Oh, the heartbreak! For all these years, we thought we’d been buying Girl Scout cookies in support of the organization’s efforts to build character in young girls and help them do good deeds (and because we have no self-control when it comes to Tagalongs). But as it turns out, our…
Linda Chavez lost her chance to serve as George W. Bush’s Labor Secretary when the news broke that she’d once sheltered an illegal alien. But, since she dropped out of the running for the position on January 9, the onetime Denver resident has been cashing in — or trying to,…
Given the exalted circumstances of today’s professional athletes and the inadequate appreciation most of them show for their good fortune, it’s always nice to find the rare individual who does the job without complaint, keeps his mouth shut and demands no special treatment…save for the occasional raw carrot. No thoroughbred…
Sheep Thrills Like lambs to the slaughter: I can’t tell you how much my circle of friends and I enjoyed Stuart Steers’s “Meaner Pastures,” in the February 1 issue. I have never met the Peroulis family, I know nothing about them, and I don’t hear anybody defending them in Moffat…
Last May, a sick and injured Peruvian sheepherder showed up on the doorstep of a rancher near Meeker. The herder, Remigio Inga Damian, had spent several days walking from the remote backcountry pasture where he’d been tending a herd of 1,000 sheep. Exhausted and feverish, he’d hidden in an abandoned…
The Black American West Museum and Heritage Center won’t be open during Black History Month. The venerable institution has been forced to close its doors for all of February, and possibly longer, because it doesn’t have enough money to continue operating. “That’s very, very unfortunate,” says museum boardmember Ottawa Harris…
Twelve weeks into the school year, Joy Kay got the surprise of her teaching career. A parent who had come to her biology classroom at Thomas Jefferson High School to pick up her child’s progress report wondered why her kid had gotten a B at the six-week grading period and…
For once, the City of Denver and local Freedom From Religion Foundation activist/attorney Bob Tiernan are on the same page — if not the same chapter and verse. Tiernan, who has battled the city and other government agencies over separation of church and state matters, won his recent fight to…
Not too long ago, a customer walked into Martín Ramirez’s botánica complaining that he couldn’t have sex. And he’d tried, the man explained. A lot. So Martín asked him for a personal object, and the man handed over a watch. Martín rubbed the trinket in his hands, closed his eyes…
At first glance, the Denver Post’s January 14 introduction of columnist Tina Griego seemed benign — but wrapped inside it was a needle aimed straight at the Rocky Mountain News, the Post’s joint-operating-agreement buddy. Specifically, the item announced that Griego’s work will appear on the editorial page in Saturday papers…
Want to make your high-powered colleagues down at the club think you’ve lost your competitive edge and corporate marbles? Try out this pitch the next time you run into a couple of venture capitalists while sweating over your “friendly” game of lunchtime squash: “Boys, I’ve been an athlete all my…
Don’t Be an Ash! History in the making: Please consider that the diminishing support for your editorial views is because you are out of touch with the common, decent people of America. Change or wind up on the ash heap of history. Howard Eckles Denver Food for Thought Soul on…
The stage lights brighten, illuminating two irregular groupings of styrofoam blocks arranged like rock formations on a beach. A stagehand adds the sound of waves breaking on the shore, and then…nothing. “Uh, when the lights come up, that means the play is supposed to start,” shouts director Jimy Murphy from…
Janice and Jhenita Whitfield were crossing the Western Slope, en route from San Diego to Denver, when they were pulled over for Driving While Black. Jhenita had been living in California with her sister, an operations technician with the Navy, for seven months. Now, on this cold spring morning in…
There weren’t any trees at first. Maybe a few cottonwoods — scrappy, messy tangles along the banks of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River — but the rest was just sagebrush and tall grass. Then the gold miners came, and the bartenders, the merchants and the ranchers, the doctors…
Not much happens in Woodland Park. It’s the place where the Millennium Holiday Tree, which was used to celebrate Christmas in Washington, D.C., will be sliced up to make park benches; it’s a jumping-off point for people heading into the Pike and San Isabel national forests for hiking, biking and…
The chiseled sign in front of the building at 400 West Colfax still reads “Rocky Mountain News,” as it has since long before October 1998, when the publication billed as “Colorado’s oldest newspaper” rechristened itself the “Denver Rocky Mountain News.” But the move to drop the “Denver” and reclaim the…
The first thing — and possibly the last — you need to know about the new Extreme Football League is that Dick Butkus is the philosopher king of the rules committee. For those who don’t remember Butkus (which is to say, virtually every fan the XFL hopes to attract), this…
Life in the Foster Lane From here to eternity: I must congratulate Julie Jargon for her January 18 story, “Home for Dinner.” She took a very complicated issue and made it easy to understand, focusing on one important point: Children deserve to be put in good homes, and be put…
In November 1998, an employee of a local hospital called the Denver Department of Human Services child-abuse hotline to report that a patient, four-year-old Ben, had been admitted with bruises on his body. Ben’s father had taken him to the emergency room after he fell off a bookshelf he’d climbed…
Walk west across Cherokee Street from the City and County Building, pass through the spike-topped iron gates of the Denver Mint, at 320 West Colfax Avenue, and you may not be in Denver anymore. That’s what Mint employee April Garcia has discovered during her ongoing attempt to get a restraining…
Unless you were a cashier in one of the original toll booths at Denver International Airport and on a bathroom break, you probably never noticed the toll plaza office building that sits on the median between Peña Boulevard’s inbound and outbound lanes. The nondescript, 6,600-square-foot structure (with another 6,000-plus square…
