Singer John Denver has his fans, but none of them is as devout as the Reverend Mark Boyer. Editor of The Mirror, a Catholic newspaper in Springfield, Missouri, Boyer has written a 132-page book, Seeking Grace With Every Step: The Spirituality of John Denver, that analyzes the religious themes in…
Jerry Stevens was flying high. He was a successful personal-injury lawyer and municipal judge in Aurora. He had the things that Thurgood Marshall once said were at the root of the law’s mystique: “Power, prestige and influence.” He also had money. There’s a large painting of him that shows a…
From the look of things, everybody had a grand time at the farewell party held last March at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility for departing deputy warden Joe Paolino. Cake and M&Ms were in abundance, and the special tribute to Paolino, a veteran Colorado Department of Corrections official, prompted a…
Put it on my tab: Just when you thought the JonBenet Ramsey saga couldn’t get any stranger, a familiar face popped up in the Rockefeller Center rabble waving to Today show cameras Friday morning. It was Bill McReynolds, former University of Colorado journalism prof and Santa to the stars–or at…
According to former corrections officer Sandra Haberman, the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility at Ordway was a hotbed of innuendo, threats and crude come-ons directed at female employees. Defendants in her sex-harassment suit have denied any improper comments or behavior, but jurors in the case got an earful of the kind…
Every time the University of Colorado men’s basketball team hosts the University of Kansas two hours before kickoff in the Super Bowl, you can count on an audience of, say, dozens. Street-corner preachers in sub-zero weather draw bigger crowds. So do doctors advertising specials on pre-frontal lobotomies. More Boulderites are…
Boulderdash I am writing in response to Patricia Calhoun’s “Where the Bodies Are Buried in Boulder,” in the January 23 issue. I believe that Ms. Calhoun is a very good and realistic journalist. The public has the right to know as much as possible as long as it doesn’t interfere…
Four years ago this month, Richard Boulware flew into heavy turbulence. His life has yet to straighten out. On February 22, 1993, Boulware–who in 1984 had beaten out hundreds of candidates to become Stapleton Airport’s public-affairs officer, a job that nine years later carried increased responsibilities and the impressive title…
On a bright winter afternoon in northeast Park Hill, elementary-school students stream out of the Margaret Smith Renaissance Academy. While some mothers wait impatiently for their children to climb into the backseats of idling cars, most of the kids are walking to the trim brick homes and well-kept yards for…
The law that created the Toxics Release Inventory is one of the more novel pieces of legislation enacted in the past decade. It doesn’t mandate any reductions in toxic releases or outlaw particular chemicals. It simply lets the public know what goes on behind factory gates. That information–and the media…
At Roll-O-Rama, roller-skating is confined to precise, two-hour sessions. If you arrive early, clutching your brushed aluminum roller-skate case–the one that contains actual four-cornered skates, as opposed to in-lines–you will just have to cool your heels. In the foyer, the ticket window has a plywood panel shoved across its opening,…
It was a medical problem for the ’90s: A rich benefactor offers a giant, cost-conscious health-care corporation $1 million to pay for a brand-new building–if the company agrees to use it to house a program that has lost money for the past twenty years. What to do? Several former employees…
Sometime just before midnight on December 19, 1984, the Wilberg Mine in Huntington, Utah, caught fire. Even now, investigators can’t agree on what sparked it–the best guess is either an overheated air compressor or an electrical arc on a piece of mining equipment. But the results were depressingly clear: Twenty-seven…
When civil rights activist Judith Lee Berg had an opportunity to work in Atlanta three years ago, she didn’t think twice about renting out her Denver home and making a temporary move to Georgia. She didn’t think twice, either, about hiring A&R Transfer, a moving company a friend had recommended…
Get the rope: Forget the unfortunate lynching routine with black rodeo clown Leon Coffee at the National Western Stock Show. And ignore–if you can–the inexcusable “Jew down” joke repeated by longtime rodeo announcer Hadley Barrett, even though stock show president Pat Grant had promised in a letter to the Anti-Defamation…
When most people drive by the north Denver neighborhoods strung out along Interstate 70–including Globeville, Elyria and Swansea–they assume the area is entirely industrial and don’t notice the hundreds of homes tucked in between the factories and junkyards. If told that the neighbors are angry because trucks roar down their…
You can take two million dollars out of Dennis Rodman’s checking account. While you’re at it, go ahead and set it on fire. With his endorsements, he’s paid seven times that. Every season. You can also take him off the floor and sit his crazy ass on the bench. Not…
Read and Buried Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “Where the Bodies Are Buried in Boulder,” in the January 23 issue: In a word? Bravo. If you are quiet, you can hear the thud reality makes when it smacks against the heads of those who wish to hide from the truth. Well, unless…
The natives–and even the ex-Californians–were getting restless. Four weeks after the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the case was still the talk of the town, the state, the country–but there were so few new developments to talk about. Reporters kept rehashing the same old stories, chewing over the same old facts…
Members of the legal community were surprised and angry three months ago, when Gilpin County District Judge Kenneth Barnhill and prosecutor Jim Stanley had the temerity to try a juror for criminal contempt of court after she declined to convict a defendant in a drug case. The action, considered by…
Manual High School students talk about commitment to their school with a religious fervor. Many of them paint a rosy picture. Everyone gets along. Race has been overcome. The basketball team’s integrated. Some teachers can’t even remember the last fight they saw, much less broke up. And the school performs…
For years, car crashes in Colorado have been big business for a handful of doctors hired to perform medical exams on people claiming to have been injured in the wrecks. Members of this small group of “independent medical examiners” were frequently retained by insurance companies hoping to prove the victims…
