part 1 of 2 It wasn’t so much that Duncan Ferguson made peace with death; it was more that the novelty had worn off. The fact is, if you are going to climb very difficult rock faces without a partner, a rope or any kind of protection, death will be…
part 2 of 2 Art Higbee was nineteen when he met Jim Erickson, via Erickson’s girlfriend, via Erickson’s dog. “I lived right down the street,” he recalls, “and she brought the dog over because their landlord didn’t want pets. She asked if I could keep Jim’s dog for a while.”…
Next week William Gates will celebrate his fortieth birthday. The products sold by his company, Microsoft, are used in an estimated 80 percent of the world’s personal computers. Recently, Forbes magazine named him the richest man in the country, again, with a personal fortune of about $15 billion. The other…
“I guess I need to give you the right metaphor,” says Jesse King, program director of Denver’s Outward Bound School, who can’t answer a question like “How safe is rock climbing?” without resorting to a metaphor. “Skiing comes close,” he decides. “You can ski slow and safely and not push…
Law and what’s your order? You see plenty of odd things on Broadway at midnight, but a vision spied at the Taco Bell at Iliff late one Saturday is still the taco the town. Customers cruising through the drive-through lane were stunned to find themselves conversing with a uniformed Denver…
St. Jude must be working overtime. First the patron of lost causes gets the Seattle Mariners into the playoff picture after nineteen seasons of rain-dampened futility and one collapsing stadium roof. Then he squeaks the M’s past the big, bad New York Yankees. As if that weren’t enough, our man…
Coming Clean Michelle Dally Johnston’s October 11 article on Tom Strickland’s U.S. Senate candidacy, “Mr. Clean,” was cheap and shoddy. If his father’s sweeping the college library’s floor wasn’t janitorial, what the devil was it? If the writer wants to attack the law firm of Brownstein Hyatt, that is her…
In the wake of mounting criticism over a state policy of keeping hospital death records secret, Colorado Attorney General Gale Norton recently proposed changes in the law that would make information about suspicious hospital deaths more accessible. But don’t count on any similar outpouring of candor concerning the medical care…
The City of Denver is losing money hand over fist at the former Stapleton International Airport. But it has paid a private publicist $20,000 to put a happy face on the dormant airfield. Working at a rate of $50 per hour–recently raised to $60–publicist Greta Gloven has sat in on…
Ann Bonnell stands in front of a rusted steel gate at the Denver Botanic Garden’s Chatfield Arboretum and stares at the No Trespassing sign. In front of her, acres of pristine Colorado prairie wash up to the base of the Dakota Hogback, a long chain of ridged slopes that run…
cartoon…
part 2 of 2 Strickland sits in the darkness at the Trinity Grille and shakes his head almost imperceptibly when asked about the Coelho scandal. “I’m not specifically familiar with those facts,” he says finally. “I don’t recall ever having heard of it before.” When pressed, he loses his newly…
part 1 of 2 Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tom Strickland has an image problem. And it seems he’s not above using a little fiction to help fix it. To win the Senate seat he’s running for in 1996, Strickland has to convince voters he’s not some slick 17th Street attorney…
Even as Tom Strickland’s campaign is in its infancy, questions continue to arise over his law firm’s role as a clearinghouse for thousands of dollars in political donations. The players in the latest flap: two prominent Denver businessmen who somehow got listed in federal election records as “employees” of Brownstein…
Ways and Means: October in Colorado just isn’t the same without our annual whinefest over Christopher Columbus. Although this state was the first to honor the explorer/exploiter, giving him his own day back in 1907, it wasn’t until 1990 that Denver really made the map, when an Italian-American group revived…
The same day O.J. walked, John Vander Wal grounded into a double play. Then Andres Galarraga struck out. And that was the beginning of the end for the 1995 Colorado Rockies. Not even manager Don Baylor expected his overachieving club to take the dominant and confident Atlanta Braves (30-6 against…
The Loan Arranger Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “Checking Out,” in the October 4 issue: Ms. Calhoun, surely even you can accept this basic fact: If you take out a loan, you are expected to pay it back. I am sorry that the Fords may lose their business, but they didn’t have…
A dispute between lower-downtown business owners and the Regional Transportation District has kept 16th Street Mall shuttle buses off the $2 million, three-block-long extension of the mall to Wynkoop Street. Exasperated LoDo leaders are now planning to fund their own shuttle to move visitors around Denver’s booming entertainment district. The…
It’s becoming a familiar story: A Colorado municipality tires of the increasingly frequent traffic snarls and tract-home developments popping up on the edge of town. Residents’ complaints grow louder, and sooner or later somebody proposes passing a law limiting growth. Except this time, it’s not just Boulderites complaining. It’s the…
Jerry Francisco, a handyman by trade, has come up against something he can’t fix: the death of his dog Cuddles. He sits in his neat, nondescript apartment in southwest Denver with new puppy Skippy, but his heart is with Cuddles. He shows off Cuddles’s puppy teeth, tags and toys. He…
A pressure campaign from Focus on the Family and its Denver affiliate, the Rocky Mountain Family Council, threatens the distribution in the Denver Public Schools system of an AIDS poster developed by the gay community that warns gay youth about the disease. Focus on the Family is credited with generating…
Lawrence Wollersheim’s hands shake as he reads his notes, ticking off the damage done to his computers. Surrounding the 46-year-old Boulder resident is a cluster of reporters and, beyond that, a ring of glowering, dark-suited men (and one woman wearing a clerical collar), all packed into a hallway of the…
