Now that NBC’s Asteroid has leveled much of Denver (which stood in for Dallas and Kansas City), it’s time to sift through the smoking rubble and unearth some more of our state’s memorable celluloid moments. Hollywood fat cats come here because they like the mountains and because it’s cheaper to…
The City Park Golf Course has long been a jewel of Denver’s parks system. These days it’s looking more like a political sand trap. Most of the attention surrounding the city’s beleaguered municipal golf system in recent weeks has focused on the dispute over whether to raise greens fees for…
The sound and the furry: It wasn’t just that Boulder police chief Tom Koby’s uniform looked so unused that mothballs might have fallen out of his pockets during last week’s news conference on the JonBenet Ramsey case. Something else didn’t quite fit the picture of a metro police chief. The…
When you’re working 24-hour shifts on an ambulance crew, there’s always plenty of time to kill while waiting for someone to almost get killed. Upstairs at Columbine Ambulance headquarters in Littleton, the restless paramedics hang out in a day room that resembles a college dorm. On a typical morning, near…
Denver may be about to lose an art collection that was a fixture in the Capitol Hill neighborhood for nearly twenty years. The Turner Museum was housed in a home at 773 Downing Street until last year. Its founder, Douglas Graham, owns hundreds of lithographs and other works by the…
He doesn’t remember much from that night at the Bossert Hotel, except that someone kept refilling his glass with champagne, and he could see from the windows that the whole length of Montague Street was clogged with delirious people. “We had to take turns going outside and waving to them,”…
What did Boulder do to deserve this? That’s a stupid question. Next question. Okay. So why did Boulder call a rare news conference last Thursday, introduce it as a “briefing” and then let Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter launch into a half-hour, Mayberry-meets-Naropa soliloquy that covered everything from his…
Fetal Attraction I just finished reading Steve Jackson’s February 13 feature, “The Fight of Their Lives,” on Dr. Warren Hern, and felt compelled to comment on it. I first encountered this amazing man in his anthropology class last fall at the University of Colorado-Boulder. I was fascinated by his account…
The plainclothes cops, their shoulder holsters bulging beneath suit coats, confer quietly with a knot of uniformed state troopers outside the old Supreme Court chambers. Here on the second floor of the State Capitol, the air is as heavy as the moment before a summer thunderstorm. Mike Newell, Denver detective-turned-security-consultant,…
The members of the Greater Metro Cable Consortium know Tele-Communications Inc. has a habit of making surprise announcements. But even veteran TCI watchers weren’t ready for the bombshell dropped by company spokeswoman Margaret Lejuste during a group meeting last December. “She simply said, ‘The rebuild has stopped,'” recalls Norman Beecher,…
To market, to market: Funny, but we could swear that just a month ago Mayor Wellington Webb said he didn’t think Stapleton was an appropriate place for a new football stadium. Late last week, however, in light of reports that the proposed November vote on a taxpayer-subsidized replacement for Mile…
Expect an increase in the number of pranksters, scientists and new-age tourists fooling around in Colorado wheat fields this summer. Crop circles, those nifty geometric patterns of flattened plant stalks that infest the English countryside, are moving this way. Actually, it’s the belief in the mystery and power of crop…
For 28 years, Denver’s Police Athletic League has honed the athletic skills of inner-city youth and taught them the value of competition and fair play. But when it comes to locking up city park sites for its ballgames, PAL doesn’t mess around; the well-connected group has no interest in competing…
MIAMI (October 3, 1997)–Say it loud, South Florida. The Marlins are going to the World Series. Playoff veteran Bobby Bonilla blasted a three-run homer off Mark Wohlers in the seventh inning at Joe Robbie Stadium last night, breaking a 2-2 deadlock with the favored Atlanta Braves. The Marlins went on…
Airport ’97 Just when I thought everyone had forgotten all about the scandals at Denver International Airport, Patricia Calhoun comes along with her February 6 column, “Soar Loser.” I don’t know if Richard Boulware would have done a better job of telling us the truth about all the delays at…
An hour before Frank Martinez’s first professional boxing match, his uncle is chain-smoking cigarettes while his mother, Irene, paces among the gathering crowd at the Great Room in LoDo on January 22, her fight program rolled tightly in her fist. But if these two could see the fighter their Frankie,…
Good schools have always attracted parents considering a move to a new neighborhood. But suppose a developer took a more active approach–making the local schools better as a marketing tool? Tom Hannon remembers the day he convinced his boss that happy, wealthy schools could be part of a real estate…
Singer John Denver has his fans, but none of them is as devout as the Reverend Mark Boyer. Editor of The Mirror, a Catholic newspaper in Springfield, Missouri, Boyer has written a 132-page book, Seeking Grace With Every Step: The Spirituality of John Denver, that analyzes the religious themes in…
Jerry Stevens was flying high. He was a successful personal-injury lawyer and municipal judge in Aurora. He had the things that Thurgood Marshall once said were at the root of the law’s mystique: “Power, prestige and influence.” He also had money. There’s a large painting of him that shows a…
From the look of things, everybody had a grand time at the farewell party held last March at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility for departing deputy warden Joe Paolino. Cake and M&Ms were in abundance, and the special tribute to Paolino, a veteran Colorado Department of Corrections official, prompted a…
Put it on my tab: Just when you thought the JonBenet Ramsey saga couldn’t get any stranger, a familiar face popped up in the Rockefeller Center rabble waving to Today show cameras Friday morning. It was Bill McReynolds, former University of Colorado journalism prof and Santa to the stars–or at…
According to former corrections officer Sandra Haberman, the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility at Ordway was a hotbed of innuendo, threats and crude come-ons directed at female employees. Defendants in her sex-harassment suit have denied any improper comments or behavior, but jurors in the case got an earful of the kind…
