News

Dig, we must: With this week’s balmy weather, the immobilizing snow of two weeks ago has melted into memory–a very bad memory. Mayor Wellington Webb’s press secretary, Andrew Hudson, was sitting in the State Capitol on Wednesday, December 18, two days after the snow hit, when he got a page…

The Denver Junior Police Band, once plagued by scandal, has returned after an eight-year hiatus and is again trying to keep kids off the streets by getting them out there pounding the pavement as a marching band. Originally struck up in 1937, the band grew to be more than a…

This old cowtown is finally big enough to merit a splashy, 500-page coffee-table book filled with full-color photos and glowing prose. But Denver’s collective coffee table may not be big enough for two of them. The new year will see the appearance of a pair of lavish profiles of Denver,…

Distaff Dis Regarding Bill Gallo’s “Avs and Have-Nots,” in the December 26 issue: Perhaps Bill Gallo has a hard time remembering any great athlete who doesn’t have a penis (unless the athlete is “perky”–a pathetic adjective in any case). Here’s a handy little list to jog his memory: The “perky”…

Newt Gingrich is still hunting that giraffe. Three hours each week, the smug Speaker of the House pops up on Knowledge TV–the former Mind Extension University on cable–touting his own peculiar view of history in what is surely the country’s most tedious infomercial (no miracle car wax, no hair extensions,…

Some funny things happened on the way to the Pepsi Center. Jurassic Parker A mystery mourner left a wreath of plastic flowers at the westside gas station where “Dino,” a green fiberglass dinosaur representing the Sinclair Oil Company, had been run over and crushed by a wayward driver. International House…

For a few dullards moreJOHN JACOB DINGLEHEIMER JORG PETER SCHMITZ Occupation: Shlock artist/German national The close-brush artist of LoDo was known mostly for his insufferable science-fiction-themed paintings until he showed up in the BMW that ran Rocky Mountain News columnist Greg Lopez off the road at 100 miles per hour…

Grab your crying towels–and wipe away a flood of ’96 tears. Denver was a boomtown this year. In fact, the whole state seemed ready to blow at any minute. The speed limit accelerated to a rip-roaring 75 miles per hour, allowing residents to flee Colorado even faster whenever Channel 7…

Home for the Holidays I have read Westword for a long time, and during that time there have been a lot of great articles–but none as great as Kyle Wagner’s “Trash Landing,” in the December 19 issue. I would just like to compliment you and the Mulherns for the wonderful…

Quentin Jones’s cheek pressed into the grit of the asphalt parking lot. His head was immobilized by the nightstick a cop had jammed into his neck, and his arms and legs were pinned down by other officers. From the corner of his eye, sixteen-year-old Quentin could see that his father–who…

Of the nearly 500 Christmas decorations Mary Mulhern has rescued from dumpsters over the past twenty years, the recently acquired Mr. and Mrs. Snowman are her favorites. Made from aluminum cans covered with cotton batting, their cheery faces fashioned from bits of felt, the happy snow people show no signs…

The former treasurer of the College Republicans on the Auraria campus became disenchanted with the party and has found a new campaign: He’s organizing a student club for pagans. These days, “I’m basically a conservative libertarian,” says Nicholas Bull, a 21-year-old Metropolitan State College English major. “I had a problem…

Six sophomores enrolled in German II file into room 208 at South High School and find their seats behind an array of microphones set up as if they were at a congressional hearing. There’s a television where the teacher usually stands. The kids chatter and chew on candy canes until…

Oscar Lopez Rivera knew what he had to do to get out of the toughest penitentiary in the entire federal system. He had to endure 22-hour-a-day solitary confinement, demonstrate “positive adjustment,” follow the rules–in short, get with the “carrot-and-stick” program. If he behaved, he was told, he could earn his…

Big dame deal: On Friday First Lady Wilma Webb added to her title–she now has an honorary doctorate in humane letters from the Colorado Institute of Art. This wasn’t just her first doctorate: It was also a first for the CIA, which up until now hasn’t granted anything grander than…

Roy Phillips has run Texaco stations in Denver since the Seventies, and in that time he’s learned a painful lesson. As a black man, he says, “you can operate stations as long as they’re inside the black community.” Over the years Phillips made a half-dozen attempts to acquire stations in…

A Dunn Deal I found Stuart Steers’s December 5 article, “All Fired Up,” very interesting but a little over-Dunn. Yes, John took a strong anti-pipeline stand–but he seemed to drop the ball at the southern end of the county. We in Simla are uninformed as to the battles to the…

When last we heard from Marshall Kaplan, the embattled dean of the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado at Denver was hinting that the public might not have him to kick around for much longer. No more big community confabs, no more big community controversies fueled…

The biggest pay-phone scam yet uncovered involved a San Diego-based company called AmTel. But Colorado has had its share, too. By 1994, eight years after it was founded, AmTel was the third-largest private pay-phone company in the country, with 8,500 phones installed–hundreds of them in Colorado–and plans for another 10,000…

In the mountain town of Frisco, Bobby Gene Kelley was known as a drinker of great persistence. Soon after receiving one too many citations for driving under the influence of alcohol, he purchased a Lincoln Towncar limousine. When he felt like having a drink, he would call his driver, who…