What’s Black and White and Rude All Over?

The year-end edition of this year’s Bolt Action student newspaper at Manual High School provides a window into the world of the next generation. It’s not a pretty view. Gone, apparently, are the days when fellow students told one another to “Stay as sweet as you are” and when soon-to-be-graduates…

Mutual Contempt

A special prosecutor has dismissed criminal contempt charges against Idaho Springs attorney Titus Peterson, bringing to a close a case some lawyers had characterized as a threat to the state’s entire defense bar. “I think the special prosecutor did the right thing,” says Peterson’s lawyer, Paula Greisen. “These charges should…

Off Limits

Summit chanted evening: Shortly after the annual Cinco de Mayo debacle on Federal Boulevard last month, the Safe City’s Youth Commission delivered to Mayor Wellington Webb, the Denver City Council and assorted “decision-makers” a report on its recent “Youth Summit.” The results were not exactly of Sermon on the Mount…

Covering the Bases

So I say to my agent, I say: Listen, I’m doin’ all the things it takes to be successful. I’m givin’ a hundred and ten percent every day. On D, I’m goin’ to get it in the gaps, hittin’ the cutoff man and usin’ my instincts for the game. So…

Letters

The Wolf at the Door Steve Jackson’s pseudo-expose of excruciating ennui on the Milstein-Wolf debacle (“Mommy Dearest,” May 22) was a tragic waste of forests. I was acquainted with Judi and Marvin Wolf during my tenure as a social chronicler for the Rocky Mountain News; I found them to be…

Graveyard Shift

Don DeFiore is an early riser, and the way he figures it, if he’s up, he might as well go to work. He often arrives at the City of Denver’s wastewater building a good ninety minutes before the start of his 7 a.m. shift, using the extra time to relax…

Citizen’s Arrest

The Denver City Council chambers, resplendent in white and gold, are nearly empty the night of May 15 as the seven members of the Public Safety Review Commission file in, businesslike, for their monthly meeting. There is the feeling that the commission, which reviews citizen complaints of police misconduct, is…

Off Limits

That hits the G-spot: The most unfortunate timing of the week belongs to Denver mayor Wellington Webb, who scheduled his announcement of G-8-related downtown beautification projects at 1:30 p.m. Monday–the exact moment the Oklahoma City bombing-trial verdict was read. But, hey–at least the return of the verdict means that all…

Give Till It Hurts

You’ve got to hand it to Charles E. Blair. Thousands of people did, to their everlasting regret. This Sunday, June 8, Blair will celebrate fifty years as the pastor and guiding light of Calvary Temple, which, under his stewardship, has become one of the largest and most successful non-denominational churches…

Another Fight on Colfax

A neighborhood feud over the proposed rezoning of East Colfax Avenue has wound up in court, with two of Colfax’s best-known businesspeople trading accusations of slander and suppression of free speech. While that dispute plays out in Denver District Court, the larger question of the future of one of Denver’s…

The Third Time for Charm

Three days before this year’s Kentucky Derby, a TV crew and members of the sporting press visited the witty California trainer Bob Baffert and his dark-gray colt, Silver Charm, at the Churchill Downs stakes barn. When the mob arrived, they found the horse standing backward in his stall, head to…

And Justice for All

When the world last heard from Robert Eaton Jr., he was being bundled into the back of a Denver squad car by a handful of uniformed officers. His crime? Mentioning Waco outside the federal courthouse Monday, just as the coverage of Tim McVeigh’s conviction kicked into high gear. The media…

Letters

Wolf Pack Regarding the treatment of Letty Milstein (Steve Jackson’s “Mommy Dearest,” May 22), it seems to me that the problem is not sibling rivalry, or the courts, or the judge, or the guardians, or the lawyers, but rather that this woman did not die before the sharks got to…

A Rocky Road

Lumpy Ridge, in the northeast section of vast Rocky Mountain National Park, is home to a wall of rocks that was just too inviting for a pair of climbers in the unpredictable weather this past March. Hayner Brooks, a 44-year-old Loveland electrician, and Ken Miller, a 35-year-old electrical engineer from…

Little Big Man

Inside Ed Dwight’s hangar-like studio, the 63-year-old sculptor rushes between welding sparks and tables laden with his work, talking angrily about the troubles he’s having with some of his ex-employees. He almost yells in order to be heard above the din of heavy equipment used to make his art. “These…

Off Limits

When Irish guys are smiling: You may think you’ve heard everything that’s been going on in Judge Richard Matsch’s courtroom. You may think that, but you’d be wrong. Even with the endless coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing trial, some testimony goes unreported by the local media. For instance, an…

Mob Psychology

As far as Michelle Valdez is concerned, the crowd waiting to take Elitch Gardens’ newest thrill ride may have already had their minds erased. A fight that erupted Sunday, May 18, while people stood in a three-hour-long line for the Mind Eraser roller coaster left Valdez’s eleven-year-old daughter Savannah lying…

Company Loves Misery

At the small Colorado Springs offices of Bereavement: A Magazine of Hope and Healing, the excitement started last year, when a writer for the prime-time show Promised Land placed a call to publisher Andrea Gambill. The television drama is a spinoff of the surprise CBS hit Touched by an Angel…

Special Handling

At age 37 but looking younger, Michael Garcia, a former schoolboy baseball and football player, keeps in shape by working out four days a week. Two of those days he trains at a nearby dojo, where he refines his skills in tae kwon do, a Korean martial art he has…

Diamonds Are a Mogul’s Best Friend

The peculiarities of the national pastime are, at the present time, running amok, like drunks loose in the outfield. Rupert Murdoch, the Aussie media glutton who swallows newspapers, TV networks and movie studios the way fans at the ballpark eat peanuts, now proposes to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers and…

Black Hawk’s History? It’s History.

Memorial Day once marked the start of the summer tourist season at the Lace House. But on this Memorial Day, it was difficult to remember what the historic landmark looked like back in the olden days. Back, say, in the olden days of six years ago, when the renovated Victorian…

Letters

Through a Glass, Dorkly Regarding Tony Perez-Giese’s “Look Out, Sin City!” in the May 22 issue: What are people in Commerce City thinking? (If, in fact, people in Commerce City can think.) Putting strippers behind Plexiglas? What’s the fun in that? Why don’t they just cover the gals with Teflon?…