part 1 of 2 Kayla Moonwatcher remembers putting the finishing touches on the sweat-lodge altar. It’s perfect, she thought, as she looked around the field outside Lyons. Just right for the most important day of my life. In three days she would be adopted there by her spiritual mentor, Oscar…
Denver Mayor Wellington Webb’s Safe City Summit began last fall with a simple goal: to keep youth violence in check during the summer of 1994 by giving nonprofit agencies a cool $1 million in taxpayer-funded grants. But the summer of 1994 is more than half over. And after a series…
part 2 of 2 Avis Little Eagle joined Indian Country Today fresh out of journalism school. She is Hunkpapa Lakota, the people of medicine man Sitting Bull, from the Standing Rock reservation near Little Eagle, South Dakota. At first Little Eagle did the usual small stories handed to young reporters…
Ardor in the court: This month’s sexual harassment suit against cowboy-booted lawyer Phil Lowery put that dull stuff in L.A. to shame. One of the most delicious moments came when a former lawyer with Lowery’s firm, John Giduck, accused one of the plaintiffs of “unprofessional” behavior. Veteran court-watchers may recall…
Amid the current outpouring of nostalgia about those American footprints in the lunar dust, the observations of former Apollo astronaut Alan Bean seem particularly apt. Bean recently told a magazine interviewer that whenever he looks at Norman Rockwell’s painting of Neil Armstrong’s small step/giant leap, it strikes him as a…
To AIDS activists in Denver, the reaction from Colorado Springs was typical: The only county health director in the state to object to a particular policy on AIDS testing that they support was the guy down in–where else?–conservative El Paso County. Coming from the home of Colorado for Family Values…
When it comes to dealing with the city government and Denver International Airport, businessman King Harris has always had a Midas touch. A company Harris controls has been given almost $20 million worth of work at DIA under a single inspection contract over the past few years. It’s reaped millions…
Jock Bitch Regarding Michael Roberts’s “Jocks of All Tirades” in the July 13 issue: Westword’s gentle treatment of Lewis and Floorwax is pathetic. Come on, theirs is the most misogynistic “show” anytime, anywhere, anyplace. Have you noticed that they play the version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps” that features…
In the editorial offices of the Ranchland News in Simla, Monty Gaddy, whose CB radio is going wild with news of grass fires in the surrounding country, thinks instead of the fabulous hook that came to him in the shower this morning. “I get great lines in the shower,” he…
I take up a station near Romance and Mystery in the Denver Public Library, Central Branch. It is only eight feet from a water fountain and a stone’s throw from the elevators. I sit at a round table scored with the pocketknife blades of the ages, thinking about Weldon Kees,…
When Jeff North first arrived at the Denver law offices of Baker & Hostetler in July 1992, he must have seemed like quite a catch. Barely 43, North had been wooed away from the upper echelons of the Resolution Trust Corporation, the federal agency charged with cleaning up the nation’s…
Even as you read this, a very librarian process is going on. Under the leadership of the Denver Public Library’s director of marketing, Pat Hodapp, a corps of assistants is transcribing the entries to the “Words for All Time” contest. “Each will be the same,” explains Hodapp. “Typed, so that…
The wrecking crew: Coors Field continues to go up, but a 108-year-old building a stone’s throw from the new ballpark apparently is about to go down–to make room for a parking garage. The North Denver Transfer and Storage Building at 2125 Market Street, the first building in the ballpark neighborhood…
If the beach volleyball season gets wiped out, you won’t hear a peep out of me. If the monster-truck drivers decide to walk, so be it. Even if ice dancing melts down tomorrow morning, the pro bowlers pack up ball, bag and shoes at noon, and they cancel the rest…
Secret Ceremonies Thank you, Patricia Calhoun, for reporting the hush-hush national antigay conference hosted by Colorado for Family Values this past May in Colorado Springs (“This Means War,” July 6). Shame on the major daily papers for not covering this important meeting. Regardless of one’s sexual orientation or religion, we…
Ticketmaster has been under fire of late–from two members of the rock group Pearl Jam, who charged at congressional hearings in late June that the ticket service gouged performers and concert fans with high service charges; from the Justice Department, which claims to be “looking into the possibility of anti-competitive…
It was only three years ago in the sprawling San Luis Valley that whites and Hispanics–two groups long plagued by tensions–came together to fight a common enemy. They united to battle a water development company whose attempts to buy up water rights for distant cities threatened the way of life…
It has been just over a year since Colorado legislators gave the go-ahead for amateur reformers to dabble in public education. The Charter Schools Act, which was signed into law last June, for the first time permitted parents and other community members to conceive, develop and operate their own publicly…
The bloodletting is delayed until after a short ceremony honoring members of Wheat Ridge High School’s state champion lacrosse team. The people in the audience at the Wheat Ridge City Council chambers listen patiently as the town’s young Farmers are honored with a proclamation. Then they get ready to rumble…
part 1 of 2 Every generation or so–most recently in 1976–the Bijou Creek, which runs north through the eastern plains from Colorado Springs, pours into the South Platte River in such volume that it causes the river to run backward. Its waters swell and cascade over the railroad embankments and…
part 2 of 2 In small towns, the collective memory is a living, breathing thing, almost separate from the people it grows from. A single bit of off-center behavior can embed itself in the recall of the community and define a person’s personality for the rest of his life. For…
When verse comes to worse: The beat went on…and on…and on last week, as the Rocky Mountain News–which just happened to sponsor the event–devoted endless amounts of ink to “Beats and Other Rebel Angels,” the Naropa Institute’s tribute to Allen Ginsberg, poet and poster child of the North American Man-Boy…
