Slots of luck: Evie Dennis hit the jackpot when she resigned as superintendent of Denver Public Schools: In a secret deal, the school board awarded her a $400-a-month stipend for life. “I know I needed some compensation like other people,” Dennis told reporters when word of her whoopee cushion leaked…
Most musicians aren’t morning people–but if police are right, Brian Nalty is the exception to this rule. On July 9, the onetime guitarist for the Jinns, a Denver-based roots-rock band that seemed on the cusp of national stardom during the late Eighties and early Nineties, was identified as the so-called…
No, you don’t need to have your eyes checked: Westword has grown. As papers across the country downsize their pages, we’re expanding ours (and changing printers, from the Denver Post to the Rocky Mountain News). You’ll find all of our standard features on these bigger pages, as well as some…
Look at it this way. The average American working stiff makes $548 a week–before taxes. Michael Jordan makes $576,923 a week–before the sneaker company and the cereal maker and the burger chain and the people who provide his underwear can even line up to add their huge endorsement checks to…
Face the Notion There she goes again. In her most recent column (“Serf and Turf,” July 18), Patricia Calhoun gets all red in the face shouting over some perceived social injustice at the Palm, which even she admits is “just a restaurant” (and a “chain steakhouse” at that). Could it…
The Insiders In the overcrowded Colorado prison system, corrections officials face a new breed of customer: the special-needs inmate. Much as public schools are now expected to tailor programs for the diverse range of children the state educates, the Colorado Department of Corrections is under increasing pressure to accommodate the…
“Look, on this whole issue of running for President, I’m not trying to be coy at all. In fact, I want to be very direct with you. Running for President is being in the Superbowl of politics.” –Richard D. Lamm and Arnold Grossman, A California Conspiracy Whatever else it might…
Colorado Springs firefighter Tim Casey once was called to a home where he found the brains of a recent suicide–a doctor who’d shot himself with a .44 handgun on his 44th birthday–sprayed across the ceiling. When Casey stopped underneath a light fixture, some of the dead doc’s gray matter dripped…
Managing a city can be a sneaky business. How else to explain why Denver ran up a nearly $80,000 tab with R.A. Heales & Associates? According to its advertisement in the Yellow Pages, the firm offers “complete investigative services” including, but not limited to, “insurance defense,” “background” and “undercover.” Most…
Independence daze: When candidates for Pat Schroeder’s congressional seat gathered at an Independence Institute forum last Friday, only the remaining Democrats–Tim Sandos and big-bucks-raiser Diana DeGette–were in attendance. Although he hardly would have faced a hostile audience (institute head Tom Tancredo is a former Ronald Reagan appointee), Republican candidate Joe…
Horseplayers and fight guys are carried through life by the same sweet torrent of optimism. Damn the facts. Sheer belief will get you back to the cashier’s window. Force of will can win the title. In the meantime, keep talking. Talking keeps the demons of doubt at bay. At the…
The Light Stuff Nothing quite so disappointing as the sight of a favorite doing something really dumb. Kenny Be’s pathetic stab at satire in your July 11 edition, “Let There Be Light,” is an unfortunate case in point. He was somehow suckered into believing that the Great Bicycle Incident on…
At midnight last Thursday, I was on the outside looking in, peering through the windows of the Palm, an establishment that now occupies the old home of Hooters just off the 16th Street Mall. For voyeurs, the scenery tops even that offered by the previous, tight-T-shirt-obsessed tenant: 200 cleaned-up (no…
In its advertising, US West boasts about how the phone company is making it easier for its customers to gather information. But there are some things US West doesn’t want its customers to know–such as salary levels for its top executives. Westword believes US West’s ratepayers in Colorado have a…
Solomon Trujillo, president and chief executive officer of US West Communications Group, is known for blunt talk. Trujillo, who started with the phone company in 1974 in an entry-level position, worked his way to the top through a combination of long hours and fierce dedication to the company. Those qualities…
Six months ago, Parker’s quintessential local bank–the Community Bank of Parker–was quietly bought by a group of investors with ties to Colorado’s largest homebuilder. It’s one more indication that Parker is booming, and the state’s most prominent businessmen are taking advantage. In the past two years, three of Parker’s four…
Westside story: They might have learned everything they needed to know in kindergarten, but when alumni of the Cheltenham School kindergarten class of 1936 gathered this past weekend, they still had plenty to talk about. “We had a blast,” says Mike Licht, the event’s master of ceremonies, who set off…
While members of Congress and the media investigate just how hundreds of FBI files on individuals not currently working at the White House ended up in White House security aide Craig Livingstone’s office, more than a handful of Colorado politicos are assessing their own history with the corpulent advance man…
In 1993, Lisa Lane, an assistant district attorney in Grand County, prosecuted a drunk-driving case against an occasional local named Jack Irving Ainsworth. Late on July 4, 1992, Ainsworth had been riding his motorcycle in an isolated location outside of Grand Lake; on the back sat a young woman he’d…
If the sign of a dysfunctional family is the inability to agree about anything, then I suppose that’s what we were. Every time we went out to a ballpark. Of course, no one in a ballpark ever used the word “dysfunctional.” But there were a lot of other, more colorful…
Sermon on the Mount Michelle Dally Johnston’s July 4 piece on the Shattuck contamination, “Down in the Dump,” was an excellent piece of work. There was one point that I was disappointed she did not address, however. Although the radium industry was once a thriving business, five decades later everyone…
There’s an ominous shadow hanging over Washington, D.C., and it’s no alien spaceship. The threat to the political status quo springs from a spot much more down-to-earth: Colorado, where third-party challenges are taking off faster than the grosses of this summer’s cinematic blockbuster. On Tuesday, former Governor Richard Lamm ended…
