Janice and Jhenita Whitfield were crossing the Western Slope, en route from San Diego to Denver, when they were pulled over for Driving While Black. Jhenita had been living in California with her sister, an operations technician with the Navy, for seven months. Now, on this cold spring morning in…
There weren’t any trees at first. Maybe a few cottonwoods — scrappy, messy tangles along the banks of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River — but the rest was just sagebrush and tall grass. Then the gold miners came, and the bartenders, the merchants and the ranchers, the doctors…
Not much happens in Woodland Park. It’s the place where the Millennium Holiday Tree, which was used to celebrate Christmas in Washington, D.C., will be sliced up to make park benches; it’s a jumping-off point for people heading into the Pike and San Isabel national forests for hiking, biking and…
The chiseled sign in front of the building at 400 West Colfax still reads “Rocky Mountain News,” as it has since long before October 1998, when the publication billed as “Colorado’s oldest newspaper” rechristened itself the “Denver Rocky Mountain News.” But the move to drop the “Denver” and reclaim the…
The first thing — and possibly the last — you need to know about the new Extreme Football League is that Dick Butkus is the philosopher king of the rules committee. For those who don’t remember Butkus (which is to say, virtually every fan the XFL hopes to attract), this…
Life in the Foster Lane From here to eternity: I must congratulate Julie Jargon for her January 18 story, “Home for Dinner.” She took a very complicated issue and made it easy to understand, focusing on one important point: Children deserve to be put in good homes, and be put…
In November 1998, an employee of a local hospital called the Denver Department of Human Services child-abuse hotline to report that a patient, four-year-old Ben, had been admitted with bruises on his body. Ben’s father had taken him to the emergency room after he fell off a bookshelf he’d climbed…
Walk west across Cherokee Street from the City and County Building, pass through the spike-topped iron gates of the Denver Mint, at 320 West Colfax Avenue, and you may not be in Denver anymore. That’s what Mint employee April Garcia has discovered during her ongoing attempt to get a restraining…
Unless you were a cashier in one of the original toll booths at Denver International Airport and on a bathroom break, you probably never noticed the toll plaza office building that sits on the median between Peña Boulevard’s inbound and outbound lanes. The nondescript, 6,600-square-foot structure (with another 6,000-plus square…
Glendale is a desert, and the man in battered denim is a wandering Jew, identifiable by the fringes hanging below his T-shirt. “I’ve spent a couple thousand hours studying Torah,” he confirms. “It keeps me focused on something other than this pain of mine. Don’t use my name.” His hair…
Despite the deadly hits that dot-com stocks have taken of late, no one’s ready to declare the Internet revolution an overhyped flop — if only because the basic technology works. Nevertheless, it is easier to create a whiz-bang site these days than it is to make money from it, as…
Turn on the television, open the paper or click on the radio, and you’d be hard pressed to avoid seeing/reading about/listening to some athlete selling something. Companies will use jocks to hawk just about anything these days (Ed McCaffrey is an expert on mattresses why?), no matter their age (Dick…
Job Insecurity Kitty letter: Meow! Judging from the depths of the claw marks in her January 11 “The Basement Tapes,” Patricia Calhoun was envious that Linda Chavez, a real columnist (with national credentials), got nominated for a Cabinet position. But Ms. Calhoun needn’t worry about any Guatemalans in her basement:…
Tom Leask waited patiently for years, biding his time, waiting for the word. The folks in the tiny mountain town of Alma, where he lived, didn’t know that Leask was waiting, but they knew he was “off.” An oddball in a place populated with eccentrics, he was the town crazy,…
The state’s insanity cases have involved a range of inviduals who have invoked the defense with varying results. Among them: • Jeffrey Miller, Byers. Killed his newborn son in 1997 by hurling him against the walls and ceiling of his trailer. Claimed “intermittent explosive disorder.” Found guilty, sentenced to life…
Rich Navarro never fought in a war, but he sure knows what it’s like to be in the middle of a dogfight. Navarro enlisted in the Air Force on February 9, 1955 — more than a year and a half after the Korean War ended, and nine days after the…
On January 2, the day after Mayor Wellington Webb said he was looking for a corporate sponsor to partner with the city on next year’s New Year’s Eve bash (conveniently overlooking the fact that one of the obstacles faced by the Mayor’s Millennium Commission in its 2000 fundraising efforts was…
No Denver event in recent memory has received the sort of unleavened media praise that was heaped upon the New Year’s party staged at the 16th Street Mall as 2000 turned to 2001. Even afterward, the press was so eager to please that it happily discarded initial crowd figures from…
No wonder Nolan Ryan is doing painkiller commercials on the boob tube. He’s hurting. After all, in his waning playing days back in the 1980s, the poor guy had to scrape by on a couple million bucks a year and live in a place with just nine bedrooms. Think of…
The Big Bang Theory Happy goo year: The city of Denver may not have collapsed into a “jellylike mass” at midnight on December 31, but it looks like Patricia Calhoun herself turned into a pile of goo. I always enjoy her columns poking fun (or worse) at Wellington Webb and…
The students stand around the steel tables of the Cooking School of the Rockies’ professional kitchen. Before them are rows of plates containing the preliminary versions of dishes that will be served at the school’s biannual gala — designed as both a fundraiser for Boulder’s Community Food Share and a…
For the most part, the mood at the Colorado State Board of Education’s last work session of 2000 is polite, collegial, even chummy. Until the end, that is. The change takes place with the final item on the December 13 agenda, a typically offbeat resolution proposal by Patti Johnson, whose…
