News

Mayor Wellington Webb threw around a lot of promises during his campaign for re-election last spring. But few have turned sour as quickly as the one he made to the schoolchildren of Denver: to appoint a cabinet-level “education czar” for the city. Five months after the election and more than…

The weekend was warm, the type of weather that puts a jingle in the cash register of anyone with something sweet and cold to peddle. Customers lined up out the door of Doug Gunn’s I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt shop in Boulder. The frozen-yogurt racket had proved a tough go…

Flynn spin: The Rocky Mountain News wasted no time in announcing the good news at Denver International Airport. “DIA Bags Rolling at Last: United Finally Using All of Automated System,” screamed the front-page headline October 28. Inside, a breathless story by Kevin Flynn claimed BAE’s notorious automated baggage system–you know,…

Sixty-nine-year-old John Hickey would rather gamble on a prison term than admit to wrongdoing for breaking the nose of his wife’s lover moments after discovering the two flagrante delicto. “Put one man on the jury,” Hickey has said, “and there’s no way they’ll convict me.” He’ll get a chance to…

When Anne McGill Gorsuch married Robert Burford back in 1983, it seemed like a match made in Republican heaven: the Ice Queen and the Marlboro Man, the steely-eyed darling of corporate polluters and the squinty-eyed sagebrush rebel. Burford, a Western Slope rancher and former speaker of the Colorado House of…

Pprominent Denver company exploits American Indians by using their images to sell buffalo products, according to the country’s biggest Indian newspaper. But Will McFarlane, president of the Denver Buffalo Company, which has a restaurant and sells other buffalo items such as decorative skulls, says he has nothing to apologize for…

Colorado doesn’t believe in mollycoddling its prisoners. Just ask officials at the Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP), the chillingly futuristic, so-called “supermax” prison outside Canon City, where the state’s most dangerous prisoners spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement. Better yet, ask some of the residents. Ask Janice, Shannon, Debra,…

Mark Her Words Having just finished Patricia Calhoun’s “Carrier Pigeons,” in the November 1 issue, I say, give ’em hell, Calhoun. You’re right: Denver is full of pigeons. MarkAir crashed–but we were the ones who got burned. Joe Levy Denver Feature Attractions With the exception of the usual stridency from…

part 2 of 2 In their lawsuit against the City of Denver, Lane, Sullivan, Powell and two women claim that the city has taken sides, choosing to align itself with Planned Parenthood. “Complaints…by Planned Parenthood, its employees and supporters are routinely and vigorously prosecuted, no matter how spurious,” the suit…

part 1 of 2 It’s early Saturday, just after 7 a.m. on a crisp autumn day. The ash and locust trees that line the sidewalks around 20th Avenue and Vine Street are bright with change. The elderly bungalows behind the trees look no different from those in many older, well-kept…

part 2 of 2 Operating on a shoestring, the Brico Symphony could afford to give only four to six performances a year. Most of its members were housewives or professionals who had full lives apart from the orchestra, and the quality of their work varied greatly. Yet in Brico’s hands,…

part 1 of 2 Dan Frantz remembers The Gaze–that piercing, dark-eyed stare that made prodigies tremble and old tenors sing their lungs out. The Gaze is as vivid to him now as it was three decades ago, the first time he saw Antonia Brico. Frantz was twelve or thirteen years…

How the West is run: Yee-haw! Colorado’s 1996 campaign is shaping up to be quite a horse race. The latest to explore a bid is Wes McKinley, rancher, trail guide, cowboy poet and foreman of the state’s first special grand jury, convened in 1989 to investigate alleged environmental crimes at…

If you thought Paul Weissmann, the 31-year-old bartender candidate for U.S. Senate, was just another “Mr. Smith” trying to go to Washington, it’s probably time to take another look. Jimmy Stewart may have ended up in Washington as a stooge-turned-crusader in the 1939 film, but Weissmann is nobody’s fool. He…

Eighteen months ago Jim Kleber, long suspected of killing his wife, Lois, in 1992, seemed on the verge of confiding what her family wanted, yet feared, to hear: where he’d hidden her body. “I just want to do the right thing,” Kleber told an Arvada police investigator. Now, however, his…

Colorado’s fast-growing wine industry revels in the image of romantic Western Slope vineyards and tasting rooms perched on mesas. But a nasty dispute has many Colorado vintners treating one of the state’s largest wineries like a jug of Ripple at a society soiree. Rick Turley, owner of the Palisade-based Colorado…

Jailhouse Blues Karen Bowers’s “Hard Time,” in the October 25 issue, is Pulitzer material. She writes about the common criminals–the prison guards, wardens and judges who get paid with tax dollars to run modern-day concentration camps. State officials who allow and encourage rapes among prisoners are heinous crime offenders, and…

It’s Friday afternoon, one of the busiest times for any airport. But at Denver International Airport’s Concourse A, the throngs of business travelers who should be celebrating the end of a long week are nowhere to be seen. The hallways are mostly empty, only two airplanes are parked at the…

part 1 of 2 James Mervin, Colorado prison inmate No. 56225, was moving again. Over the years, he’d learned to pack quickly, tossing his meager belongings into a box so as not to upset the guard waiting to escort him to his new home. He didn’t think much about it…

part 2 of 2 If Hilton had named Gray as his attacker, says DOC legal counsel Brad Rockwell, Gray would have been slam-dunked into solitary to await a disciplinary hearing. But since Hilton had not yet named his assailant, Gray stayed where he was. On July 20 Gray was given…

Demo derby: When Colorado’s Democrats gathered on October 14 for their biennial issues conference, state party chair Mike Beatty, scheduled to deliver the opening speech, was missing in action. He finally appeared in time for lunch (where Don Fowler, head of the Democratic National Committee, was the speaker) and offered…