One hundred seventy-five years after he should have died, Lance Grabowski is still here and looking as resplendent as ever. For this crisp fall day, he has selected a bear-claw-and-mink-fur necklace. He also sports a nineteenth-century do-rag, emblazoned with dozens of pins and medallions, as well as tanned, coffee-colored buckskin…
Give Me Libertarians Ballots, not bullets: Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “Mr. Stanley, We Presume,” in the October 17 issue: Thanks, Calhoun, for the non-judgmental article about Libertarians (in spite of Rick Stanley’s disrespect for the decorum of the office he is running for). Don’t forget it was the Libertarian Party that…
Krist Novoselic sounds weary from his hotel room in Austin. When asked about the “survivor” tag that the press has attached to Eyes Adrift, he seems slightly peeved. “It’s a story we never really propagated,” Novoselic says. “That’s just a coincidence — how we all played in trios. People jumped…
In the beginning, the Big Bang created the heavens and the earth. The Big Bang, not God. Also, camels and lions were never immortal, and neither were humans, who actually used to be monkeys. Oh, and get this: The Earth is billions of years old, not six thousand, like the…
On the evening of June 8, 2001, Delores and Charles Gates received the kind of phone call every parent dreads: Their nineteen-year-old son was calling from jail. They barely had time to absorb that information when the news got much worse. “Get me out of here,” John Gates told his…
The last time this town saw Charlton Heston — the living, breathing movie star, or what passes for him these days — was less than two weeks after the shootings at Columbine High School, when the National Rifle Association held its annual convention in Denver. Moses came down from the…
It’s a dinner party waiting to happen, but where is the dinner? The silver urn centerpiece sprouts black ostrich feathers instead of flowers. The high-rent china is stacked five pieces deep, and in each soup bowl some wise-ass butler has placed a man’s necktie, neatly folded, rather than soup. The…
Many old-timers believe that radio’s golden age took place during the ’30s and ’40s, when high-quality dramas, serials and variety shows filled the schedule and television had not yet taken hold of the popular imagination. Baby boomers, meanwhile, are generally divided over whether the medium was at its best during…
Their amazing quarterback stands 5′ 11″ and weighs 185 — which makes him three inches taller and ten pounds heavier than their top running back. They call older men “sir,” get straight A’s in calculus and would no sooner cheap-shot an opponent than fly a Mig for Iraq. In the…
Raining on His Parade A sorry development: I was disgusted by everything I read in Alan Prendergast’s October 3 “Viva Las Villa!” Even if all of the developers at the Parade of Homes were on the up and up, the excessive displays — too much living space, too much water,…
John Losasso still recalls the dark mornings when his father would rouse him from bed at 3 a.m. The sleepy schoolboy was just ten, but his dad needed help making deliveries, so he was pressed into service. The elder Losasso was a produce peddler who drove a horse-drawn wagon through…
For much of the past decade, Columbus Day has been tense in Denver. Parading Italian-Americans have been confronted by Native American protesters and their allies, hundreds of people have been arrested, and animosity between the two groups has grown. This year promises more of the same. The Columbus Day parade…
Back in 1998, the dot-com wave was at its peak, and it seemed like money — big money — would flow forever. Chris Sword, then 29, had just moved to Denver from Detroit for his job with Lincoln-Mercury and was living in corporate housing down in the Denver Tech Center…
Mad magazine couldn’t come up with a better prank than what’s now posted on the http://coloradicals.org Web site. While Denver police chief Gerry Whitman scrounges through detectives’ drawers at the DPD’s so-called Intelligence Bureau, trying to round up every last scrap of paper testifying to the bureau’s surveillance of civilians,…
“I’m not here for me,” the man in the waiting room says. “I’m here with my friend. He needs a job. He’s talking to someone about a job in one of those offices. Maybe I should be in there,” he says nervously, twisting a little in his chair. Recently laid…
When measured by circulation, Denver’s MediaNews Group is the seventh-largest newspaper company in these United States, with a roster of more than 120 publications topped by the Denver Post. But until recent years, MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton, who put together this sprawling enterprise and watches over its day-to-day operation, received…
The only sticking point in the romance, Andi remembers, occurred last spring when KC showed up in Moab with a brand-new cherry-red Avalanche. A Chevy Avalanche. “When I saw him show up with it, I thought it was a rental,” she says. “I couldn’t believe he’d buy a Chevy.” KC…
Trick or Treatment Courting disaster: I very much enjoyed Stuart Steers’s “Looking for a Fix,” in the September 26 issue. You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats certain groups within it — children, women and sick people in particular. When it comes to the disease…
Suppose, for a moment, that you’re in the market for a seven-figure custom house. Nothing fancy, mind you. Just a little something for the missus and the wee tykes, now that you’ve outgrown that quaint pied-à-terre downtown. Something different, something fresh. Something to make your friends weep with envy. Seeking…
The man behind the wheel of the forty-foot passenger bus sits and waits for 9:12 a.m., the minute that he’s scheduled to pull out of a stop at Seventh and Water streets. But on this recent Tuesday morning, he also waits for some kind of clue as to what, exactly,…
For the first time in a long while, the workplace culture at the Denver Botanic Gardens is looking rosy. After more than two years of high turnover and management problems, DBG executive director Brinsley Burbidge has stepped down, and employees wasted no time in toasting his departure. Staff members heard…
Judging from those whopping ads that popped up this week in dailies across Qwest’s service area, the bumpy ride of the telecom’s “Ride the Light” slogan has come to an abrupt halt. From here on out, Qwest’s slogan will be “Spirit of Service.” But given the current lineup of Qwest…
