If only Linda Chavez had spoken more than English only, she might still be George W. Bush’s nominee for Secretary of Labor. If only Chavez had spoken Spanish, for example, she might have understood immediately that her new pet charity back in the early ’90s, Marta Mercado, was in the…
“I predict that a large city in Colorado will be the victim of a strange and terrible pressure from outer space, which will cause all solids to turn into a jellylike mass…I predict the name of the city will be Denver, Colorado.” — Criswell Predicts From Now to the Year…
Jefferson Smith came out to Colorado when this state was booming — the first time. He tried Creede and Leadville but discovered he could make a much better living in Denver. His specialty? Squeezing suckers. It was in Denver, aka Suckerville, that Smith picked up the nickname “Soapy,” in honor…
This is the never-ending election. Because even after all the counts and recounts are completed, Florida finally sinks into the sea, and the U.S. at last has a new President-elect, Colorado won’t have the one thing that would prove a more lasting legacy than four more years: sensible growth control…
As this column went to press, the Metropolitan Football Stadium District announced that it was suspending naming-rights negotiations — at least for now. “Some things should just not be for sale,” said Wellington Webb. Denver’s mayor was talking — to just about anyone who would listen last week, including National…
Six dead women — the body count so far this month for Colorado’s victims of domestic violence — weren’t enough to lead local TV newscasts. Patrick Roy’s arrest early Sunday morning was, making the NHL’s most winning goalie ever an unlikely, and unwilling, poster child for Domestic Violence Awareness Month…
In May 1998, Chris Clendening, who by then had more than twenty years with the Denver Sheriff’s Department under his belt, was assigned to extradite a prisoner from Detroit. A second deputy sheriff collected an advance check to cover the trip; he cashed it and turned over the entire amount,…
The shelves of the Denver Public Library hold many items that some might find objectionable. The books of the learned Laura Schlessinger, for example, bestsellers by the talk-show hostess with a doctorate in physiology whose advice clogs the airwaves. Yes, the Denver Public Library contains many objectionable items — but…
The valet parking area at the Westin was full, but they took so long to tell me that I felt aggrieved. So I squealed down to the basement of the hotel parking garage on my Firestone-recalled tires, talking on a cell phone that was almost certainly shooting deadly electronic impulses…
“The gauntlet had been thrown. And now the town was to see an interminable newspaper war, with attacks, journalistic screams, fisticuffs and gunplay. Meanwhile, the people of the city read this whirlwind paper in increasing numbers. It became known everywhere — and feared.” — Gene Fowler in his classic account…
The right click opens up your Windows options, Paul Verizzo tells his computer class. “It opens up your life.” But that window’s about to slam shut. A week from now, Verizzo will be gone from the Curtis Park Community Center, where he’s been director of the technology program since last…
Two weeks until summer begins, and already the dog days are upon us. They’re snapping at our most exquisitely sensitive spots. As might have been predicted, the most rabid area is Boulder, a town literally going to the dogs — and the cats, and the ferrets, and the parrots –…
Last Friday, John Bray landed on the ground outside our office, a bullet in his chest. On Saturday, his killing landed on the front pages of both dailies, already labeled “road rage” — the first such deadly instance in Denver. But by Sunday, Bray’s death rated just an inside mention…
Pity the poor Denver City Council members who get caught napping after Monday night’s meeting. On Tuesday, May 2, “the City will begin enforcing ordinances that prohibit trespassing, including sleeping overnight, at any City and County Building,” according to an April 20 memo from the Department of Human Services. “Notices…
All of Denver’s neighborhoods have character. Few have clout. Not the clout of Hilltop, certainly, which ten days ago wrested from Denver City Council a moratorium that temporarily bans lot-splitting in the pricey neighborhood, where the stuff inside the residents’ wallets is as green as those big, broad lawns that…
With a Republican in the governor’s office — a Republican who, during his 1998 campaign, told the Christian Coalition he supported banning tax money from going to organizations that provide abortions — and Republicans dominating both sides of the Colorado Legislature, I thought by now we’d be teaching creationism in…
On Tuesday, his last free day in this country, Loi Nguyen frantically tries to salvage what he can of the rest of his life. At the end of this week, the INS will revoke the bond that has kept him out of its Aurora detention center for the past year…
And you thought Pedro Astacio had problems with the INS. Even as the justice system debates whether the confessed wife-beater — confessed, at least, until Astacio’s lawyers realized that their plea bargain could result in the Rockies pitcher (and now hitter) being kicked out of the country — can withdraw…
Connections count. In early January, US West filled a time capsule with tidbits about how the telephone had changed our lives. “In 1900,” the company chirped, “telephones were considered luxury items.” But in certain parts of Colorado, where potential US West customers have been waiting weeks, months, years for service,…
This week the Colorado Legislature passes the point of no return, when bills must either move on to the other house for ten more weeks of bickering or disappear altogether. But even before this session started — when Senator John Andrews declared that the Ten Commandments should be posted in…
Tom Tancredo is back from Washington, back home in Colorado after his first year as a freshman representative, wondering if the snow now smothering D.C. will somehow prevent him from attending the State of the Union address. Could he be so lucky? So far, the conservative congressman from Colorado’s Sixth…
There may not have been fireworks on New Year’s Eve, but all hell’s been busting loose since we woke up Saturday morning and found ourselves living in Loserville. Denver was so dull, so dead on Friday night that local TV anchors pleaded for something, anything, to put on the air…
