Mr. Big

Here’s to you, Mark McGwire. Thank you very much for thrilling us from the tips of our toes to the tops of our heads last summer with your home-run prowess. Thanks also for shining much-needed light on a game that’s threatened in recent seasons to wither in the darkness. That…

In Sickness and in Health

She climbed up into the back of the pickup and looked down at dozens of anxious faces. They could hear the sirens screaming several blocks away, where dust still hung in the air above the shattered building. That’s where these doctors, nurses and medical workers needed to be right now…

Captive Market

John Cominsky wants people to know that the Tranzport Hood is easy to use. He demonstrates this by putting one on. The change in his appearance is remarkable. In seconds, Cominsky no longer resembles an inventor and enterprising businessman. Instead, he looks like a dangerous maniac. A maniac with a…

A Game of Chance

Downtown developer Bruce Berger is giving Denver a lesson in real estate speculation, and it will only cost the public $45.8 million. Fourteen months ago, Berger bought the square block between California and Welton streets and 14th and 15th for the bargain-basement price of $3.3 million. He spent an additional…

School Haze

he ten-year-old girl came home from school one day and told her parents that a boy was teasing her. He was pulling her ponytail and calling her names. It was her first year at Stedman Elementary School; in fact, it was her first year at any public school. Until the…

Head Games

he southeast corner of Pearl Street and Louisiana Avenue appeared to be a prime location for Mr. Jay’s newest endeavor. With the Margarita Bay Club next door, the funky Stella’s Coffee House down the street and the University of Denver nearby, Mr. Jay — Leonard — figured his store, Highway…

Off Limits

Worn outColorado Rockies fans shielded their eyes during a day game at Coors Field last week as the hometown heroes and their opponents, the Atlanta Braves, donned space-age togs for Turn Ahead the Clock Day, Major League Baseball’s latest attempt to rejuvenate its fan base. But horrified fashion monitors are…

Rescue Me

Juliet Draper stands at the bottom of a five-story tower constructed of steel girders, a spectator…for now. She’s wearing the bottom half of the protective gear she uses at work as a firefighter in Colorado Springs. Counting the air canister worn on her back, the heavy boots and the insulated,…

The Man You Hate to Love

Bob Visotcky attracts negative press like the Backstreet Boys attract preteen girls. The overseer of six Denver-area radio stations owned by Dallas’s AMFM Inc., a brand-spanking-new conglomerate created by the merger of media giants Chancellor and Capstar, Visotcky has spent most of the past four months being publicly pilloried. He…

Side Effects

Whenever someone handed Pharmacist Bob a prescription for thirty pills, he filled the order for thirty pills. “Not 29. Not 31,” he says. “Thirty. That’s how I see the world.” So when he started seeing nurses fudging the rules at the Colorado prison where he worked, Bob Gusich didn’t like…

Black to Nature

Along Elkhorn Avenue, parents with kids in tow pour out of candy stores and T-shirt shops. They fight their way through the crowded sidewalks, quieting the little ones with caramel apples and saltwater taffy. A shiny new black Toyota Solara emerges from a parking lot and pulls out onto Estes…

Full Disclosure

Michael C. Hill is missing one testicle. Regrettably, this fact is now common knowledge among many guards and prisoners within the Colorado Department of Corrections. According to Hill, a 48-year-old former correctional officer, “very intimate details about my genitalia” were divulged to other prison staffers and to loose-tongued female inmates…

Out of Bounds

hen the Denver Nuggets trot onto the hardwood floors at the Pepsi Center on November 2 to open the season against the Phoenix Suns, team owner Donald Sturm will be on the edge of his seat. The newly built, $165 million arena will have already hosted its first blockbuster concert…

The Fun Is Over

he roller coaster is already gone, as is the Yo-Yo, a contraption that set riders spinning on metallic swings attached to slender chains — and that’s only the beginning of the end. At 10 p.m. on September 6, Guyton’s Fun Junction, the largest amusement park between Denver and Salt Lake…

Off Limits

Crossing the line Thwarted several times in their attempts to turn Rebel Hill into a permanent shrine with thirteen giant crosses honoring the victims of the Columbine massacre, Steve Schweitzberger and Greg ‘Road Warrior’ Zanis were back in Clement Park on Friday to at least create a permanent record of…

Food on the Tracks

The train is late, again, so the stringy blonde and her friend, the one with the silver stud through her nose, slouch toward a couple of stools at the far end of the Railcar Diner. The friend asks for a banana and a dollar’s worth of change while the blonde…

Back-to-School Special

It was 4:45 a.m. Monday, August 16 — the day students came back to Columbine High School for the first time since April 20, when twelve students and a teacher were murdered there — and while the campus was blessedly peaceful, it wasn’t silent. The building itself was aglow as…

Buff Puff

In a rare moment of privacy last Wednesday afternoon, Gary Barnett stood before a picture window in the dining room of the Dal Ward Athletic Center, gazing out at his world. Two stories below, the sunlit expanse of the Folsom Field gridiron stretched before him: an acre and a half…

Bells Are Ringing

Ray Gifford was stumped. The questions seemed so simple. Why have hundreds of US West customers had to face waits of up to five months for telephone service? Why have these problems plagued the company for five years? A parade of US West Colorado division vice presidents–in gray suits and…

Tough Operators

US West may take a lot of criticism, but its customer-service shortcomings are nothing compared to the way Denver’s first telephone company treated customers. In the 1880s, the Denver Telephone Dispatch Company set up shop at 15th and Larimer streets, taking up three rooms in a second-story office. The city’s…

Caller Rewards Program

When US West announced that it had decided to reject its first suitor, Global Crossing, and marry Qwest instead, most shareholders rejoiced at their good fortune. After all, Qwest’s bid of $69 per share was considerably more generous than Global Crossing’s offer. And no one had more reason to be…

Kings of the Hill

Buying crack on East Colfax Avenue is easy. All a person has to do is walk the littered street, preferably at night, and pace the sidewalk between Logan and York streets. The thick of the strip is at Ogden Street in front of the 7-Eleven store and beneath the shadows…