First, the good news. This was the year Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open, the British Open, the PGA and seven other tournaments with the ease of a golfing god, then graciously praised the efforts of his merely mortal opponents. It was the year that Rulon Gardner, an unknown Greco-Roman…
A Winning Card The greening of Denver: Justin Berton’s “Card Sharps,” his story in the December 7 issue on fake green cards, is another in a long history of Westword’s honest-to-God reporting that will eventually wake up the hacks over at the Denver dailies. After all, it’s easier to make…
On Thanksgiving morning, the White Spot parking lot holds nine cars — two of them ancient Pinto station wagons — and one bright-yellow cafe racer of a motorcycle. A well-dressed man and woman, not old enough to be grandparents but much too dignified to ever go sledding, sit on the…
A man who says his name is Alejandro promises he can make you “American” for $170. Alejandro works outside the coin laundromat in the Zuni Plaza, at West 30th Avenue and Zuni Street. He’s about 5 feet 7 inches tall, with a stocky build, and today he’s wearing a blue…
Friday, May 5, started out cloudless and hot. By 8:30 a.m., Ron Ruhr’s girlfriend had left for work and her ten-year-old daughter had gone to school. But Ruhr, a self-employed carpenter, had set aside this day to have some fun. Bill, a man he had taken goose hunting, was so…
Colorado will lose one of only two black-studies majors next spring when the African American Studies (AAS) degree at Denver’s Metropolitan State College is eliminated. The move is a blow to the school, which prides itself on its commitment to diversity, as well as to the faculty and students involved…
Leonard Carlo is so upset, he can’t even curse properly. He shakes his big bald head, slaps a callused hand on the bar, stutters through a four-letter invective, then strokes his long white whiskers. “Motherfucker!” he says at last. Carlo, proprietor of the notorious Leonard’s II tavern in Colorado Springs,…
The hair-netted men and women who prepare and serve lunch every day in school cafeterias across Denver are fed up. They have been for years. Until recently, they kept silent out of fear for their jobs. But concerns about low wages that max out at about $10 an hour, little…
Nothing breeds success like, well, success. And John Fielder has had plenty of it — on the business side, anyway. Although Amendment 25, the growth-control initiative he helped create and publicize, was bulldozed into oblivion like a Douglas County prairie dog habitat on November 7, the photographer’s must-have coffee-table book,…
Paonia, about seventy miles from Grand Junction, is no one’s idea of a metropolis: All 1,800 of the town’s citizens could fit into Denver’s Paramount Theatre with room to spare, and its downtown, spread out along the optimistically named Grand Avenue, is two blocks in length, no doubt making parades…
College admissions directors are well aware of a phenomenon known as the “Flutie Effect.” The Flutie in question, of course, is Doug Flutie, the slippery bantam quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. (He also has his own breakfast cereal, Flutie Flakes, sold regionally, whose digestive “Flutie Effect” is another story.) The…
Poetry in Notions Yeah, that’s the ticket: We were attending Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s 1985 Vajradhatu Seminary at the Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center west of Fort Collins, and before one of Rinpoche’s most important talks, I was selected to make sure all those attending had tickets. Before allowing people to enter,…
April 1997, New York City Peter Hale woke up as usual to an AM radio station that rattled off traffic conditions, sports highlights and news updates every ten minutes. Sunlight was already sifting in the windows of his loft in Greenwich Village as he left his lover, Joseph, asleep in…
It was February 1998, and as Chip Berry looked around the nearly empty Belcaro Shopping Center, his old anger came back. For four years, his landlord had been promising to fill the center with shops that would help bring business back to the old strip mall. Hodel’s Drug Store, which…
Now that the election season is (mostly) over, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at a lot of malls and stores around town — except, of course, for the giant wall on the back of the Denver Pavilions. As usual, it looks a lot like nothing. Mall manager…
In a crowded surplus store in downtown’s ragged, industrial backyard, Arturo Rascon hits pay dirt. “How much for these?” he asks, appraising two wooden crates of Russian pipe wrenches. “These?” replies Ralph Long Jr. “Well, let’s see.” Long, the store’s proprietor, holds up one of the tools, which promptly breaks…
In the beginning, television was rife with creative possibilities because no rules had been written and practically nothing was out of bounds. But since then, TV genres have become so deeply entrenched that even the slightest variation from the template is seen as an incredible risk that no sane person…
Broncs Cheer Play as you go: I agree with Bill Gallo that the name of the new Broncos stadium is meaningless (“The Name Game,” November 23). The only thing that matters is how the Broncos play at that new stadium! Jay Whiting Denver The football stadium bard: Bill Gallo –…
As Denver’s economy finally gained momentum after the deep slump of the ’80s, a group of hardy entrepreneurs set to work building an empire. The budding capitalists were all young women. For the most part, they were also foreigners, having only recently immigrated to this country from Korea; a few…
On a cold afternoon in January 1995, the parents of 43-year-old Denver securities lawyer Daniel B. Matter reported to Denver police that their son was missing and probably suicidal. Matter struggled with manic depression, and while his mother was visiting from Florida to keep him company after the holidays, he’d…
On October 24, Denver Police Chief Gerald Whitman’s team of public-information officers hosted local reporters at a meet-and-greet session in the DPD’s press room. The gathering was a throwback to the alleged good old days when cops and reporters sat barstool to barstool. This morning get-together, however, was fueled by…
Standing at a makeshift podium in a field outside the Florence federal prison complex, Jim Davis gestured angrily at the stark walls encased in razor wire. Dozens of listeners sat on hay bales, many of them broad-shouldered men clutching signs calling for “Fair and Equal Treatment” and wearing T-shirts that…
