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…
Previous Westword article
“The Shed Spread”
October 3, 1996
This summer’s outdoor-concert season was the weakest in years. Doesn’t anyone want to hear music outside anymore?
If it seems like a buck doesn’t buy as much of a booty-shaking good time as it used to during stripper night at your favorite local gay bar, you’re right. Denver police have warned bar owners that their go-go boys had better fill in their cracks or face the consequences…
The anonymous message showed up in the voice mail of World Class Limousine last month. “It’s good you run black cars,” the caller said, “because you’re going to need them for the funeral.” “I expected some flak over this, but not to this extent,” says Major Marcks, the operator of…
Let them drink Guinness No matter how hard Coors Brewing Company tries to clean up its act, the Golden-based business just can’t catch a break. Having successfully smoothed over angry unions, environmentalists, people of color and gays, Coors has now irritated the Irish — a hard-drinking population that a brewery…
I’m instantly awake and driven to purchase. Pot holders. Deck paint. Sturdy overalls, size 2T. Disposable rubber gloves, the 75-pair pack. Sunny Delite juice drink. A-point-and-shoot camera. Things I’ve never seen before but that are so ingenious — and such a bargain! — that I must have them. Now. So…
Denver Post sportswriter Adam Schefter is among this town’s most prominent Denver Broncos reporters/commentators. In addition to getting plenty of inches in the Post’s sports section during pigskin season, Schefter appears regularly on KOA and is a permanent part of KUSA-TV/ Channel 9’s team. But while such extracurricular gigs have…
It’s going to be a long, cold winter at the El Vado apartments. The complex was originally a motel, built in the 1940s on the site of a former gold and silver mill in the canyon linking Boulder and Nederland; in 1975, El Vado was converted into nine apartments. A…
The Bobolink — named for a small brown and white bird that frequents the area — is a bucolic trail meandering alongside Boulder Creek. In the marshy water near the trail’s head stand tall yellow narcissus or, later in the year, bulrushes with their hard, brown bottle-brush tops. Farther along,…
