When Karen Jenkins went to work for a market-research company a few years ago, she expected to spend her time talking to consumers about their lifestyles and purchasing habits. What she didn’t expect was a stream of crude comments about spanking, anal sex and other dicey topics–all issuing from a…
Tom Strickland has been shrugging off his connection with the law firm Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber & Strickland ever since he announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate last fall. But despite the campaign’s efforts to distance the Democratic candidate from his livelihood, Strickland’s contributions tell a different story: Money is…
Tom Kreutz fixes cars for a living, and he was just the sort of ordinary fellow the Denver Art Museum was looking for in its ad campaign to promote the museum’s working-class appeal. The kind of guy, the award-winning ad said, who’d feel equally happy “collecting rocks, bushwhacking in Mexico,…
It’s July. You return to the office after a little vacation. Well, not a vacation, exactly–more like another trip to the welding shop. They cemented fourteen new bones into your body and bolted an Erector Set to your right elbow. Without making a big fuss about it, they also fulfilled…
Your article on Landmark Education and the information about Cult Awareness Network and Action Works was most appreciated and well-presented. I am a recent “graduate” of The Forum and The Forum in Action series. My background is in the field of education, and I wanted to find out just what…
Black Hawk boasts more violent crimes per capita than any other community in Colorado. But the caper the town contemplated last Saturday was completely bloodless. It set out to hijack Central City’s train. Like almost everything else that’s happened to these two adjacent mountain towns since gambling was legalized five…
The sky was the limit for Denver aviation officials hoping to lure overseas air service to the city back in 1987. According to a “forecast summary” prepared that year by the consulting firm of Simat, Helliesen & Eichner, the Mile High City could soon expect to have an aerial armada…
Walter Plywaski placed the blue yarmulke on his head. A Jew by ethnicity but an atheist by choice, he rarely wore the symbol of faith. But it seemed important now, as he stood near a mass burial site for Jews murdered at what had once been the Riederloh “punishment” camp…
Tom Anthony has a dream: of lozenge-shaped, four-person vehicles that cruise an elevated rail on demand, delivering passengers around the metro area at 30 mph or taking them up into the mountains and out to Denver International Airport at four times that speed. Suddenly, cars are unnecessary. Parks bloom where…
What began as a mind exercise for Jerald Lepinski ten years ago has become a crusade to challenge the music notation system that’s dominated Europe and America for hundreds of years. Lepinski, a Denver music teacher and choir conductor for more than thirty years, is not the first to suggest…
When Mayor Wellington Webb’s stepson Keith Thomas clipped a parked car March 31 and kept on driving, it wasn’t the first time he’d “hit and run,” says a former business associate. In fact, claims bar owner Chester Johnson, after he fired Thomas for alleged misuse of funds last fall, Thomas…
State your business: The June issue of Spy rates the nation’s fifty states in order of annoyance–and we make the dirtiest dozen. Texas takes first place, but Colorado clocks in at number twelve for, among other reasons: “Laws: In Durango, it is illegal to go out in public dressed in…
Business and politics have been known to make uneasy bedfellows, but an obscure Boulder company is showing just how strange the marriage can be. Last month United States Voting Machine Inc. declared bankruptcy. The announcement was hardly earthshaking: USVM listed a mere $20,000 in assets. Yet the company’s union of…
Most of America didn’t want Jackie Robinson to reach Daytona Beach, much less Brooklyn. In February 1946–half a century ago–Robinson and his new bride, Rachel, began one of the most important journeys in the nation’s sports and social history by boarding an airplane in Los Angeles. Everything went well until…
How the West Was Won Alan Prendergast’s story on the Center for the New West (“Winging It,” April 11) was a priceless piece of work. Good reporting, better writing. I laughed so hard while reading it that the only way I could calm down was to look at my US…
Rodney Long was at the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., when the spirit “hit” him. It stayed with him on the trip back to Denver, and it’s with him still. “If you go by your heart, you go with your spirit,” he says. “You go in the right direction.”…
Except for his protruding gut, Wild Bill Hardney appears to be in great shape as he steps into the boxing ring at the 20th Street Gym. For a 54-year-old chain-smoker, he looks pretty good dancing around, dodging blows, firing off tightly controlled punches from shoulder height, crouching in low on…
When Phil Burgess gets up to speak, he doesn’t just take the floor. He takes the whole room–floor, walls, ceiling, people and every last scrap of oxygen in the place. He storms the podium like Patton rolling through the Rhineland or Al Haig commandeering a press conference; there’s no question…
One of Denver’s top airport administrators took early retirement last summer, but he didn’t fly off into the sunset. Instead, Errol K. Stevens came back to work the next day as a private consultant–with a contract from the city that pays him more than he earned as a public employee…
If Colorado experiences an increase in the number of prisoners on death row, the condemned may have convicted killer Thomas Luther and a recalcitrant juror to thank. Eleven of the jurors who in February convicted Luther for the 1983 murder of Cher Elder stood together this past Friday, many of…
It takes money to make money, but Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz has gotten so good at pulling money out of unlikely situations, he’s starting to look like the King Midas of 17th Street. When he’s not out raising funds for Bob Dole’s campaign or talking to the president of Mexico…
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest: New flight paths introduced last week at Denver International Airport are supposed to cut down on noise–both from the planes themselves and from irate citizens who complain when they thunder overhead. But echoes of earlier problems still resound. Next Tuesday, Paul Grant is slated…
