No matter how sensitive the University of Denver is these days, it keeps getting spanked. First, the school got bashed by boosters of Denver Boone, the onetime Pioneer mascot. Then some loyalists griped about a commission to investigate the role of John Evans, the territorial governor who founded the school,…
For the past eleven years, Colorado Inside Out, the weekly public affairs roundtable on Colorado Public Television, has taken an annual trip in the Colorado Time Machine. The show’s reported on current events of 1912 (last year’s show, when I played Margaret “Molly” Brown or 1951 (the 2011 episode, when…
Dear Readers: My columna a couple of weeks ago about whether Aztec savagery influences violence in Mexico today drew muchos responses, both bueno and malo. Here are two: Dear Mexican: I enjoy reading all of your replies and was thinking about the last reply you wrote about the violence/Aztec blood…
It could have been worse: The University of Denver could have been stuck with the Exterminators instead of the Pioneers. “Exterminator” is the label that Major Edward Wynkoop slapped on then-territorial governor John Evans after he endorsed “the destruction and killing” of “all hostile Indians” — an endorsement acted on…
Will Guy didn’t set out to minor in civics when he transferred to the University of Denver. He just wanted a good education in design. “On my first tour,” he recalls, “I just out of curiosity asked what the mascot was. The tour guide gave me a puzzled look and…
“I’m a welder and a family man, and I tell you, that feels pretty great,” says Seth Lee. It sounded pretty great, too, as this welder/family man stood before a crowd gathered today in the Capitol to talk about how far he’s come since that day in 1998 when he…
Don’t haul out the peanuts and Cracker Jack just yet: The opening of Sonny Lawson Field has been delayed from today to let the new sod take hold — and that means the first game of the Homeless Diamond’s third season has also been pushed back, to 9 a.m. Tuesday,…
Baseball has always been big in Five Points; in On the Road, Jack Kerouac described going to a game on Welton Street one night among “all humanity, the lot.” That game was on a field renamed Sonny Lawson Park in 1972, and it’s still home to one of the most…
Dear Mexican: I’m a U.S.-born Mexican who spent part of my life growing up in Tijuana. Why do Mexican-Americans from Santa Ana and South Gate always think they’re harder than the rest of us Mexicans, yet their neighborhoods are like a hundred times better than the colonia I grew up…
The half-life of plutonium is 20,000 years — and it looks like books about plutonium have a long shelf-life, too. When Kristen Iversen decided to write about growing up in the shadow of Rocky Flats, she “wasn’t sure it would get published,” she says, even though she’d had earlier success…
Judge Herbert Stern will decide on Friday whether the city’s swap of eleven acres by Hentzell Park to Denver Public Schools in exchange for a DPS facility at 1330 Fox Street can go through — or will instead go to a vote of Denver residents on the November ballot. Meanwhile,…
While History Colorado and tribal representatives consult on Collision, an exhibit dedicated to the Sand Creek Massacre, and the political and cultural issues that continue to reverberate, other groups are gearing up to mark next year’s 150th anniversary of this sad chapter in Colorado history. Local filmmaker Aaron Sears, for…
Seven months after the Northern Cheyenne tribe sent its last letter to History Colorado demanding that Collision: The Sand Creek Massacre 1860s to Today be closed; fourteen months after History Colorado opened its new building with that exhibit in place, despite earlier protests; and almost 149 years after the Sand…
Dear Mexican: Recently, a co-worker turned me on to a website that features many videos of unspeakable atrocities the drug cartels are committing in Mexico, many graphically displaying murders and beheadings. I recently saw one of a woman getting her head cut off with a knife! Now I wish I…
Dear Mexican: In Philadelphia, where I live, there are three Spanish-language stations on regular broadcast television. None of them offer English subtitles. I’ll bet plenty of people of all heritages would like to check out Spanish-language television, or the news from Central America or whatever, if we could get subtitles…
Jamie Laurie makes music — and also political and social change. A founder of the Flobots, he was raised in Denver, where he grew from a comic-loving kid to an East High teacher sharing rap with students. Although still based here, Laurie promotes global issues through the nonprofit flobots.org. And…
“This new nonstop flight will be a gateway into Colorado for Japan and other Asian countries,” said Governor John Hickenlooper at yesterday’s send-off for the inaugural United flight direct from Denver International Airport to Japan. And then, after a sake toast, a dream team of Denver boosters (who’s running the…
With seventy of this state’s movers and shakers headed to Japan this week for an economic mission that includes a side trip to Denver’s sister city of Takayama, there should be lots of sibling revelry. But up in Boulder, the sister-city program founded by President Dwight Eisenhower more than fifty…
Tired DIA travelers were doing double-takes as they boarded the escalator heading down out of Concourse B last night, their eyes drawn to the right by the bright sign on a new restaurant — and then riveted by the sight of who was standing under that sign: John Elway. “There…
Dear Readers: The U.K.’s spectacular Guardian newspaper has asked if I could field some questions for their readers as part of the paper’s summer travel package. Turns out Brits want to know more about Mexican food! Let’s be benevolent toward those buggerers: Their idea of what our comida constitutes comes…
Stake your claim in the latest residential hotspot,” urges the story in Saturday’s New Homes section in the Denver Post touting an open house at Century Communities at Candelas. A really hot spot: the half-life for plutonium is 24,000 years. Century isn’t the only home builder developing Candelas, a 2,000-acre…
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” said George Santayana, who condensed his moral code into The Life of Reason in 1951 — the same year the feds announced they was building a facility dedicated to fighting the Cold War sixteen miles northwest of Denver. The…
