent black mayoral administrations in the country–knew about the St…
Parks and Wreck I read with interest Michelle Dally Johnston’s October 18 article “A River of Asphalt Runs Through It,” concerning Mayor Webb, the “parks mayor,” trying to permit a road through one of Denver’s largest parks, the Chatfield Arboretum. Obviously, the Sierra Club made a mistake in endorsing him…
part 1 of 2 It wasn’t so much that Duncan Ferguson made peace with death; it was more that the novelty had worn off. The fact is, if you are going to climb very difficult rock faces without a partner, a rope or any kind of protection, death will be…
part 2 of 2 Art Higbee was nineteen when he met Jim Erickson, via Erickson’s girlfriend, via Erickson’s dog. “I lived right down the street,” he recalls, “and she brought the dog over because their landlord didn’t want pets. She asked if I could keep Jim’s dog for a while.”…
Next week William Gates will celebrate his fortieth birthday. The products sold by his company, Microsoft, are used in an estimated 80 percent of the world’s personal computers. Recently, Forbes magazine named him the richest man in the country, again, with a personal fortune of about $15 billion. The other…
“I guess I need to give you the right metaphor,” says Jesse King, program director of Denver’s Outward Bound School, who can’t answer a question like “How safe is rock climbing?” without resorting to a metaphor. “Skiing comes close,” he decides. “You can ski slow and safely and not push…
Law and what’s your order? You see plenty of odd things on Broadway at midnight, but a vision spied at the Taco Bell at Iliff late one Saturday is still the taco the town. Customers cruising through the drive-through lane were stunned to find themselves conversing with a uniformed Denver…
St. Jude must be working overtime. First the patron of lost causes gets the Seattle Mariners into the playoff picture after nineteen seasons of rain-dampened futility and one collapsing stadium roof. Then he squeaks the M’s past the big, bad New York Yankees. As if that weren’t enough, our man…
Coming Clean Michelle Dally Johnston’s October 11 article on Tom Strickland’s U.S. Senate candidacy, “Mr. Clean,” was cheap and shoddy. If his father’s sweeping the college library’s floor wasn’t janitorial, what the devil was it? If the writer wants to attack the law firm of Brownstein Hyatt, that is her…
