Life has just gotten even more difficult for local residents who need non-emergency medical care and who have the bad fortune to be uninsured. Because of a wave of funding cuts from University Hospital to the community health centers serving the metropolitan area’s poorest patients, those safety-net clinics have been…
Denver is spending millions to build a new park along the South Platte River that is intended to be the centerpiece of the Platte Valley renaissance. There’s only one problem with this idyllic return to nature: A power line runs through it. A massive, 120-foot-high Public Service power line, to…
Attorney General Gale Norton is adamant in saying she doesn’t want to go after big tobacco companies the way so many other states have. If that sounds like the position of somebody who has taken money from those tobacco companies, that’s because it is. When Norton ran for re-election in…
Critical mess: A major game of musical–and otherwise–chairs is now in progress at Denver’s dailies. On Monday the Denver Post filled its long-vacant movie-critic spot with arts writer Steve Rosen, who was already at the paper when Howie Movshovitz was shoved aside last December. The announcement included a corollary surprise:…
The vast majority of football-crazy, hoops-happy, golf-goofy American sports fans give their attention to horse racing just one day a year now. It’s the first Saturday in May, when all eyes turn to Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby. Most people will want to get right back to their…
Good, Bad, Indifferent Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “It’s a Good Thing,” in the April 24 issue: Who cares whether Governor Roy Romer knows who Martha Stewart is? I’m more worried that he may not remember where Colorado is. Hey, Roy: It’s in the center of the country. Remember? Jack Haynes Arvada…
Last summer a Denver emissary for Columbia Hospital Corporation, the nation’s largest for-profit health-care chain, had lunch with one of the city’s prominent community leaders. A pair of hospitals were on the menu. Leaning over the table during the meal, Richard Anderson, chairman of the local Columbia/HealthONE joint venture, reportedly…
Daytime-television viewers know Frank Azar as the fighting attorney who can retrieve the insurance settlement an automobile-accident victim deserves. His TV ads feature the crumpled remains of a car crash and an alchemic pledge: “Turn this wreck…into this check!” But today the promise has proven false, and Azar is furious…
Our daily dread: As if Denver’s newspaper war weren’t already hell, another combatant has entered the field: the New York Times. The venerable newspaper has poured $20 million into a national advertising campaign, promising not only that readers across the country can “expect the world,” but also have it delivered…
The Boulder apartment David Wittlinger rented for his final year at the University of Colorado wasn’t great, but it was okay–until the weather turned cold. The furnace never worked, and calls to the owner and the property manager yielded no heat. Because space heaters would blow a fuse, Wittlinger shivered…
A quixotic effort to run English-style punts through downtown Denver got off to a slow start last summer, but that hasn’t deterred promoters of the boat trips from planning a $2 million expansion of the unusual network of dams and locks along puny Cherry Creek. Punt the Creek was launched…
Like a lot of residents of southeast Denver, Judy LaMar has come to embrace the High Line Canal trail as a refuge from the urban madness. Joggers and strollers, horseback riders and bicyclists all flock to the cottonwood-shaded trail, which offers a weathered asphalt path flanked by what LaMar calls…
Stephen Goodman is a hapless victim of the U.S. Postal Service’s Neanderthal personnel policies, another cog worn down and abused by an agency with a reputation for treating its career servers with the same amount of common sense found in Alice in Wonderland. Either that, or he is the employee…
The seventh edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia (The Complete and Official Record of Major League Baseball) weighs six pounds and is stuffed with 2,875 pages of facts a lunatic can love. For instance. If you need to confirm (and who doesn’t?) that in May 1902, Cleveland traded Dummy Leitner to…
Roy Romer doesn’t know who Martha Stewart is–and it’s a good thing, too. The high priestess of high-class living is a menace to women everywhere, and particularly here. That by-the-book (her book) lifestyle is precisely what people move to Colorado to avoid. After all, hydrangeas are not xeriscape-approved. And how…
Read It and Leap Patricia Calhoun: What happened to you? Your April 17 column, “Look Before You Leap…to Conclusions,” was sensible and well-reasoned. In short, it was a refreshing change from your usual strident harangues. Sal Connors Denver Denver P.D. Blues Regarding Karen Bowers’s “Sliced and Dicey,” in the April…
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…
