Tuesday, September 7, 1999. It’s the beginning of a new school year, and it’s going to be a big one for P.S.1, Denver’s oldest charter school. As P.S.1 enters its sixth year of existence, its charter will be up for renewal by the Denver Board of Education, and teachers and…
Five years ago, Arron Apperson didn’t talk to his father much. The two argued more than they ever agreed. Whenever Arron’s dad, Curt, would tell him something, he’d shut himself off or pick a fight with the old man. It never seemed to matter what it was — hanging a…
Like much of the area northeast of Coors Field, the 2600 block of Larimer Street has become somewhat jumbled lately. People with a fondness for discount gin have always been at home here, but they’ve been joined by Merlot-sipping loft-lovers drawn by the neighborhood’s “character” — though the street’s characters…
In most circles, the subject of dating over the Internet elicits either wisecracks or bewildered looks. The stigma is that meeting someone online is for losers, degenerates, and anyone who can’t get laid. But a quick peek at the big Web sites — America Online, Yahoo and Alta Vista –…
Colorado’s image has taken a beating over the past several years, what with the eternally unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey, in which Boulder’s law-enforcement types compare unfavorably with Mayberry’s, and then the Columbine killings, which continue to inspire Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone’s excellent impersonation of Barney Fife (even if…
Hal Bregman’s good manners know no bounds. Hence, any conversational topic — even hygienic concerns arising from our most personal daily function — may be tackled without fear of offense. Could it be that his vocabulary, which, with its specificity and lack of rude informality, inspires confidence? Or is it…
Those locals praying that coverage of Columbine High School would diminish following the first anniversary of the shootings didn’t have to wait long to be disappointed. Last week, only six days after the modestly attended commemorative festivities (“Anniversary Post-Mortem,” April 27), Jefferson County Attorney Frank Hutfless ordered that a Columbine…
The favorite in this Saturday’s Kentucky Derby is a regally bred but half-crazy colt named Fusaichi Pegasus, and if you can pronounce his name, you’re doing better than most of the bourbon-soaked horse gentry decorating the saloons of Louisville. To be sure, Foos-ey-EE-chee, American-bred and Japanese-owned, is quite a runner:…
Spies Like Us Eileen Welsome’s April 20 piece on Wen Ho Lee, “Spies, Lies and Portable Tapes,” is the state of the art now. Congratulations. Jude Wanniski via the Internet Normally, I’m not one for spy stories — true or not — but I couldn’t put Eileen…
Eagle is the kind of Colorado town that people in less scenic places dream about. For decades it survived as a supply center for the ranches that were the mainstay of Eagle County. The downtown streets — wide enough to maneuver a horse and wagon — are lined with century-old…
Stephen Elliott’s five-year-old daughter, Isabel, wanted hamburgers for dinner, and so on April 17 last year, a little after 5 p.m., they headed for Alfalfa’s grocery store in Capitol Hill. The two had spent the warm Saturday afternoon at a birthday party near Sloan Lake. Isabel was still wearing her…
You are not the kind of person who settles for easy answers. You never swallowed the Warren Report. You think the Church Committee’s investigation of the CIA lacked balls. You just know they pulled the plug on the Iran-Contra hearings and the Vince Foster affair before they got to the…
This is what City of Aurora employee Anita Burkhart told the Aurora police in 1997 about Becky Beckler, the acting manager of Original Aurora Renewal, a department in the city’s Office of Community Development: “Becky was stalking him. At work, Becky was just Becky. Her personality would change when it…
The sign taped to the back of the display case reads “fo-cosh-uh,” and Terry Williams glances nervously at it as the next customer walks up. She smiles when he points to a sandwich that’s been made with focaccia and says, slowly and carefully, “So you like that fo-cosh-uh, huh?” He…
The JonBenét Ramsey movie Perfect Murder, Perfect Town may have been mostly filmed in Utah, and the John Denver movie airing this Sunday, Take Me Home: The John Denver Story, may have been shot in Vancouver, but that doesn’t mean that everybody thinks Colorado is a bad location for moviemaking…
Kim Chlumsky was returning from lunch when her mom heard the shots echo in the backyard garden. As Kim approached the school, which is only a few blocks from her Littleton home, the streets were already blocked off by police. She thought it was a car wreck until her mom…
What if they gave a media event and only the media showed up? That’s not quite how things worked out on April 20, the one-year anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, but it was closer to the truth than the press reporting about the would-be spectacle let on…
Paper Trail Now that both dailies have their Pulitzers (as Michael Roberts predicted and then recapped in his April 13 Message), maybe they’ll quit forcing Columbine onto Page 1 day by day, month by month. And since the local and national media, the jocks-rule administrators, some parents and students and…
The days tick by slowly for Wen Ho Lee, the scientist who has been accused of downloading and transferring onto portable tapes virtually every nuclear-weapon secret in the United States arsenal. In late February, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver agreed with a federal judge in New Mexico…
The phone rang. It was a Littleton woman who said her kids’ candy had been disappearing. Jack Murphy smelled a rat. He fired up the Dodge van and headed over. “I get under the sink and look under there, and there was really no place where the rat could go,”…
They flowed into the streets, shouting and waving signs, angry at Denver police. Mostly they were young teens and college kids, more than a thousand of them, demanding justice for two boys they say were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the protesters weren’t in Denver. They…
In charging a petty thief who attempted to rob a Safeway with felony murder, Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter is making use of one of a DA’s handiest tools. He’s also stretching the definition of felony murder as far as it will go — and possibly further. In March, Kenneth…
