It’s Tuesday morning, and Thierry Smith, Denver’s most unlikely radio sports-talk host, is on the air. Sporting a yellow polo shirt and seated in the motorized scooter he’s been forced into by multiple sclerosis, he moves across a variety of subjects. Surgery on John Elway’s arm. (“Just maintenance. Nothing to…
The Greeley sniper’s shot was on target last September 24, hitting teenager Joe Gallegos just below his Adam’s apple. Blood gushed from his back where the bullet left his body. The day had been bloody enough: Gallegos had killed three people 400 miles away, including one who had tried to…
Author! Author!: A twofer of Coors is coming right up, with a pair of books due out on the Golden brewery and the family that founded it. One of the tomes is the official Coors history, authorized–and subsidized–by the brewery in time for Coors’s 125th anniversary in March 1988. According…
An anti-union lobbyist has so angered normally unflappable state senator Don Ament that he may be the first lobbyist ever banned from doing his job at the State Capitol. The irony is that Ament and the lobbyist, Guy Short, are on the same side. Short is director of Colorado Citizens…
Recently, on an obscure cable-TV channel, dedicated amateur Tonja Roi–the co-host of Cineview–took her best shot: After a clip from the action yarn The Long Kiss Goodnight, in which Geena Davis plays a CIA assassin, a “robber” burst onto the set of the public-access TV show and snatched Roi’s purse…
The Denver Police Department, already beset by accusations that its officers manhandled a suspected car thief who crashed into the car of a rookie cop, is reeling under a new round of allegations. And this time, police officers are the ones pointing the finger at their colleagues. Internal scuttlebutt has…
It’s a good bet that Messrs. Tinker, Evers and Chance, turning double plays in the Celestial League now, are looking forward to the sixteenth of June. That’s the day their Cubs get another shot at the White Stockings in a game that counts. Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown will probably be…
Throwing Fits Alan Prendergast’s “All the News That Fits,” in the April 10 issue, was both amusing and informative. Having worked in the editorial department at the Rocky Mountain News for three years, I saw firsthand the carnage that Prendergast describes so well. It is both depressing and sad to…
Memo to Denver: With all the national media in town for, and already bored by, the Oklahoma City bombing trial, this is no time to misbehave. For example, no matter how peeved you might be after some seventeen-year-old punk in a stolen car broadsides your buddy–your cop buddy on only…
1895–Local curio magnate Harry Tammen and Kansas scoundrel Frederick Bonfils buy the fledgling Denver Evening Post for $12,500 and start shaping it into a lurid, red-headline scandal sheet that will rob readers from the venerable Rocky Mountain News, established on the banks of Cherry Creek in 1859. 1907–Seething over criticism…
Last October, two women accused former Durango mayor Jeff Morrissey of making lewd comments. His apparent inspiration: bumper stickers on the women’s cars opposing the proposed Animas-La Plata water project. One sticker boasted the acronym A-LP with a red slash through it. The other read “A-LP sucks.” Did that mean…
From the moment he flew into town early last year, Dennis Britton noticed something strange about Denver’s daily newspapers. A former editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, soon to become the Denver Post’s editor-in-chief, Britton knew all about the inexorable dynamics of newspaper wars; in the white-heat of competition, dailies often…
Paul Orosz was willing to pay for his crime. Like thousands of others who commute through Commerce City, the 33-year-old software engineer had been caught speeding by the city’s photo-radar system. “I saw a flash,” says Orosz, “and thought to myself, ‘What the hell?’ Then two weeks later I got…
Less than a year after losing the battle over Amendment 2 in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Colorado Attorney General’s office is on the cutting edge of another 1990s-style controversy, although this one has nothing to do with lawsuits. Not yet, anyway. A male lawyer with more than a decade’s…
Three years ago, while attempting to climb Mt. Everest’s treacherous north face, Mark Udall started to think about getting into the family business–politics. And after just ninety days of working at the Colorado House of Representatives, the Boulder Democrat has found his new career a bit treacherous, too. Making the…
Spanish speakers in Denver may be shocked by the impending invasion of Luscious Lulo ice cream, considering that “lulo” is slang in some Latin quarters for the female nether regions. But the dessert, made from the Latin American lulo fruit, has already made a hit on Capitol Hill and is…
A recent attempt by Denver sheriff’s deputies to remove politics from their wage negotiations resulted instead in fisticuffs between two key players, an act that has serious political repercussions all its own: City officials may now have to discipline–perhaps even fire–two deputies who are arguably among the most influential officers…
The unbearable lightness of being from Colorado: David Letterman plans to fill his studio audience with 135 Colorado residents for a special May 16 taping of his Late Show. The lucky guests will be picked at random from postcard entries, but one Coloradan need not apply: Margaret Ray, the Crawford…
On the bulletin board outside the Rockies’ clubhouse, some wit had posted a newspaper photo of Marshall Herff Applewhite, the late, lamented guru of the Heaven’s Gate cult–he of the astonished eyes. It’s astonishing, all right. As of Wednesday morning, seven games into the season, the Rox had won five…
In U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch’s courtroom, the Oklahoma City bombing trial moves as slowly as a kept secret. Lawyers from both sides ask potential jurors their views on religion, their feelings about the death penalty, their recent reading habits. So far, the runaway favorite is John Grisham’s The Runaway…
Whose Sarin Now? Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “And Not a Drop to Drink,” her April 3 column on the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, I do not believe the government is capable of cleaning it up in a timely and cost-effective manner. I believe the effort should be aimed at protecting the groundwater…
It was muggy and gray and the skies threatened rain the afternoon Dana Garner was murdered. Her eight-year-old son, Ben, was home from school ill, and she’d hurried to see him. Peering through the windshield, the wipers going just fast enough to remove the drizzle that had been hanging in…
