Old and lonely, Mabel Smith sat in her Denver apartment, looking forward to the telephone calls from her “friends”–those sweet young people who would inform her about the wonderful prizes coming her way. “You’ve won a car, Mabel!” “Mabel, you’re the winner of our $20,000 grand prize!” “You’ve been selected,…
Cliff Moers went to a boarding school in Colorado Springs, but in some ways it might as well have been on another planet: The teachers insisted on using one language while the students used another. Now Moers is trying to start a charter school in the Denver area that would…
The outgoing senior-class president of Denver’s Manual High School blames the principal for the fracas that marred the school’s centennial graduation ceremonies on May 29. The principal blames the kid and the kid’s mother. The media blames Kinshasa Sayers, the graduating senior who commandeered the microphone. And meanwhile, Sayers says,…
It began as a standard, if violent, date-rape case. The issues were muddied when the alleged victim admitted to an affair with the Denver detective who investigated the case. It became even more complicated when, after the rape charge was dismissed due to the affair, the woman vowed to sue…
Another Crest-Fallen Reader I guess Robin Chotzinoff could be a male, but somehow I feel that’s not the case. Anyway, I loved her May 25 story on Crest Distributing, “A Facade in the Crowd.” I have passed that place so many times and yearned to go in. Usually it was…
part 1 of 2 Bob and Elisabeth Boccardi of Colorado Springs have spent the past two decades trying to rescue their son Richard. When the boy was three, that meant seeking professional treatment for his hyperactivity. When he was an adolescent, it meant going to bat for him when he…
part 2 of 2 Robert Gardner III was adopted in Pennsylvania shortly after his birth in March 1974 and given the name of his adoptive father, Robert Gardner Jr. His parents dubbed him “Robby” to distinguish him from his dad and from the host of “Bobs” they knew. “It was…
Lobal warming: It was just a year ago that Colorado lost one of its living legends–T.D. Lingo, the Fifties folksinger known as “The Drifter” who won a bagful of money on Groucho Marx’s TV show and used it to buy the top of Laughing Coyote Mountain outside Black Hawk. There…
The latest wisdom among baseball pundits, most of whom have not swung a bat since Little League, holds that soon the game must produce the most appealing athlete in the country in order to regain its high perch as the national pastime, to restore the mythic dimension that faded away…
Computer programmer Jack Woehr considers himself a “candidate for the Nineties.” Running for the Democratic nomination in the 6th Congressional District, a seat occupied by incumbent Republican Dan Schaefer, Woehr is mounting a computerized campaign that includes press releases by E-mail and contributions solicited over Internet. Despite those high-tech flourishes,…
Mark Robinson’s arrest last year was a rock ’em, sock ’em, action-packed, real-life cop adventure chronicled in both Denver dailies and broadcast by Channels 2, 4, 7 and 9. And if you liked that, you’ll love the sequel: a federal lawsuit brought by Robinson in April accusing law enforcement agencies…
All Bets Are Off Regarding Karen Bowers’s “Laws of Chance” in the May 18 issue: Great story on the gambling community’s problems. Just what the hell did those people expect? Instead of finding creative solutions to economic problems, the first thing they lunge for is legalized gambling. We now have…
Joseph C’de Baca is taking on some very smart people–7,990 of them, to be exact. That’s the number of children in Denver Public Schools’ gifted and talented program, which C’de Baca, an industrial education teacher at Hamilton Middle School, says is disproportionately white. C’de Baca isn’t the first to claim…
In 1989 the life of fortysomething anthropologist Rebecca McSwain was changed by MTV. “The video of `Dr. Feelgood’ by Motley Crue really struck me,” she says, laughing at the absurdity of her confession. “All the cliches were there–the fire, the cars, the long hair–but it was all new to me…
part 2 of 2 It is a Wednesday evening at the Stony Creek Elementary School library, in southern Jefferson County, and about twenty parents have gathered to discuss what to do about the district’s plan to splinter Stony Creek’s much-praised inclusion program. It is, they agree, just another example of…
part 1 of 2 By all appearances, Dave Spinks is an excellent principal. He moves through his bustling one-story school easily and informally. He greets each child by name and can spin a personal minibiography in a few sentences. His school’s staff-to-student ratio–about one-to-ten–is something that most private colleges can’t…
One day five years ago, Lucien Wulsin was walking down the hallway at the Naropa Institute. By then his white hair had grown out into a ponytail, and he’d abandoned the suits that had seen him through several distinguished roles: attorney, CEO of Baldwin United Corporation, chairman of the board…
Fool’s gold: Colorado author Clive Cussler keeps raking in the bucks–if not the Pulitzers–with his Dirk Pitt thrillers. The most recent, Inca Gold, is the usual yawn of a yarn, noteworthy primarily for three distinctly Cusslerian conceits. One is the author’s inclusion of himself in the action, in this case…
If you’d like a startling new insight into America’s strange love affair with the automobile, try standing beneath one of the underpasses at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway while 230-mile-per-hour race cars scream over the pavement above your head. The sensation is not unlike cozying up to a roomful of tornadoes…
If Jamey O’Donnell builds it, they will come. And that’s what worries political consultant Rick Reiter. “They” are the homeless, whom Reiter envisions flocking to a new Capitol Hill food bank proposed by O’Donnell, a 37-year-old former drug addict who founded the National Organization Against Homelessness less than two months…
In the 1981 cult movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, a Kalahari Desert bushman stumbles onto a Coca-Cola bottle tossed from an airplane. As the bottle passes from person to person, each interprets it as something different and finds a way to use it for his purposes. In Colorado Springs,…
