In 1993, Lisa Lane, an assistant district attorney in Grand County, prosecuted a drunk-driving case against an occasional local named Jack Irving Ainsworth. Late on July 4, 1992, Ainsworth had been riding his motorcycle in an isolated location outside of Grand Lake; on the back sat a young woman he’d…
If the sign of a dysfunctional family is the inability to agree about anything, then I suppose that’s what we were. Every time we went out to a ballpark. Of course, no one in a ballpark ever used the word “dysfunctional.” But there were a lot of other, more colorful…
Sermon on the Mount Michelle Dally Johnston’s July 4 piece on the Shattuck contamination, “Down in the Dump,” was an excellent piece of work. There was one point that I was disappointed she did not address, however. Although the radium industry was once a thriving business, five decades later everyone…
There’s an ominous shadow hanging over Washington, D.C., and it’s no alien spaceship. The threat to the political status quo springs from a spot much more down-to-earth: Colorado, where third-party challenges are taking off faster than the grosses of this summer’s cinematic blockbuster. On Tuesday, former Governor Richard Lamm ended…
The split-level ranch house on the western outskirts of Fort Collins doesn’t look like a bunker, but it houses Colorado’s oldest war room in the battle against the New World Order. The HQ is the basement office of Colonel Archibald E. Roberts, a former Army information officer who for decades…
In 1988 Irma Zimmerman stood on the back porch of her lime-green house in Overland Park and faced a tornado. “We watched it come right up Asbury,” she says, shaking her head of tangled gray hair. “Stood there like idiots and just watched it come. Hurling doors and sheds and…
Aurora officials believe they’ve found an ideal mountain hiding place for part of the city’s future water supply, but residents of rural Park County are promising a fight before they let the fast-growing suburb tap into the huge aquifer that underlies the county. The controversy centers on a plan by…
Pei to play: Now that the pesky, if historic, I.M. Pei-inspired hyperbolic paraboloid is out of the way and the Denver Urban Renewal Authority subsidy safely pocketed, phase two of the $130 million renovation of Fred Kummer’s Adam’s Mark Hotel is going full-bore. And speaking of bore, Kummer’s company has…
In one of the stranger tests of the University of Colorado’s new get-tough policy on sexual harassment, an internal committee has found “no concrete evidence” to support harassment charges against a prominent Boulder professor–even though the committee’s report raises uneasy questions about the professor’s admitted “romantic” relationships with female students…
Sexual assault?” Dave Lawrence, who manages the Park Centre Lounge, a Westminster karaoke bar, is perplexed. “I guess you could call it that. If you want to get technical…I mean, most guys in a bar would kind of like that sort of thing.” Nonetheless, that’s the charge listed on a…
When they asked Ozzie Smith last week about the best plays of his career, it was a little like having Picasso pick out a couple of favorite pictures. Where do you start? Still, the slickest-fielding shortstop in the history of the game obliged his questioners. * On April 20, 1978,…
Off Track Stuart Steers’s June 20 article on the proposed Southern Pacific/Union Pacific merger, “Whistle Stopped,” is an interesting mix of old-time nostalgia and economic fantasia. What Mr. Steers completely ignores is that the Southern Pacific is the walking wounded of American railroads that has recently had its crutches removed…
I am sitting in a local bar, and I am thinking that I would like to punch Bruce Willis in the nose. The bar is a block from where the world’s billionth Planet Hollywood will make its debut next year. The 33rd opened in Seattle this past weekend, and according…
The breeze moves across the creek, turns the corner by the old porch swing, dallies with the ancient lilac bush and settles where the ladies sit in rockers with their quilting hoops: A mother, an aunt and three daughters, all taking refuge from the heat of the eastern plains. The…
The Turntable Restaurant is in a squat gray building that sits along the railroad tracks running through the small mountain town of Minturn. Just a stone’s throw from the Eagle River, the Turntable will never be mistaken for one of the many shops and cafes in Minturn that sell howling…
Tammy Montabon had high hopes of getting off welfare and finding a job to support herself and her son when she enrolled at Barnes Business College in January 1994. Those hopes faltered when the school declared bankruptcy in August 1995, five weeks into the eleven-week semester. But Montabon picked herself…
John Deans learned a hard lesson about office politics: Be careful what you say about your boss. Particularly if you’re a federal employee investigating possibly illegal fund diversions at Denver International Airport and your boss happens to be the godfather of DIA. Last year Deans, a criminal investigator with the…
A brush with fame: Sunday’s Rex Kildow & Co. auction offered a variety of pieces by local artists, none more famous at the moment than Peter Schmitz. But the painting by Schmitz, who is better known for his reported role in the death of Greg Lopez than he is for…
Looking up and down the seemingly peaceful 1200 block of Milwaukee Street, longtime resident Darby McNeal observes that there’s “inhibition all over the block.” That may be an understatement. After film crews from the miniseries version of The Shining descended on the block for a single day of shooting last…
In the age of MTV and the no-attention span, most Americans demand their spectator sports stuffed with flash, crash and bang–along with the occasional three-color dye job. Graying Cadillac owners still watch golf on the boob tube, but the silent beauty of man or woman gliding swiftly over a course…
Picture Perfect I don’t often see in your Letters column praise for the art that accompanies your lead stories, in this case Steve Jackson’s “Rough Waters,” in the June 13 issue. Tony Ortega’s cover really amounts to fine art; it’s much more than illustration. Steve Jackson’s article in itself is…
The wind people tug violently at the white flag above the corral’s only entrance–on the east side, as is proper. The flag proclaims that this is the Southern Ute Bear Dance in Ignacio, Colorado. The first few vendors have erected their tables outside the corral. Kiowa neck chokers. Navajo silver…
