Bonds on the run: Denver officials may not know how to open an airport on time (much less on budget), but they clearly understand how to stop certain complaints before they ever get off the ground. For proof, check out one of those pesky property-tax notices popping up in mailboxes…
Figure skating isn’t exactly a sport, and it isn’t Swan Lake. It is, rather, that frozen netherworld where community theater meets the double axel, in costumes on loan from the floor show at Caesar’s. It’s no wonder that the skaters themselves are often quivering bundles of nerves and that their…
“I don’t give up very easily,” says Stephen W. Smith. “No matter what, I keep making things happen.” Smith’s claim is no idle boast. He is currently a resident of the Jefferson County jail, where he is awaiting trial on a potpourri of charges, including first-degree forgery, criminal impersonation, issuing…
The Denver accounting firm Patten, MacPhee & Associates has received a thorough drubbing in the national press over the past two weeks for its role in the hottest scandal of Bill Clinton’s presidency–the Whitewater real estate deal. Now, it turns out, the firm also finds itself near the center of…
Mary Murphy has spent more than ten years trying to make Calvary Temple pastor Charles Blair pay for his sins. As a member of the James 1:27 Committee, a group formed by investors who lost millions of dollars in Life Center, a Calvary-backed senior citizens’ complex that failed in the…
All Talk and No Action Congratulations to Patricia Calhoun for an excellent column, “The Smother Brother,” in the January 12 issue. She may be the only person who ever gets the last word in with Ramblin’ Hamblin. Sophia Thomas Denver I very much enjoyed Patricia Calhoun’s piece on Ken Hamblin…
Kelly Roberts lays on the blue eye shadow a bit too thick for anyone other than a fortune teller. But there are no crystal balls or tarot cards in the jumbled single-wide trailer where she lives with her children in a valley near Durango. Take away her mascara, and the…
Where does a $5 billion gorilla sit? Wherever it wants to. Among the giant Denver International Airport’s latest victims are regional airports that have been forced to delay or cancel improvements–all because of an unpublicized DIA policy shift. And at least one of those airports, Longmont’s Vance Brand, is badly…
Federico Pena, former Denver mayor and current Secretary of Transportation, was so anxious to build Denver International Airport that he paid an $8 million “ransom” to Adams County. So says Jim Nelms, chief hostage-holder and an early player in Denver’s airport game. In the Eighties Nelms served as both Adams…
Call it an anti-House Beautiful. Or the evil twin of Architectural Digest. For the past four months Life on Capitol Hill, a small monthly neighborhood paper that covers goings-on along the funky streets south of 20th Avenue and east of Broadway, has devoted a half-page in each paper to “Eyesores…
When state officials last week rejected the plan of Tim Blixseth and Big Sky Lumber Co. to acquire the Taylor Ranch, they may have saved themselves some headaches. Blixseth, of Oregon, had announced his proposal to buy the 77,000-acre ranch in south-central Colorado, log some of it and trade the…
Elitch Gardens has done its best to keep the financial details of its star-crossed move from northwest Denver to the Central Platte Valley shrouded in secrecy. Following last month’s announcement that the City of Denver would throw another $7 million into the pot–raising taxpayers’ total contribution to more than $30…
Before it ended last month, the Rocky Mountain News’s five-part series on Denver’s taxi mess stretched to a mysterious sixth story. That piece, which ran December 23, detailed some of the personal and financial connections between Karen Mathis, the Yellow Cab receiver appointed by Judge Lynne Hufnagel, and LaRae Orullian,…
Back in the Middle Ages, when the Miami Dolphins could still field eleven men on defense and Buddy Ryan was fighting in the Golden Gloves, I wrote in this space that the Dolphins would beat the San Francisco 49ers in this year’s Super Bowl. Sure, and the Germans will win…
Teacher’s Fret Regarding Robin Chotzinoff’s “Class Dismissed” in the January 5 issue: I just wanted to commend Westword for having the courage to print the story you wrote on Hillary Adams. I’m a retired teacher who worked 25 years for DPS, and the sad truth is that this is not…
September 2 was a bad day at Barnum Elementary. Just a few days earlier, teachers at the west Denver school had started the new year with considerable apprehensions. By all accounts, the 1992-1993 session had been a difficult one. But they still had hopes that a fresh start could turn…
When we offered last month to help the U.S. Department of Energy find a new name for Denver’s nuclear bomb factory, we weren’t just blowing smoke. In fact, our fission expedition generated a whopping 14.2 tons of entries! And while we could pick only one winner, they all got glowing…
Jerome Wayne Dingerson took the Rocky Mountain News for a ride–literally. Dingerson, owner of the Lakewood-based Bear Creek Horse & Carriage, last month provided holiday hayrides for young News carriers and their families. Unbeknownst to the News, however, he was on probation for sexually assaulting a twelve-year-old girl who once…
It is not yet time to print playoff tickets and map a parade route through downtown, but your Denver Nuggets–the problem children of the National Basketball Association–are growing up. Last month they put together their first .500 December in four years. They won five straight before collapsing against Philadelphia Sunday…
When Ron Maynard announced his plans to build a new railroad repair facility just outside the tiny Weld County town of Hudson in 1988, the government couldn’t be helpful enough. Maynard’s company, Rocky Mountain Railcar Inc., received tax credits and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fixed-interest loans from state…
The Eternal Flame A thousand thank-yous to the “Flaming Heterosexual” who responded to Patricia Calhoun’s December 15 column, “Grave Doubts,” on Madrid St. Angelo and Taylor St. John. He (or she) hit the nail right on the head, albeit unwittingly, when he (or she) said, “Will homosexuals please, please get…
John Horan has handled a thousand bodies, but even now, after 25 years, the forgotten ones still touch him.”This was an eleven-year-old child,” he says, examining a green cardboard package no larger than a deck of cards. “I can’t imagine how anyone could abandon the remains of an eleven-year-old child…
