When the Colorado Convention Center was dedicated on a spring day in 1990, the promises flew as fast and furious as a March snowstorm. Politicians who had spent years campaigning for the new center didn’t disguise their delight with the opening of the tenth largest convention center in the United…
Charles Dudley Martin was just starting his law career when he came across the Thomas Gaddis book Birdman of Alcatraz. The Springfield, Missouri, attorney was so impressed by the story of Robert Stroud, convicted murderer turned bird researcher, that he wrote to a committee of Stroud’s associates that was campaigning…
Get ready for a cutthroat battle. The Winter Park ski area wants to build a road on public land along a creek, saying it’s needed to evacuate injured skiers. Environmentalists say the unpaved road would be nothing less than a ski trail to some thrilling backcountry runs on the area…
Nine months ago, Paul Cooper, a Denver attorney, wrote a letter to another local attorney, Jay Horowitz. The two lawyers represent different parties in the infamous ethnic-intimidation/wiretapping dispute between two Evergreen families, the Aronsons and the Quigleys. “Dear Jay,” the November 20, 1996, letter began, cordially enough. “When I asked…
Gail force: If it worked for fearless leader Roy Romer, why wouldn’t it work for his lieutenant? A dozen years ago, before then-state treasurer Romer ran for governor, he got a makeover from image maven Jo Farrell, who told him to ditch the heavy glasses and absent-minded-professor hairdo (and then…
Even though the refurbished Casino Cabaret nightclub in Five Points doesn’t have a liquor license, it still serves alcohol at its series of jazz concerts. How? By having the nonprofit Denver Black Arts Festival obtain special-event liquor licenses from the state liquor division. Such licenses enable nonprofits to sell alcohol…
They say we’re living in the new Golden Age of Sports. Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player ever to lace up a pair of sneakers, they say, and Jerry Rice is the best pass receiver who’s ever run a post pattern. Young Tiger Woods won his first Masters as…
Teacher’s Petting Scott Yates’s story about the Vietnamese boy victimized by his teacher (“Little Boy Lust,” July 3) was the most frightening thing I have ever read. It almost broke my heart to see how the Tran family still honored Ava Owens, even after all the horrible things she had…
When their son’s teacher came into the room one day this spring, Duc and Mai Tran stood out of respect. They smiled an almost embarrassed smile, waved and bowed their heads. Nothing unusual about that, says Diana Nga Miller, vice-president of a community support group for Vietnamese immigrants to Colorado…
Thom Lancy joined the Air Force straight out of Denver’s George Washington High School because he wanted to see the world. “I like adventure,” he says. “I’d rather be launching F-14s off of aircraft carriers than working at McDonald’s.” As it turns out, he didn’t launch any Tomcats. He guarded…
Most days, Jack Eads, 61 and blind, sits in his room at the Barth Hotel in lower downtown and putters around with one of his accordions. That’s something he can do by himself. But his deft touch recently got him in big trouble: A saleswoman at the Walgreens drugstore in…
Descending from the Summit: Reviews of the Denver Summit of the Eight–and the city that hosted it–are still trickling in. Fortunately, the international press ignored some of the more local-yokel activities that accessorized the event, including puffed-up pride exhibited by the two hometown dailies. Camera-toting Denver Post editor Dennis Britton…
At first Ken Kosanke’s research was underappreciated. “We were making these colored balls of fire, and so to see what they looked like, we’d throw them up in the air, because the chemistry changes,” he recalls. “Unfortunately, we had a neighbor whose garage had burned down after it was struck…
Twenty years ago, Fidel Ramos found the living conditions in Canon City’s “Old Max” penitentiary so appalling that he sued the state, charging that the Department of Corrections was inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on its inmates. A federal judge agreed with him, and Ramos’s lawsuit changed the entire Colorado…
As long as your name wasn’t Mike Tyson, the last sports person in the world you wanted to be Sunday afternoon was Scott Sharp. Six hair-raising seconds after the green flag fell on the Samsonite 200, pole-sitter Sharp slid high up on the track at 170 miles an hour and…
Badge Company Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s June 19 column, “Putting the Boulder Police on Report”: Westword’s persistence on the Ramseys and Boulder was a good thing in the beginning. But now, go after the parents or Boulder government and please, let this little child rest in peace. JonBenet Ramsey did nothing…
The Rocky Flats grand jurors are about to get their day in court. Two days, actually: Courtroom C-159 at the federal courthouse, the building that recently hosted the trial of Tim McVeigh, has been reserved for two days this week for a “confidential, closed proceeding.” The grand jurors are about…
“I call it the gargoyle,” says Scott Stone, owner and sole proprietor of the Stone Fossil Co. of Frontier, Wyoming. “It’s one of the most incredible finds ever. I mean, it’s a fifty-million-year-old gargoyle.” Stone has never seen the piece, but, like many others, he has heard about it. He…
In 1975, Colorado’s brash young governor said no to the highway lobby. Newly elected on an environmental platform, Dick Lamm vowed to “drive a silver spike” through plans for a southwest suburban beltway linking I-70 and I-25. Lamm said the highway would foster suburban sprawl and gridlock and that the…
Proponents of the Animas-La Plata Water Project (ALP) in southwestern Colorado have agreed “in concept” to a reduced version of the project that knocks non-Indian water users out of the picture, according to confidential documents obtained by Westword. The Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes, whose tribal councils have…
Patrick Robb’s business philosophy is as unambiguous as the army tanks parked outside his small South Denver home. Taxpayers, he argues, spent a fortune bankrolling the fiercesome weapons of the Cold War. Now that the war is over, it’s time to get some back. “I look at it this way,”…
G-string: This week’s Denver Summit of the Eight has inspired a global village of cottage industries hoping to bask in the reflected glow of the 50-watt klieg lights. On the commercial side, there’s the Faux Show opening Friday at the Art & Artists Gallery, with “repainted great masterworks” from France,…
