Let them eat tulips: The Central Platte Valley has suddenly become the destination for Denver’s society crowd. The dusty railyards that used to provide a swell home to hobos, drunks and river rats are becoming just a memory, and civic boosters can’t stop yammering about it. The city’s patrons and…
The houses are still there, sitting in the middle of the Auraria campus as though nothing had ever happened. They stand side by side, one short block of them, red brick and green trim, Victorian and cottage, reminders of a time — and a community — long gone. Josie Acosta…
It’s four o’clock on a late September afternoon, and Sam Hammer, the flying traffic cowboy for Country 104.3 and 950 AM/The Fan, would already be in the air if it weren’t for one little problem: He can’t find his plane. So he picks up the handset of the mobile radio…
For the last month or so, I’ve been shucking littlenecks from the supermarket, splashing them with a little Tabasco and eating dinner in front of the television set. One night before tuning in, I constructed a pastrami on rye the size of a housing project. Trapped in a couch dent,…
Saturday, July 17, 1999. Grace Aragon drives 170 miles from her home in Denver to the Kit Carson Correctional Center, a private prison on the outskirts of Burlington, just ten minutes shy of the Kansas border. She comes to visit her son Kenny, who at age 22 has already served…
The young man in the tailored gray suit stands behind the defense table and waggles his finger at Judge R. Brooke Jackson. He’s pretty full of himself, and he occasionally looks back at the gallery to see if his audience is equally impressed with his courtroom presence and vocabulary. Except…
Jimmy Myers was eighteen the night he rolled the car with the body of Geoffrey Hobin inside. Eighteen months later, in March 1999, he stood before Judge R. Brooke Jackson to be sentenced — not for murder, but for burglary. Now that a jury had acquitted Myers’s friend and co-defendant,…
When Coors Brewing Company worker Homer James was summoned to a meeting with his supervisors in April 1996, he thought it was because he’d been called “nigger” by a co-worker. Instead, to his surprise, the topic was sexual harassment. Coors had been sued over the issue in 1994 and –…
At the heart of Denver’s most contentious school-board race is a weed-studded field on 37th Avenue and Zuni Street. It will be the site of northwest Denver’s newest elementary school. But the fenced-in lot has also come to symbolize years of struggle between parents in northwest Denver and the Denver…
The Santa clauseWhen former governor Roy Romer lost his seat as chairman of the Democratic National Committee last week, Colorado lost some of its national prominence — and local detective R. W. “Pete” Peterson lost one of his favorite targets. Back in early 1998, when the Washington, D.C., magazine Insight…
Mystery writer Dolores Johnson may have made a fatal mistake the first time she decided to invent a gruesome death rather than rely on inspiration from a real dry cleaner. “The idea,” she remembers, “was a body found on a conveyor belt in the morning when the dry-cleaning shop opens…
The wild, wide-open medium known as Internet radio is booming in these parts, which is good news for Sam Stock. After all, his colorful departure from the Peak earlier this year demonstrates that he’s better off in a job without too many rules. Stock’s dismissal, previously recounted in these pages…
For Angelica Harris, working for United Parcel Service seemed like the perfect job. A single mother with a two-year-old daughter, Harris was looking for a part-time job that would allow her to spend some of the day with her child while providing benefits for her. A help-wanted ad for UPS…
Last November, a task force of state and local police, the FBI and the U.S. Customs Service assembled near Mile High Flea Market for an operation called Flea Powder IV. It was the latest in a twice-yearly sweep to identify counterfeit merchandise and arrest vendors who sell it. The day…
A Mississippi company plans to offer local telephone service in Colorado soon, at a price most people would consider a ripoff: $36.50 per month. Despite the high price, however, NOW Communications expects to have thousands of customers, even though US West offers a similar service for as little as $16.91…
Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden is proud of his box. His box, a solid two-foot-by-two-foot cube, is a smorgasbord of drugs; clear plastic baggies loaded with pot, bundles of psilocybin mushrooms and tiny envelopes of cocaine. “Even got some black-tar heroin,” the sheriff says, disgust clinging to his voice. The…
International relationsColorado’s foremost religious-radio talk-show host and convicted child-abuser, Bob Enyart, his mother, Connie Enyart, and a handful of other ambitious Americans managed to get themselves arrested in Auckland, New Zealand, on September 10 while protesting against President Bill Clinton, who was there for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. The…
When KBDI-TV/Channel 12 debuted in February 1980, it was as a public-television station dedicated to taking chances — and in the years since then, it has regularly provided a quirky alternative to the more stodgy KRMA-TV/ 0Channel 6. So it comes as something of a surprise that, beginning next month,…
It’s a big night on the boulevard. Federal Boulevard. Cruisers drive along with Mexican flags draped over their hoods, rap music thumping from their stereos and Mexican Independence Day smiles plastered on their faces. In their midst, a purple Impala rolls quietly along. “Check it out,” a passenger says. “That…
Dressed head to foot in orange and blue, the crazies stood and howled in the Denver night, their raucous cry of joy mingled with blood lust. Their team had just taken a late lead, and now no one could shut them up. They flapped orange pennants and waved blue caps…
Last year, three days before Christmas, in an isolated field outside the tiny Western Slope town of Mancos, Richard Skala and Kelly Green began drinking hard. The two men lived in small trailers near each other. Neither did much in the way of regular employment. Green worked a mining claim…
Late one afternoon, after an overly long day at work, I left my office and began walking toward my car. I assumed I was alone until, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a man leaning against a nearby dumpster. He appeared to be about 25 and wore…
