Mary MacLean is trying to explain what she does for a living and how she does it, but her friend Debi Lind keeps finishing her sentences. “When you learn a discipline, the discipline takes over the conscious mind,” Mary says. “Which leaves the unconscious mind free. And then it just…”…
Sid Lindauer’s family has been ranching in western Colorado for three generations, fighting winter storms, brushfires and outbreaks of disease, but never worrying much about what went on in the state legislature. Until now. The area around Lindauer’s ranch just outside Parachute is dotted with natural-gas wells, part of a…
Jeff Conn is an urban hunter. Each weekday morning at 7:15, Conn bounces down the seven steps from his home in Alamo Placita Park and starts walking to his job in downtown Denver. The walk–the hunt–will take precisely 25 minutes. “I bet we don’t see anything today” Conn says. “Wouldn’t…
Larry Mizel, the home builder who once spent his days worrying about criminal cases being built against executives in his company, is back on Colorado’s A list. A regular on the social circuit, Mizel has been feted at fundraising dinners and was even made an honorary dean by the University…
Like most of his fellow road warriors, Bill Owens has spent too much of his life stuck in traffic, usually during what passes for rush hour in the Denver metroplex. When he lived in southeast Aurora, his daily crawl on I-25 to downtown took an agonizing 30 to 45 minutes–and…
The night belonged to the captains of industry. They arrived in all their fin de siecle glory, disgorged from stretch limos and sleek foreign sedans, each with a freshly pressed tuxedo on his back and an elaborately coiffed spouse on one arm. They made their way to the Plaza Ballroom…
Michael Robert Grainger, who in April 1998 pleaded guilty to reckless manslaughter in the death of his wife, was considered for parole last week and rejected. He will, however, be recommended for placement in Boulder County Treatment Center; it will be six to eight weeks before the final decision on…
In the first day of each semester, West High School teacher Alan Chimento hands his social studies students a twelve-page guide called “Activism 101.” This is your world, it says. You can do something to change it. Now go out there and create your reality. The guide explains how to…
Heeling power: Volunteers began packing up the Columbine shrines at Clement Park Monday. But debris from peripheral damage keeps piling up, and it’s getting deep. Also on Monday, the White House held its warm-and-fuzzy summit on youth violence, during which President Bill Clinton begged the entertainment industry to clean up…
To live in Denver in the spring is to enjoy the songs of birds, the warmth of sunshine, the scent of blossoming flowers. Other pleasures include the sight of abandoned cars at the curb and the stench of slow-dripping oil and gasoline puddling beneath metallic heaps of junk. Each day,…
The kill is the easiest part of the job. People kill one another every day. It takes no great effort to pull a trigger or plunge a knife. It is being able to do so in a manner that will not link yourself or your employer to the crime that…
The Hating Game In the May 6 issue, I read first in Patricia Calhoun’s “The Ten Commandments,” then in Kenny Be’s Worst-Case Scenario, of Vikki Buckley attributing the Columbine shootings to “new-age hate crimes.” What I want is for someone to corner this feeder at the public trough and ask…
In spring, John Starnes, better known as the Garden Doctor, is exhilarated whenever he isn’t exhausted. Daily, the UPS man brings him roses from all over the country. Weekly, he visits a long list of landscaping clients. Nightly, he sits at his computer, drawing up plans for his yearly tour…
Dessert at the opening gala of Colorado’s Ocean Journey is sure to be tasty, and a clever trick for the eye: a milk chocolate seashell filled with vanilla-bean mousse, then topped with an edible pearl. The delight of illusion, after all, is the secret to a splendid soiree–and key to…
Judy and Bill Fleming had a dream. And it was full of slippery, slimy, buggy-eyed fish. Michael Weissmann also had a dream. And it was full of creepy, crawly, hairy insects. Together these visions built two of the Denver area’s most talked-about tourist destinations. While the Flemings founded Colorado’s Ocean…
In the end, it wasn’t so easy to kill Robert Lee Riggan Jr. after all. The 39-year-old drifter from Iowa was convicted last fall of the May 1997 murder of 21-year-old prostitute Anita Paley, the mother of two little girls. Riggan had taken Paley up to the mountains outside of…
Editor’s note: We requested an official copy of Mr. Heston’s remarks to the National Rifle Association convention in Denver last week, held under massive protest in the wake of the fatal shooting of a dozen students and one teacher at Columbine High School. Along with the speech, an anonymous source…
They’re usually called fender benders: Cars and trucks traveling at low speeds hit each other, causing dings and dents. The worst of the physical injuries are often headaches from filling out insurance claim forms. In fact, low-speed accidents do no more damage than sneezing, coughing, riding a roller coaster or…
Hell to pay: Organizers of the April 25 Columbine memorial service continue to express their dismay over complaints by liberal Christians, blacks and Jews that the service was too white and too evangelical. “There were fourteen different speakers and singers, we had the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Denver, two evangelical…
After three years on the waiting list, Walter Andre finally got a kidney transplant at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center on January 27. He came out of surgery quite well and was soon able to call his out-of-town friends and family to tell them he expected to be discharged in about…
When it was over, the big, blue-eyed man wearing the beautifully tailored charcoal suit and the pale-gold necktie left a box of Kleenex untouched on the podium and followed his blocker, wife Janet, through one last Sunday-afternoon sea of photographers. They vanished through a side door of a hotel ballroom…
What’s the Agenda? From Patricia Calhoun’s “Opportunism Knocks,” in the April 29 issue: “On Sunday, Colorado Right to Life gave birth to this announcement: ‘Today our organization reminds Governor Bill Owens and all Colorado elected officials that 32 years ago–April 25, 1967–this state signed into law the first in the…
