Audio By Carbonatix
They say that truth is stranger than fiction; even more frightening, truth is real. The following events (compiled from items in Colorado’s daily and weekly papers — including this one — as well as reports on local TV and radio stations) actually took place this past year. They’re strange, all right. Sadly, they’re also true.
Fallout
Denver International Airport officials advised passengers with hidden piercings — of belly buttons, nipples, etc. — to remove their jewelry before they attempted to walk through the airport’s metal detectors. Searching these passengers was apparently causing delays.
Boulder police arrested Glenn Dale Ewell, 47, a dishwasher working for the University of Colorado’s residence halls, and charged him with leaving threatening messages on an answering machine belonging to the school’s Muslim Student Association. The messages warned Muslims to leave the country by Christmas or be killed.
Marc Guttman, who was in charge of distributing the 1,200 seats that were sold as souvenirs out of Mile High Stadium, was called to active duty just as the packaging and shipping of the seats was about to start in October, leaving employees of the Metropolitan Football Stadium District scrambling. Guttman is a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve.
A doctor in Washington, D.C., prescribed the anthrax-fighting antibiotic Cipro to Congresswoman Diana DeGette after she complained of having a cold. DeGette, who was preparing to evacuate the House of Representatives along with the rest of her colleagues after anthrax-laced letters were found in Senate offices, had gone to the doctor for a flu shot. Her tests came back negative.
The People’s Republic of Boulder
Two traveling magazine salesmen were arrested in March after one allegedly offered to give the other a haircut for $3 and then upped the price to $7 after he was done. Police said Danny L. Johnson, of Gary, Indiana, stabbed his colleague in the back four times with a scissors during the Boulder hotel-room altercation. Kevin Leonard Hicks, of West Memphis, Arkansas, was treated for minor stab wounds and then arrested and charged with instigating the fight by punching Johnson in the head.
In April, the Boulder City Council took up a proposed ordinance to ban the outdoor use of indoor furniture, namely couches. The measure was brought to the council by the University Hill Neighbors Association, a community group that has been trying to deal with violence and lawless acts incited by University of Colorado students living or partying on the Hill. Members of the neighborhood group told councilmembers that there had been about 25 couch burnings a year since 1997. In response, a tongue-in-cheek organization calling itself the Rocky Mountain Backside Enthusiasts sprang up to protest the proposed ban. City council postponed a decision until October, then postponed it again until sometime next year.
Boulder Valley School District officials yanked a Mesa Elementary School student’s project about race and culture from a science fair in February after deeming that it was too controversial and could hurt the feelings of minority students. For her project, titled “Does Skin Color Make a Difference?” the third-grader compared people’s reactions to a white Barbie doll versus a black Barbie doll when she asked them which one was prettier. Although adults were fairly neutral, most of the children in the survey preferred the white doll. After the project was pulled from the fair, the ACLU protested, saying the girl’s right to free speech had been violated. The controversy ignited a raucous debate about how race should be taught and whether a science fair was an appropriate place to address the subject. To help satisfy the ACLU, teachers at Mesa agreed to discuss the project, as well as the debate it caused, in their classrooms.
More controversy arose in Boulder in October when Marcelee Gralapp, the longtime director of the Boulder Public Library, denied a request by library employees to hang an enormous U.S. flag from the ceiling. Although there are other U.S. flags displayed around the library, offended patriots pointed out that an art exhibit hanging inside the library included a piece made up of 21 multicolored ceramic penises hanging from a clothesline. The work, called “Hanging ‘Em Out to Dry,” was part of Art Triumphs Over Domestic Violence, an exhibit sponsored by Safehouse, a local shelter for battered women and children. Predictably, the issue made it onto talk radio, and from there, into the ears of Boulder resident Bob Rowan, who took it upon himself to steal all 21 penises in broad daylight and replace them with an American flag and the message “El Dildo Bandito was here.” The undamaged phalluses were recovered the next day when Rowan called a radio station to confess and the station called the cops. Rowan was charged with misdemeanor criminal tampering.
Strange Bedfellows
In April, state representative Lola Spradley was on her way to a House Appropriations Committee meeting when her elevator got stuck between floors at the State Capitol. Spradley, who had her cell phone with her, called her staff and the Colorado State Patrol, who in turn called firefighters, who freed the Republican lawmaker by lowering a ladder down to her.
In May, President George Bush nominated New York lawyer Harvey Pitt as the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a move that generated heated criticism from the religious right and other groups. They didn’t approve of the fact that Pitt had once represented New Frontier Media Inc., a Boulder company that runs several cable networks and Web sites featuring hardcore porn and distributes pornographic films to major corporations such as AT&T, Time Warner and EchoStar Communications. Pitt, who specialized in helping people and companies fight the SEC when they got into trouble (people like convicted financier Ivan Boesky), had assisted publicly traded New Frontier in a dispute with the Nasdaq stock exchange. Despite these resumé items, Pitt’s nomination was cheered by both the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, and he was confirmed by Congress in August.
After resisting for years, Representative Joel Hefley of Colorado Springs became the last national lawmaker to get his own Web site. The eight-term Republican went live over the July 4 weekend with a user-friendly, if somewhat sparse, Internet home page. A number of his constituents, however, pointed out that the 66-year-old Hefley still didn’t have an official e-mail address — an ironic oversight considering that a national study ranked Colorado Springs second only to the Silicon Valley’s San Jose as the most tech-savvy city in the nation. Hefley’s lack of an e-mail address became an even bigger issue in October, when anthrax scares halted mail service at the Capitol and legislators began encouraging constituents to stay in touch electronically.
An Aspen newspaper revealed in June that city councilman Tony Hershey, elected in 1999, had a 5 percent ownership in the Internet domain name aspensucks.com. Hershey, a lawyer, was given the meager share as payment for representing the men who own the rest of the domain name. Although there is nothing posted on the site, and although Hershey insisted that he is a strong supporter of the town he represents, he chose to give up his shares in the name after a public outcry.
In August, the Colorado Springs Independent ran a story and a photo about what appeared to be a knee-high marijuana plant growing in a bed of bluebells in the backyard of the Governor’s Mansion. The Colorado State Patrol, which provides security for the mansion and for Governor Bill Owens, yanked the plant in response to the story and tested it in a lab. Although the CSP reported that the leafy intruder was merely a pot look-alike, a Denver Post reporter took a sample of it to an expert at the Denver Botanic Gardens, who said that it was indeed marijuana. A police spokesman speculated that the plant might have grown from a seed that the wind blew into the guv’s backyard.
In July, two high-profile local youngsters tried to trick Representative Scott McInnis into talking to them about gun control. Brooks Brown, 21, a former Columbine High School student (and on-again-off-again friend of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold), and Ben Gelt, 20, son of Denver City Councilwoman Susan Barnes Gelt, showed up at McInnis’s D.C. office carrying a video camera and claiming to be documentary filmmakers. The two were actually members of SAFE Colorado, a gun-control group created after the Columbine massacre, and were trying to get McInnis to talk about closing the “gun-show loophole” — after he’d turned down an earlier request by SAFE for a meeting. The Grand Junction Republican has stubbornly refused to talk to SAFE, or former Columbine students, since a heated 1999 exchange with some of them; he also declined to see the “filmmakers.” Although members of SAFE were indeed in D.C. lobbying legislators when Brown and Gelt pulled their stunt, the group said the incident was not sanctioned. Brown, Gelt and a third man were kicked out of the organization a day later.
In Spirit
Lakewood police arrested Patricia Hancock, 34, and her two teenage children in March and charged them with harassing pastors at the church they attended. At Hancock’s urging, police said, the teens had set fire to a vehicle belonging to one pastor and scrawled “You will die” across the door; they’d slashed the tires of a car belonging to a second pastor.
In May, the Archdiocese of Denver rescinded an invitation for U.S. Representative DeGette to speak at a Catholic awards dinner held to honor those who work for affordable housing. Because DeGette is staunchly pro-choice, the invitation outraged a number of anti-choice Catholics who made threatening phone calls, according to Archdiocese fundraiser Denise Ludwig. Archbishop Charles Chaput then wrote a letter to DeGette criticizing her stance.
In August, Chaput announced that he wouldn’t be able to formally bless the new Invesco Field at Mile High until October, well into the football season. Still, when he finally did get around to the blessing, he put on quite a show, sprinkling the facility with holy water and reading a special Catholic prayer for the blessing of stadiums and gymnasiums. Bible passages relating to sports competition were also read. Even so, the Broncos played less than heavenly football this year, especially at home.
But Seriously, Folks
Freshman state representative Al White, a Winter Park Republican, showed up for his first day of work at the Capitol in January riding the same electric scooter he’d used to campaign throughout his district.
Pueblo resident Dave Fern was frying a tortilla on his stove in May when a bolt of lightning struck, burning a hole through the middle of his frying pan.
In January, a fuel-truck driver mistakenly emptied 7,000 gallons of diesel fuel into a water-quality monitoring well at the Copper Mountain ski resort instead of into an underground storage tank. Although officials were able to immediately recover about 150 gallons of the fuel, six months later they still had no idea where the rest had gone.
In February, Denver police officer Ronnie Williams attempted to form a white officers’ organization because he felt that white cops were frequently being passed over for promotions in favor of minority candidates. Williams, who said he would call the group the “Denver Police Equal Rights Association,” pointed out that there were already groups for Hispanic, black and gay officers.
Fans of the Rocky Horror Picture Show set a world record on July 10, when over 2,500 of them attended a showing of the cult classic at Red Rocks Amphitheater. The previous record for viewing the film was set in 1990 in California, when 2,500 people gathered to watch the 1975 flick. Damn it, Janet.
A vasectomy was among the items offered at Bromwell Elementary School’s annual silent-auction fundraiser in May. No one bid on the procedure, however, even after the auctioneer offered to take pseudonyms.
In October, Glenwood Springs lawyer Don Kaufman posted on eBay the Garfield County jail bunk that serial killer Ted Bundy had slept in. Although auctioning the cell’s contents was part of an official effort by Garfield County to raise money for legal services for the poor, eBay took the offering down in November, stating its policy that items relating to murder aren’t permitted, out of consideration for the families of the victims. Bundy escaped from the Garfield County jail on New Year’s Eve 1977.
Only half a dozen people showed up to a February reading and book-signing event featuring Daniel Glick, author of the book Powder Burn, which detailed the 1998 arson fires at the Vail ski resort and took a critical look at the local community. The low turnout was strange, considering that the event was held in the Vail area itself.
Controversy rang throughout Invesco Field at Mile High — not to mention the rest of the known world — this spring and summer when it was revealed that although most people call him Bucky, his real name is Bucko. They were talking, of course, about the 16,000-pound, 27-foot-tall fiberglass statue of a stallion that sat on top of Mile Stadium for 26 years before being repainted and removed to the new home of the Denver Broncos in June. Although both the team and the Metropolitan Football Stadium District, which owns the new place, were calling him Bucky, Rocky Mountain News gossip columnist Penny Parker uncovered evidence in May that the horse — made from the same cast as a statue of Roy Rogers’s famed steed, Trigger — had actually been named Bucko as part of a radio contest in 1975. Not to be outdone by Parker, the Denver Post then held a contest of its own, asking readers to choose. (The Post likes to make up its own names for stadium-related items.) Bucko was selected, beating out Bucky by 21 votes. Other suggestions included: Thunder, Elway, Invesco Horse at Mile High, Invesco Bucky on top of Invesco Field at Mile High, Scammy, Bilko and Bourque-o. A spokesman for the MFSD eventually acknowledged that the horse’s given name was Bucko but said the statue could officially be referred to either way.
Rest in Peace
When they raided a mobile home belonging to John George Minea in February, police in Ramsey County, Minnesota, recovered an urn containing the ashes of a Grand Junction man. Minea had worked as a handyman for Georgia Eaton, a Colorado resident, in July 1999 and apparently had decided to take the ashes of her late husband with him when he left in a dispute over money. Police also discovered 832 unreturned library books valued at over $14,000 in Minea’s home.
Just two days after the venerable White Spot restaurant shut its doors for good in June, waitress Edith Shaw was found dead in her Aurora home. A picture of Shaw, 56, had appeared the day before in a Post article about the closing of the Denver landmark, which stood at Eighth Avenue and Broadway for forty years.
The newly appointed chief of staff for Lieutenant Governor Joe Rogers was found dead on May 11 in her Lone Tree home. Ashley Andrus, 32, was the former director of public policy for the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce before taking the job in Colorado. Drugs, alcohol and foul play were ruled out by the Douglas County coroner.
All the News
Channel 9 anchor/reporter Mark Koebrich was ticketed by police while covering the first game at Invesco Field at Mile High in August, after he allegedly got into a physical confrontation with one of the station’s technicians, who’d criticized Koebrich’s work.
Rocky Mountain News international editor Holger Jensen was arrested on June 5 on suspicion of driving drunk. Police pulled the writer over after witnesses reported seeing his pickup weaving; he’d gotten as far as exotic Golden.
Channel 4 weatherman Ed Greene was charged with careless driving after he was involved in a serious accident in August that left him hospitalized with six fractured ribs, a broken clavicle and a partially collapsed lung. Greene had been driving his Acura sports car in Highlands Ranch when he pulled in front of an oncoming car, according to police. No one else was injured, and Greene pleaded guilty in November to a lesser charge of driving a defective vehicle.
Channel 9 sportscaster Tony Zarella told his audience at the end of a 10 p.m. newscast in April that the reason he had been on leave for more than a month was so he could get help for a drug-and-alcohol problem. “I have just begun my journey to recovery,” he said.
Qwest Communications accidentally billed about 14,000 cell-phone customers up to $600 a minute, a gaffe that was duly reported in the Denver daily newspapers. But when the phone company’s lines ended up jammed by customers demanding that the faulty charges be fixed, Qwest recorded a message blaming media coverage for the long waits. The message was eventually removed.
We’re Number 2
About ten high school students were charged with criminal mischief in November after dozens of portable toilets at construction sites near Steamboat Springs were toppled. Police originally thought the damage might have been done by environmental terrorists.
Someone set at least nine portable potties on fire in late December and early January 2001 in the vicinity of Green Mountain. West Metro Fire Protection District investigators said the ground around each of the toilets was littered with empty beer bottles and fireworks.
In October, Boulder County sheriff’s deputies had to mediate a dispute over an outhouse, which Boulder resident Scott Allen Verrill said he’d lent to a neighbor two years earlier and had never gotten back. Verrill told the deputies that he had repeatedly asked Scott Charles Haggerty to return the wooden outhouse, which Haggerty had borrowed for a party, but to no avail; Verrill said the outhouse was an antique that could be worth as much as $550.
Calling them “perhaps the most expensive toilets on the planet,” U.S. Representative Bob Schaffer, a Republican from Fort Collins, criticized the construction of an elaborate, $1.7 million, fourteen-stall toilet complex at Maroon Bells near Aspen. In an August letter sent to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, he demanded an explanation for why taxpayers should have to pay so much for a pretty privy. But Schaffer wasn’t the only one mad about the bathrooms. Visitors to the extremely popular wilderness area complained that the facilities were ugly, berating the fake rocks and calling the bathrooms the “Flintstone Palace.” In October, Schaffer got a letter back from David P. Tenny, acting deputy undersecretary for natural resources and the environment, who defended the toilets as long-lasting and environmentally sound. Schaffer responded by encouraging “every American to go to the Maroon Bells to have a seat on one of these thrones to get their money’s worth.”