Dave Minshall doesn’t get recognized on the street all that often these days, even though he spent well over two decades as a featured journalist on Denver television. But once a day or so, he says, someone will approach him and ask, “Didn’t you used to be…?” His stock answer:…
Heavy Traffic Road to nowhere: T.R. Witcher’s “Collision Course,” in the April 19 issue, confirms what I have thought for a long time: Motorists are a greater threat to public safety than are murderers. Last year, car accidents claimed a total of 84 lives. Motorists killed 37 pedestrians. By contrast,…
State of Siege The answer man: Regarding Alan Prendergast’s “Chronology of a Big Fat Lie,” in the April 19 issue: Now that CBS News and 60 Minutes have given us cause to reflect, once again, on the events at Columbine High two years ago, perhaps a modest proposal is in…
When schoolchildren visit the Museo de las Américas, one of the first pieces Jacquelynn McDaniel shows them is a contemporary painting titled “Pensamiento,” Spanish for “thought.” The first thing the kids notice is a large skull peering out from the dark background, she says, and they usually hate the piece…
In the coming years, Denver residents will see some major — and expensive — expansions and renovations at the city’s Big Four institutions. The Denver Art Museum and the Denver Zoo are both using money from a 1999 bond initiative to pay for major expansions; the Denver Museum of Nature…
Tier I Denver Museum of Nature and Science — $7,205,093 Denver Zoo — $5,636,952 Denver Art Museum — $5,636,952 Denver Botanic Gardens — $3,252,087 Tier II * Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities — $883,938 Butterfly Pavilion and Insect Center — $563,899 Central City Opera — $215,360 Cherry Creek…
On July 23, 1996, Adrienne Anderson grabbed her briefcase and drove across town to Gaetano’s restaurant, where she’d be meeting for the first time with some of the other Denverites who sat on the Metro Wastewater Reclamation District’s board of directors. Denver mayor Wellington Webb had appointed Anderson to the…
Back in 1946, when Duncan Clark built his Trailer Haven Mobile Home Park, East Colfax Avenue could be a pretty lonely place. Fitzsimons Army Hospital, which sat practically across the street, was one of his only neighbors. Even Aurora didn’t make it past Peoria Street until 1955, when the city…
Denver will get its chance to make a lasting impression on Boeing executives next week when the aerospace company makes a second visit to the Mile High City. Boeing, which announced last month that it plans to move out of its Seattle headquarters — taking 500 jobs and lots of…
“Please let me introduce myself. I’m Randy Miller, owner of the Colorado Daily…” So began a letter, headlined “Dear Reader,” that appeared on the front page of the March 5 Daily, a newspaper in its 109th year of serving the residents of Boulder — and while Miller sustained a friendly…
The furies of the National Hockey League — 130-mile-an-hour slapshots, player salaries that would numb Bill Gates’s checkbook, blood-streaked goons exchanging insults in French and Russian — have once more drawn all of Denver under their spell. Since the Avs swept Vancouver, Cup craziness has spilled out of the sports…
Native Truths Best intentions: Just about my favorite part of your Best of Denver issue is reading all the letters of response from people complaining about how lame Denver is. What a bunch of whiners and babies and people whose self-esteem is way too high: “Denver is still a backwater…
When former state patrolman Bill Wilson arrived for his interview with the Environmental Protection Agency in 1988, nearly thirty years had elapsed since he’d cruised the lonesome roads that traversed the Lowry Bombing Range. A weird Cold War paranoia lay across that land in the early 1960s. Scarred dirt roads…
Denise Dixon was dreaming. In her dream, she woke up from a deep sleep, cold and sweating at the same time, and looked around to find her bedroom walls covered with blood. There was a face in the room, but she couldn’t make it out. She screamed. Then the phone…
Seth Brigham fits right in at the Penny Lane coffeehouse. A longtime Boulder resident, he produces an off-color program for the city’s public-access CATV Channel 54, during which he makes political statements against corporate greed and government censorship. And although Brigham is bipolar and suffers from anxiety, he handles his…
The last two weeks have not been the best of times for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. The agency has been in serious damage-control mode since the court-ordered release of hundreds of pages of police records that indicated the JCSO was telling something less than the whole truth about its…
Last November, after the board of directors for the Eulipions theater group sold the historic El Jebel Shrine Temple for $3.9 million, board chairman Darrell Nulan said that whatever proceeds weren’t directed toward the group’s debt would be used to establish an endowment that would ensure the future of the…
It’s not easy working for the state prison system. You spend the majority of your waking hours dealing with the criminal element — or at least thinking about the criminal element — and when you get home, you have to selectively edit out details of the workday for your kids’…
The fight against the Denver dailies’ joint operating agreement ended not with a bang, but with a snicker. Or maybe two. The second such bit of mirth took place on April 12, day two of a hearing before U.S. District Judge John Kane, who had been asked to issue a…
On a recent evening at Archery Adventures, a bow-hunting store in an Aurora strip mall, Bob Cook was setting up his slide projector for a seminar on turkey calling. It was still a couple of weeks before the start of the spring turkey- hunting season, but that didn’t matter: Bob…
The Bust of Denver Fossil fuel: Congratulations, Westword! With your new Best of Denver 2001 edition, you’ve confirmed, once again, what a tacky rag you’ve become. Like that ’70s dinosaur, Patricia Calhoun, Westword is one more reason to think Denver is still a backwater cowtown. Best of Denver 2001 was…
One hot morning last summer, a small valve was turned on at the Lowry Superfund Site, and groundwater from the old landfill began flowing through a newly constructed sewer line. The water had no color, no odor, and had already undergone several procedures at the landfill site to remove certain…
