One hot August morning, a day even drier and dustier than it had been that June more than 123 years before, I said goodbye to Alan Dumas and added some more dust to the Little Bighorn Battlefield, where George Armstrong Custer had made his last stand. I’d been to this…
On the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, hundreds of Denverites gathered at a luncheon honoring community leaders who have held true to King’s principles. The banquet was sponsored by Colorado’s MLK Commission, which is headed by Denver First Lady Wilma Webb, wife of one of the most prominent…
It was not looking like a very happy new year for Foxes. In the preceding months the city had come down, hard, on the nightclub at Sixth Avenue and Bryant Street. The bar’s neighbors–most of them businesses–in the largely industrial area just off Federal were complaining about garbage, about broken…
Is this a great country, or what? Although it is not the land of his birth, my companion is defending the United States and all those truths that are supposed to be self-evident with the sort of ferocity usually displayed by taxi drivers fighting over a nice, juicy fare. Which…
In the January 8 New Yorker, satirist Christopher Buckley sums up 1996 with a series of hypothetical headlines: “Colorado Militia Blows Up New Denver Airport,” reads one. “Denver Airport Bombers Are Given Ticker-Tape Parade Through Downtown: Mayor Hails `Heroes’ and Presents Them With Keys to Old Airport,” reads the next…
Defame is the name of the game. David Thomas, the district attorney of Jefferson County, wasn’t happy with Eric Dexheimer’s August story that deconstructed the Quigley-Aronson mess from an overblown scandal to an overgrown neighborhood spat. By then, of course, the case that the head of the Anti-Defamation League labeled…
My upper torso heaves with indignation. Late last month, in an effort to clean up their act before Congress does it for them, those arbiters of taste at America Online banned the word “breast.” In doing so, the country’s largest computer on-line service exhibited all the exquisite sensibilities of those…
She opened her mail the first Saturday in November, and the bottom dropped out of her world. Jo had worked hard to shore up the foundation of her life. She had followed all the orders, read all the books, done all the right things. She had fought for her family…
Are they gone yet? Have the last polar-bear-suited protesters packed up their picket signs, the last TV cameras captured that last foot of film, the last Klondike and Snow fans finally left the Denver Zoo? Good. Maybe Denver will now come out of hibernation. Maybe the town will wake up…
Now you see it, now you don’t. The hyperbolic paraboloid still stands sentinel on the 16th Street Mall, a dilapidated, Jetson-esque reminder of the days when Denver’s hopes soared as high as the structure’s I.M. Pei-designed roof. “Our mall has only two characteristics that distinguish it from Anytown, USA,” says…
Ben Dover. That was the name of the mythical airline vice-president of finance skewered in a series of limited-edition cartoons last spring in Alaska. In faxes sent to that state’s legislators, reporters and the governor’s office, yuksters poked fun at “ColoradoAir” and its attempts to extort $40 million from Alaska…
It was Wednesday, and grease was the word. That meant one thing: the Mexico City Lounge (or Cafe, depending on which sign you pay attention to), in the 2100 block of Larimer Street, where the weekly taco specials draw people from all walks of life. In this instance, the walk…
A thousand miles away in California, the O.J. Simpson jury had just started deliberating when Denver County Court Judge Larry Bohning called his court to order. From the outset, the city’s case against Arisha McRae and DeShawn White looked like anything but a grand slam. Time had not only dulled…
“I’ve been here twenty years,” Ronald Ford says from behind the only register at Scott’s Market. “I didn’t even realize twenty years had gone by. You stay in this little place, and you’re cut off from the rest of the world.” For two decades Ford has helped the people who…
LoDo is over, the urban hipster said sadly. His pronouncement would certainly surprise anyone who has dodged through the throngs of well-lubricated partyers who roam the streets at 1 a.m. And he wasn’t even thinking about Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose proposed Planet Hollywood could terminate much of what’s still charming about…
This summer has been no picnic for Elitch’s. The relocated amusement park has been criticized for its long lines, crowded walkways and general stinginess displayed in the lack of landscaping, the high prices and the prohibition against bringing food into the facility. Because of the above complaints, or perhaps becaue…
They don’t have a prayer. As women from across the country arrive in Denver this week for the Summit on Women’s Economic Security, they may think they’ve come to talk about planning for retirement, or new technological opportunities, or dealing with daycare, or how to imbue girls with the proper…
These had been dull days in Denver’s newspaper war, marked primarily by a slide in circulation for the Rocky Mountain News, a slide into somnolence for readers of both papers, and the continual murmur from industry analysts that the city’s status as a two-newspaper town couldn’t last. And then last…
This is not a pretty picture. In a matter of weeks Denver City Council members, whose average aesthetic tastes tend to John Denver songs and paintings of big-eyed little girls, will suddenly find themselves in charge of handing out three-quarters of a million dollars to arts groups–every year. Suddenly it’s…
In Quebec, home of our soon-to-be NHL team, the soon-to-be-renamed Nordiques, it’s considered bad taste to call someone a “pepsi.” In Denver, it’s only considered bad taste to be caught cutting deals for Pepsi. But even before the clock struck 12 at the very end of May 8, the legislature’s…
From the halls of Montezuma County, the outraged cries carried all the way to Denver: Six years of hard work, soon to be undone by one stroke of Governor Roy Romer’s pen. For over half a decade, Montezuma County had fought–three times all the way up to the Colorado Supreme…
At daybreak on the Comanche National Grassland, the air is so sweet and the endless, empty vistas so breathtaking that it is impossible to imagine anyone going out of his way to screw this world up. This rough, beautiful country was the backdrop when Wes McKinley left his ranch in…
