Letty Milstein didn’t believe she needed a guardian to look out for her best interests. All the feisty, opinionated 82-year-old widow really wanted in the spring of 1996 was to spend her remaining years in the home she’d occupied with her husband, Jules, for more than three decades, in the…
Betty Gibbs carefully aims her Isuzu Trooper down a steep dirt road carved out of the side of Fourmile Canyon. It is snowing, and the narrow path has become slippery; with hair-raising dropoffs to the south, drivers must cooperate to negotiate the route safely. But as an oncoming Volkswagen van…
When William Minnix was arrested in Ohio last summer, he thought he knew what to expect. He knew he would be extradited to Colorado to face a charge of violating his parole on a felony theft conviction. He also knew that the 1,000-mile trip back to prison, shackled in a…
The following are excerpts from a diary kept by William Minnix, a convicted felon transported from Ohio to Colorado last July by Transcor America to face a charge of parole violation. Minnix claims the trip covered twenty states in twenty days. May 27: Arrested in Cincinnati, OH. June 20: Extradition…
Sam’s Land doesn’t look like a historical treasure. The building’s stucco exterior is crumbling, the crinkled tin roof needs attention and the neon tubes on the sign out front hang like broken old bones. But to preservationists in Golden, the rich past of this fading relic is no secret. Built…
To the customers of utilities like US West have the right to know how well the company is serving the public? And with the local telephone market starting to open up to competition, should consumers have access to the service records of all local telephone providers? These questions have come…
Room service: Since Denver’s finally selling off the old DA’s building at Speer and Colfax (pending a final Denver City Council vote next Monday, and assuming no one else gets his shorts in a knot over the sweet deal cut with a Hispanic group), you’d think the city was swimming…
If you see the guy in the next cubicle typing frantically during his lunch break, it may not be because he’s trying to meet an important deadline. He may just be hooked into a worldwide sex network based in a drab suburban Denver office building. Men from around the world…
To get a feel for this thing–for the magnitude–imagine that your Denver Broncos were to win consecutive playoff games against Pittsburgh, New England and Kansas City, all of them on the road. Then try to imagine Elway and company facing heavily favored Green Bay in the Super Bowl–on their fourth…
To Surge and Protect Thank you, thank you for Patricia Calhoun’s “Autumn of Angst,” in the December 11 issue. Assholes are everywhere; Denver just happened to have a surge. Stupidity breeds stupidity, but we are still a great town with great people. Jill Strunk via the Internet Big Brother Is…
Movie special-effects maestro Phil Tippett has won billowing praise for the jaw-dropping digital transformations that turned models of alien bugs into the fearsome insect armies of Starship Troopers. But the 46-year-old founder of Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, is his own most astonishing piece of transformation. If he’s at the…
There are many things Californians love about Colorado–the mountains, the skiing, affordable real estate. But while Californians have to visit or move here to sample those delights, there’s one Colorado pleasure they may soon be able to enjoy without ever leaving home. Colorado’s relatively cheap power supply, a by-product of…
Last March a 35-million-year-old stingray fossil found in Wyoming became a television star and a symbol of all that is wrong with private fossil hunters. Now a national organization of fossil hunters and collectors has mounted a rebuttal campaign and threatened a lawsuit, arguing that a National Geographic TV show…
On a recent afternoon, eleven members of the Territorial Daughters of Colorado convene their final monthly meeting before the winter holiday break. They have a full program: the officers’ reports (the checking account stands at $543.07), the minutes of the October meeting (approved), a membership update (nothing to report), food…
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas: No, not because the City and County Building resembles a rancid birthday cake, its garish lights illuminating the world’s most bizarre–but secular, and thus lawsuit-proof–nativity scene, with the Two Wise Snowmen flanking the stable holding Baby Jesus. And not because the dailies…
It’s 11 a.m., give or take, and Ed Phillips has just arrived for work, carrying a bag of King Soopers pastries and a vinyl suitcase bound with a belt. He opens the door, which sets off a ringer and a set of lights in the back furnace room. Phillips’s assistant,…
Two things happened to Carrie Lucas when she was teaching middle-school science on the Pacific island of Saipan that radically changed her life. The first, she says, was positive: “I just knew then that I had a calling to the ministry.” The second was considerably different: Lucas contracted a rare…
Westword staff writer Alan Prendergast has been awarded the Morton Margolin Prize for Distinguished Business Reporting from the University of Denver. Prendergast was honored for his February 22, 1996, story “Out for Blood,” which described Boulder biotech firm Somatogen’s efforts to tap into the $5 billion international blood-transfusion market. Named…
After studying plans for Montrose’s new library, religiously conservative residents of the Western Slope town fear that their children will be checking out hellish images instead of heavenly reading material. An October 20 library board meeting was packed with residents decrying the planned use of four gargoyles on the exterior…
If we can believe Lawrence Funderburke, the Sacramento Kings’ resident apocalyptician, the world is coming to an end in the next five or six years. Funderburke bases his prediction on biblical prophecy and says his primary regret is that his career will be cut short. Meanwhile, NBA commish David Stern…
One day in mid-November, a San Francisco radio station called my office. “We hear Denver’s overrun by skinheads,” a reporter said. “Can we get a quote?” How about: “Baloney.” On the last day of November, a cabbie heading downtown from DIA reported that the skinhead violence had spread to a…
The Mouse That Roared I appreciated Alan Prendergast’s article on the Preble’s mouse, “Of Mice and Men,” in the November 27 issue. Too often the mainstream media seems to be very biased in favor of growth and development in Colorado. I am a Colorado native and think projects like Highlands…
