Bob Hornbuckle takes another drag on his cigarette and looks up from under the brim of his cap. His face looks worn and tired in the afternoon light that sneaks into the bar. A recovering junkie and, some say, the best blues guitar player in Denver, Hornbuckle has hepatitis C…
Everybody’s talking: With all the new radio shows cropping up, is anyone left to listen? That lord of discipline, Horace Mann vice principal Ruben Perez, now chats about education issues Sundays on KHOW (on weekdays, Denver Public Schools has consigned Perez to campus). At the Independence Institute’s tenth-anniversary dinner last…
Now that Mike the Messiah has descended into Dove Valley, robes abulge with cash, is it too early to start dreaming of heaven? Nah. Take that orange hairshirt off this instant and try the future on for size. But remember, patience is still a virtue. Dallas and San Francisco weren’t…
In the midst of the confusion surrounding the Denver Public Schools teachers’ strike last October, Robert Feldstein of New York City found himself in the perfect spot: passing through town, teaching certificate in hand, with no qualms about crossing a picket line. Feldstein even garnered his fifteen minutes of fame,…
Eight years ago, after he won a low-interest, $50,000 loan from the City of Denver to build a restaurant and bar in west Denver, Don Sandoval brushed aside criticism that the loan was improper. Sandoval was a state senator at the time, and Denver’s auditor had complained that the city…
James Colden’s face peered from a dozen “Wanted” fliers hung throughout the City of Arvada’s administrative offices. Contact police if he shows up, the fliers warned, because Colden is potentially violent. But Colden’s only “crime” is in getting a divorce. And Colden–who has filed a notice of intent to sue…
With Denver’s mayoral election less than three months away, and with four Democrats in the running, tempers are flaring over allegations that the forces of Mayor Wellington Webb are attempting to hijack the local Democratic Party machinery. The party’s own treasurer questions a fundraising scheme last October in which county…
The Sorrow and the City So Patricia Calhoun has now decided she must save the city from Douglas Bruce (“Another Slum Dunk From Doug Bruce,” February 1). But who will save the city from Ms. Calhoun? Joe Garcia Denver After reading the letters attacking Patricia Calhoun for her very good…
When Justin Nielsen saw the semi-automatic, he struggled to keep his voice under control. “Uh-oh, they got a gun,” he told the 911 dispatcher. Nielsen had dialed the emergency number moments before, after seeing a silver BMW pull into a parking lot across the 16th Street Mall. As four men…
To a taxpayer’s eye, the City of Denver’s decision to lend $180,000 to Manuel Fernandez and his partners five years ago might look like a mammoth mistake. Fernandez’s Mammoth Events Center, a historic music hall located on depressed East Colfax Avenue, was renovated with money from the loan but has…
I’m AK-47, you’re AK-47: Reporters and public servants who’ve been unwillingly drawn into the web of Denver’s most noted conspiracy theorist got quite a bang out of last Sunday’s Denver Post, with its front-page story on the “radical right.” Listed as one of the top “players” was Stewart Webb, former…
In Baltimore, them baseball fans what still exist are getting ready this week for Babe Ruth’s 100th birthday party. There will be celebrations in other cities, too, but Baltimoreans are puffed up with the pride of authorship: The Bambino was born in a humble row house in their town on…
Shirley, You Jest Regarding Michael Roberts’s “They Think They Love You,” in the January 18 issue: Sitcom queen Shirley Jones the Virgin Mary? The hell you say! If that’s the case, then who is Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show? Beelzebub? Rick Hoover Denver Your newspaper cover of…
Doug Shadoan’s weenie-wagging hoochie-coochie, which he performed last August 17 while clad in a black dress and wig in front of his second-story Edgewater apartment window, earned him a $275 fine and a thirty-day suspended jail sentence for public indecency. Because he was already on probation for a Peeping Tom…
I’m kind of like a drag mother,” says Brandi Roberts, “in that I have a lot of drag children. I help with hair, makeup, shopping–it’s what I love.” In whatever passes for real life, Brandi is a 45-year-old man who lives simply, among his beaded gowns, with his twenty-year-old daughter…
Tom Blach’s family has been ranching for more than a century now, its annual economic fortunes tangled up in the stalks of grass that carpet 4,000 acres of Yuma County rangeland. “Where we make our money is harvesting grass and putting pounds on cattle,” he explains, adding that “you need…
Seven years before he died, George Murray inscribed his Last Will and Testament by hand. “And it better be legal, as it comes from my heart,” he wrote, with his usual intensity. “Anyone who doubts this, I will come back after my death and haunt THEM.” The time is right…
Clearing the air is what it does best, boasts Envirotest Systems, the embattled operator of Colorado’s new auto-emissions testing program. But the Arizona-based company under fire from residents faced with long lines and higher test fees does some of its best work in smoke-filled rooms. Two years ago, before Colorado…
Snow-lo contendere: The Moffat Tunnel Commission is plenty steamed over the Winter Park Recreational Association’s efforts to put it on ice. So after the city-owned ski resort hired big-time lobbyist Pancho Hays to snow the legislature, the chairmen of the bore tapped the powerhouse legal firm of Brownstein Hyatt Farber…
When last we checked, Fisher DeBerry was tucked safely in his bunk at the Air Force Academy with two armed sentries standing over him, and Don Baylor was hitting fungoes to a group of outpatients in Tucson, whipping them into shape for Opening Day. Of course, things may have changed…
The prospect that Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich will make good on threats to reduce or eliminate federal funding to the Public Broadcasting System has most PBS representatives already talking about cuts in budgets and airtime. So why has Denver’s KBDI-TV Channel 12 chosen this moment to expand its…
Supersalesman Joe Vaughn arrived on Springfield’s main street late last year determined to sell the plains town on the economic benefits of building a privately financed prison west of the Baca County fairgrounds. It was a familiar sales pitch for Vaughn, an Indiana-based promoter who has cut deals for rent-a-prisons…
