The trading floor starts filling up fifteen minutes before the opening bell. But these aren’t stockbrokers wearing three-piece suits and chomping on antacid tablets. They’re mostly middle-aged men in golf-casual clothes. Above them are four clocks: London, New York, Denver and Tokyo. They stare intently at stock charts and listen…
Last August, David Rocha, a 38-year-old immigrant from Mexico, went to work at a building in the Denver Technological Center, just like thousands of other people. But it was a day he’ll never forget. A janitor who worked for just over $5 an hour for Maintenance Unlimited Inc., the largest…
Another day at the office: Shelly Anderson slams her foot down and the ground shakes. The stench of tire smoke and the sting of burning nitromethane shoot into the crowd. Almost 6,000 horsepower–enough to drive an ocean liner–leaps into the rear wheels, and five G’s of force smash Shelly deep…
Field of Schemes Kudos to Stuart Steers for his July 16 “Cash and Carry,” on how the Colorado Rockies took taxpayers to the cleaners on the Coors Field lease. I guarantee you the Broncos are hoping for the same sweetheart deal for Pat (Bowlen)’s Profit Palace. I’ll also wager the…
Ideas come to Henry Badgett. While he’s watering flowers in his front yard. Taking a shower. Sleeping. Standing. Making meatloaf. Suddenly a lightbulb flashes over his head. A fairy taps his shoulder. A tree falls in the forest. A mushroom cloud blasts through the stratosphere. “It just happens, man,” he…
Kathi Williams and Neil Macey have spent a good part of their lives working in real estate, but their biggest deal, the one they’ll always be remembered for, still embarrasses them. They built Coors Field. Perhaps more than any other two people, Williams and Macey are responsible for bringing major-league…
There have been several recent John L. Morris sightings up in the Fryingpan Valley, a remote area northeast of Aspen in the wilds of Pitkin County. Locals have seen Morris driving his sport utility vehicle up the valley and hanging around his three-cabin compound just outside Basalt. But what everybody…
They met in an Internet chat room. She sent him a school picture so he would know what she looked like. After a couple of weeks, he told her that he loved her. They set up a date to meet at the Westminster Mall for a Coke. But there were…
Earthlaw, a tiny Denver-based public-interest group, has won some pretty big court battles on behalf of environmental groups in the West. It helped protect the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse, the controversial inhabitant of Colorado’s Front Range (“Of Mice and Men,” November 27, 1997). It stopped logging in all of New…
Get stuffed: The price of the Coors Field Beanie Babies that sparked a feeding frenzy outside the All-Star Game last week continues to head skyward faster than a Mark McGwire batting-practice dinger. As of Monday, official All-Star Glory Beanie Babies were going for $649.95 on cable TV’s Beanie Babies Showroom,…
Grab a bag of peanuts, crack a cold beer and make yourself at home while we administer today’s number-association test. Here goes: Fifty-six. Sixty-one. Five hundred and eleven. Seven hundred and fifty-five. Four thousand one hundred and ninety-one. Point three-six-seven. Three. Two. One. Simple, wasn’t it? Piece of cake. Any…
Don’t Have a Cow, Man Megan Hall’s “Not a Pretty Picture,” in the July 9 issue, paints in unintentionally comic perspective a most cherished modern sacred bovine: the notion that art and its purveyors are “loftier” than useful things like hotdogs and those who vend them. This notion and the…
Sonja Winfield works in the trenches–the pink, lacy trenches of the Joslins Intimate Apparel department. What goes on here, though, is neither rakishly romantic nor deliciously self-indulgent. Most of the time, it’s not even fun. “It’s a good thing I like -ologies,” says Sonja, the chain’s expert bra fitter. “Psychology,…
Poor Ken Calhoun. The former Denver Post vice president of marketing, known as “Ken4Boys” in Internet chat rooms, didn’t so much as get his Bermudas unzipped for that “hot oil massage” he’d talked about with a supposed teenage boy he had planned to meet on a Florida vacation. But within…
A lot of things decorate the walls at Reliable Enterprises on West 38th Avenue. There are signs advertising that the business will, for a fee, provide translations from Spanish to English, notarize documents, Xerox them, fax them, prepare tax returns and handle immigration applications. There are two Broncos pennants, several…
Everyone heard the explosion. It sounded like someone had detonated a cherry bomb behind the apartment. A man named Bud opened the back door to see what the hell was going on. Big mistake. There were three of them in the parking lot, three wild men lit by the midnight…
You go, Dennis!: Press releases don’t usually excite us, but this one stuck out. On July 3 we received an official notice from the Denver Post on its letterhead, announcing that editor-in-chief Dennis Britton was retiring August 31. Joy in Mudville! Any discombobulation at the dailies is always good news,…
Two attorneys can live in a town where one cannot,” proverb collector V.S. Lean noted a century ago. Colorado’s booming economy has brought a corresponding surge in the number of practicing attorneys in the state–now estimated at around 20,000, with actual attorney registration pushing 28,000. And with the disputatious tide…
For a man who’s dedicated his life to creating art, Steve White sure knows how to make a mess. When he got out of the Army in 1969, protests over the Vietnam War were getting ugly. It was then, White says, “I decided I just wanted to spend the rest…
Last Saturday, three days before the All-Star Game, Petey Maestas waited two hours for the chance to hit a home run off Randy Johnson. Johnson, the hawk-nosed, fright-wigged, six-foot-ten-inch flamethrower of the Seattle Mariners, has not been enjoying the best of seasons–seven wins, seven losses, seventeen home runs yielded in…
HOW IT ALL BEGAN “I was selling portraits door-to-door, and the boss died, so I decided to go to the mall and play the clarinet. On my first day, I sat on a bench and made $60 playing one song after another. I didn’t look up at anyone. I just…
The Bused of Denver Although I enjoyed your annual Best of Denver issue as well as your domestic-violence series, I didn’t know how much I’d missed Patricia Calhoun’s columns until she came out swinging in her July 2 “You Can’t Get There From Here.” Give ’em hell, Calhoun! Send Pat…
