When Justin Nielsen saw the semi-automatic, he struggled to keep his voice under control. “Uh-oh, they got a gun,” he told the 911 dispatcher. Nielsen had dialed the emergency number moments before, after seeing a silver BMW pull into a parking lot across the 16th Street Mall. As four men…
To a taxpayer’s eye, the City of Denver’s decision to lend $180,000 to Manuel Fernandez and his partners five years ago might look like a mammoth mistake. Fernandez’s Mammoth Events Center, a historic music hall located on depressed East Colfax Avenue, was renovated with money from the loan but has…
I’m AK-47, you’re AK-47: Reporters and public servants who’ve been unwillingly drawn into the web of Denver’s most noted conspiracy theorist got quite a bang out of last Sunday’s Denver Post, with its front-page story on the “radical right.” Listed as one of the top “players” was Stewart Webb, former…
In Baltimore, them baseball fans what still exist are getting ready this week for Babe Ruth’s 100th birthday party. There will be celebrations in other cities, too, but Baltimoreans are puffed up with the pride of authorship: The Bambino was born in a humble row house in their town on…
Shirley, You Jest Regarding Michael Roberts’s “They Think They Love You,” in the January 18 issue: Sitcom queen Shirley Jones the Virgin Mary? The hell you say! If that’s the case, then who is Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show? Beelzebub? Rick Hoover Denver Your newspaper cover of…
Doug Shadoan’s weenie-wagging hoochie-coochie, which he performed last August 17 while clad in a black dress and wig in front of his second-story Edgewater apartment window, earned him a $275 fine and a thirty-day suspended jail sentence for public indecency. Because he was already on probation for a Peeping Tom…
I’m kind of like a drag mother,” says Brandi Roberts, “in that I have a lot of drag children. I help with hair, makeup, shopping–it’s what I love.” In whatever passes for real life, Brandi is a 45-year-old man who lives simply, among his beaded gowns, with his twenty-year-old daughter…
Tom Blach’s family has been ranching for more than a century now, its annual economic fortunes tangled up in the stalks of grass that carpet 4,000 acres of Yuma County rangeland. “Where we make our money is harvesting grass and putting pounds on cattle,” he explains, adding that “you need…
Seven years before he died, George Murray inscribed his Last Will and Testament by hand. “And it better be legal, as it comes from my heart,” he wrote, with his usual intensity. “Anyone who doubts this, I will come back after my death and haunt THEM.” The time is right…
Clearing the air is what it does best, boasts Envirotest Systems, the embattled operator of Colorado’s new auto-emissions testing program. But the Arizona-based company under fire from residents faced with long lines and higher test fees does some of its best work in smoke-filled rooms. Two years ago, before Colorado…
Snow-lo contendere: The Moffat Tunnel Commission is plenty steamed over the Winter Park Recreational Association’s efforts to put it on ice. So after the city-owned ski resort hired big-time lobbyist Pancho Hays to snow the legislature, the chairmen of the bore tapped the powerhouse legal firm of Brownstein Hyatt Farber…
When last we checked, Fisher DeBerry was tucked safely in his bunk at the Air Force Academy with two armed sentries standing over him, and Don Baylor was hitting fungoes to a group of outpatients in Tucson, whipping them into shape for Opening Day. Of course, things may have changed…
The prospect that Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich will make good on threats to reduce or eliminate federal funding to the Public Broadcasting System has most PBS representatives already talking about cuts in budgets and airtime. So why has Denver’s KBDI-TV Channel 12 chosen this moment to expand its…
Supersalesman Joe Vaughn arrived on Springfield’s main street late last year determined to sell the plains town on the economic benefits of building a privately financed prison west of the Baca County fairgrounds. It was a familiar sales pitch for Vaughn, an Indiana-based promoter who has cut deals for rent-a-prisons…
Over the years, Haagen-Dazs, the luxury ice-cream maker, has earned a reputation for trying to put the chill on its competitors. In 1980 the company sued the owners of Frusen Gladje for allegedly using a copy-cat umlaut (and lost). Four years later Haagen-Dazs tried to freeze out an upstart Vermont…
Big Mac Attack I agree wholeheartedly with Patricia Calhoun’s excellent editorial on Coach Mac (“Is Nothing Sacred?,” January 18). I swear she read my mind! “The Preacher” truly is a hypocrite in every sense of the word. His criticism of people’s lifestyles needs to begin at home. Rosemary McManis Denver…
Reverend Dan “Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque” Partridge, co-founder of the Partridge Family Temple, is seated on a platform overlooking an indoor waterfall at Casa Bonita, the Mexican restaurant/theme park that’s been Lakewood’s proudest claim to fame since 1973. Before him, enchiladas share a tabletop with several vintage…
John Frew has never held public office. But he knows how to give a politician a bloody nose–and he’s gotten a few in return. When the 38-year-old Park Hill attorney, lobbyist and political consultant was still in his twenties, he was enough of a campaign veteran to conduct a workshop…
It’s a date! “In February we will open Denver International Airport,” said Mayor Wellington Webb in a fundraising letter mailed earlier this month. That assertion, tucked into the usual campaign laundry list of good deeds, started tongues wagging that the mayor had, at long last, unofficially announced an official date…
In order to reach Cooperstown, New York, from the north, you drive south on winding, tree-shaded Route 28 through the villages of Dennison Corners, Richfield Springs and Schuyler Lake, whereupon the lovely shore of Lake Otsego springs into view, then the picturesque town beyond. From the south, stay on 28…
After clashing with the Moffat Tunnel Commission over lease payments for state-owned land at the Winter Park ski resort, the Winter Park Recreational Association is backing an effort to abolish the agency. If successful, the controversial city-owned ski area could save millions of dollars in rent payments–and get its hands…
Five weeks ago, Mitchell and Candice Aronson of Evergreen filed a civil lawsuit against their neighbors, William and Dorothy “Dee” Quigley, alleging a campaign of intimidation and harassment driven by anti-Semitism. The time immediately following the legal filing was hectic. On December 7, one day after they filed their lawsuit,…
