The most vocal liberal on the state Criminal Justice Commission has given up–driven out, he says, by politics that seem to breed prisons. In an eight-page resignation letter, Roger Lauen urged Governor Roy Romer, other commission members and legislators to “please wake up” before the current mania for building prisons…
History books remember Cynthia Ann Parker as the Anglo girl who was kidnapped at age nine from her frontier Texas home in the spring of 1836 by a Comanche raiding party. Twenty-four years later she was rescued by the Texas Rangers, then spent the few remaining years of her life…
part 2 of 2 For families that had just come through such dramatic situations, life dwindled down to mundane problems rather quickly. My car had died while Bill was still in the hospital. No, I didn’t crack it up; it just needed some warranty work. But that meant I had…
part 1 of 2 The first week in October was hell on the traumatic amputation specialists at University Hospital. Within 36 hours they received three emergency cases: a detached arm and two severed legs. On Monday, October 4, Mike Thurby of Arvada was hauling the day’s last load of trash…
Two strong forces conspired to put my head in the hands of the Ultima College of Cosmetology. The first was the inimitable ARC Value Village store at 72nd and Federal, where I have shopped for life’s little necessities for nigh on to a decade. Several years ago, ever on the…
Anton Chekhov once wrote, “Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day-to-day living that wears you out.” But then, Chekhov never appeared on CNN, electronically labeled “Victim’s Wife.” Having been in publishing for nearly twenty years, I understood from the start that Bill’s excellent adventure made excellent copy. A…
Law and disorder: State legislators are already peeved at having to find $400,000 in a tight, tight budget to fund Attorney General Gale Norton’s new “death squad” for pushing the prosecution of death penalty cases. Adding to their irritation is the fact that Norton broke her budget by about that…
What’s new? Put five circus midgets wearing swim fins on the floor and Your Denver Nuggets can find a way to lose to them. But if it’s the high-flying, trash-talking, world-beating Seattle Supersonics out there, or Hakeem the Dream and the Houston Rockets, Dan Issel’s problem children probably will kick…
Live and Let Die Regarding Steve Jackson’s “The End of the Line” in the April 6 issue: My heart goes out to Ric Games and the hundreds of thousands for finding the courage to stand up to the very thing that’s encompassing them. Too many people are being destroyed by…
When its new light-rail line is completed this year, Denver will join the ranks of “America’s most progressive cities,” promotional literature for the project says. But construction of the system, some now charge, has involved an old-fashioned conflict of interest. The Regional Transportation District, the government agency building the light-rail…
One day last month an army of bulldozers and house-movers showed up, and there went Irene Redfern’s neighborhood. But not Irene Redfern. For the past six decades Redfern’s life has revolved around the intersection of Downing and Evans. When Safeway decided to zap more than a dozen houses on her…
From the start, the fight for control of talk-radio station KNUS-AM/710 has seemed like a nineteenth-century melodrama–a crusty rich guy who’s the self-described “meanest man in Denver” versus a heartbroken blind man. And while the final chapter has yet to be written, the latest developments are positively Dickensian: A Jefferson…
cartoon…
part 2 of 2 It was also in 1985 that Ric met Danny and his lover, Brad. The pair ran black-market AZT from Mexico, selling bottles for $75 that U.S. pharmacies sold for $300–if you were lucky enough to be part of the government drug-testing program. They were carefree rebels,…
part 1 of 2 A light snow was falling as Richard Games entered the Catholic church on Palm Sunday. He dipped his fingers in holy water and crossed himself. Near the front of the sanctuary he knelt and crossed himself again. Then he rose, moved to his seat and began…
Ken Almos spoke quietly to the front-desk attendant at the Denver Swim Club, a gay bathhouse on Colfax. Two guys in the steam room were having anal sex, and he wanted them stopped. It wasn’t the sex he objected to; it was their failure to use condoms. The attendant walked…
The tapeworm has turned: A tip-top secret tape making the rounds these days promises “the truth” about all the deal-making behind Denver International Airport. Pop it into the VCR, though, and what do you get? “Corruption in High Places,” a 56-minute quasi-talk show starring Stew Webb, January 1993 Westword cover…
October 18, 1994–Two days after the miracle, the stunned Montreal Expos are crying in their Beaujolais. Don Baylor is pinching himself. And Denver fans–all five million of them–can’t seem to sober up. The Colorado Rockies have amazed the world by winning the National League pennant in just their sophomore year,…
A Matter of Corpse Regarding “Deliverance” by Arthur Hodges in the March 30 issue: Mr. Arthur Hodges, you are a sick and twisted writer…I love it! Madison Sterling Denver The Edge of Right Regarding “Life on the Edge” by Karen Bowers in the March 23 issue: Our town is not…
A partner in a law firm that has been paid more than $800,000 in fees by the city of Denver for airport legal work was censured two years ago for conduct the Colorado Supreme Court said “involved dishonesty and misrepresentation.” Darrell E. Nulan was suspended from practice for sixty days…
Three weeks ago, Herschel Caldwell, the owner of a small newspaper company called Focus Journals Inc., filed for protection from his creditors under federal bankruptcy laws. The filing came as little surprise to, among others, Oliva de Castanos, a former editor of Caldwell’s Denver Medical Journal, who had been trying…
President Clinton’s Superfund environmental cleanup plan has sparked criticism by a group that includes some of the country’s most prominent polluters, but the problem isn’t Clinton’s affinity for environmentalism. These business leaders are joining the ranks of environmentalists who claim that the president isn’t green enough. In fact, one of…
