Leonard Carlo is so upset, he can’t even curse properly. He shakes his big bald head, slaps a callused hand on the bar, stutters through a four-letter invective, then strokes his long white whiskers. “Motherfucker!” he says at last. Carlo, proprietor of the notorious Leonard’s II tavern in Colorado Springs,…
The hair-netted men and women who prepare and serve lunch every day in school cafeterias across Denver are fed up. They have been for years. Until recently, they kept silent out of fear for their jobs. But concerns about low wages that max out at about $10 an hour, little…
Nothing breeds success like, well, success. And John Fielder has had plenty of it — on the business side, anyway. Although Amendment 25, the growth-control initiative he helped create and publicize, was bulldozed into oblivion like a Douglas County prairie dog habitat on November 7, the photographer’s must-have coffee-table book,…
Paonia, about seventy miles from Grand Junction, is no one’s idea of a metropolis: All 1,800 of the town’s citizens could fit into Denver’s Paramount Theatre with room to spare, and its downtown, spread out along the optimistically named Grand Avenue, is two blocks in length, no doubt making parades…
College admissions directors are well aware of a phenomenon known as the “Flutie Effect.” The Flutie in question, of course, is Doug Flutie, the slippery bantam quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. (He also has his own breakfast cereal, Flutie Flakes, sold regionally, whose digestive “Flutie Effect” is another story.) The…
Poetry in Notions Yeah, that’s the ticket: We were attending Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s 1985 Vajradhatu Seminary at the Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center west of Fort Collins, and before one of Rinpoche’s most important talks, I was selected to make sure all those attending had tickets. Before allowing people to enter,…
April 1997, New York City Peter Hale woke up as usual to an AM radio station that rattled off traffic conditions, sports highlights and news updates every ten minutes. Sunlight was already sifting in the windows of his loft in Greenwich Village as he left his lover, Joseph, asleep in…
It was February 1998, and as Chip Berry looked around the nearly empty Belcaro Shopping Center, his old anger came back. For four years, his landlord had been promising to fill the center with shops that would help bring business back to the old strip mall. Hodel’s Drug Store, which…
Now that the election season is (mostly) over, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at a lot of malls and stores around town — except, of course, for the giant wall on the back of the Denver Pavilions. As usual, it looks a lot like nothing. Mall manager…
In a crowded surplus store in downtown’s ragged, industrial backyard, Arturo Rascon hits pay dirt. “How much for these?” he asks, appraising two wooden crates of Russian pipe wrenches. “These?” replies Ralph Long Jr. “Well, let’s see.” Long, the store’s proprietor, holds up one of the tools, which promptly breaks…
In the beginning, television was rife with creative possibilities because no rules had been written and practically nothing was out of bounds. But since then, TV genres have become so deeply entrenched that even the slightest variation from the template is seen as an incredible risk that no sane person…
Broncs Cheer Play as you go: I agree with Bill Gallo that the name of the new Broncos stadium is meaningless (“The Name Game,” November 23). The only thing that matters is how the Broncos play at that new stadium! Jay Whiting Denver The football stadium bard: Bill Gallo –…
As Denver’s economy finally gained momentum after the deep slump of the ’80s, a group of hardy entrepreneurs set to work building an empire. The budding capitalists were all young women. For the most part, they were also foreigners, having only recently immigrated to this country from Korea; a few…
On a cold afternoon in January 1995, the parents of 43-year-old Denver securities lawyer Daniel B. Matter reported to Denver police that their son was missing and probably suicidal. Matter struggled with manic depression, and while his mother was visiting from Florida to keep him company after the holidays, he’d…
On October 24, Denver Police Chief Gerald Whitman’s team of public-information officers hosted local reporters at a meet-and-greet session in the DPD’s press room. The gathering was a throwback to the alleged good old days when cops and reporters sat barstool to barstool. This morning get-together, however, was fueled by…
Standing at a makeshift podium in a field outside the Florence federal prison complex, Jim Davis gestured angrily at the stark walls encased in razor wire. Dozens of listeners sat on hay bales, many of them broad-shouldered men clutching signs calling for “Fair and Equal Treatment” and wearing T-shirts that…
The sale earlier this month of El Jebel Shrine Temple, at 1770 Sherman Street, the former home of the Eulipions theater organization, may finally have ended one act in a bitter dispute between two rival Eulipions factions, but the story is far from over. In October, a real estate company…
Denver International Airport, that little bigtop on the prairie, has never exactly blended in with the natural environment. And why should it? DIA’s an airport, not a state park, and its form should follow a function dedicated to great planes, not the Great Plains. But despite its size, noise and…
On a terrace 5,500 feet above sea level, Ted Polito Jr. leans over and lets me in on a little secret: People pray up here, he whispers. They’re not supposed to, because this is Colorado’s Capitol Building, but they do anyway. They usually come on Fridays, two men and two…
In the year 2000, Channel 9’s Adele Arakawa is Denver’s undisputed local news queen, the reliable, levelheaded, take-no-crap senior anchor for the city’s highest-profile newscast. The departures earlier this year of Channel 9 longtimers Ed Sardella and Ron Zappolo had TV insiders predicting that the station’s ratings winning streak might…
Just a wild surmise, but doesn’t it seem to you that in recent weeks Denverites have been far more concerned with the name of their new football stadium than with the name of their new president? Terrorists could blow up Boettcher Concert Hall in mid-Mozart, and not a soul would…
Gas Pains We want to pump you up! I know vertical integration is different from monopoly. Or is it? Still, since the feds have had our eyes directed at Microsoft, maybe we’ve not noticed the oil-company convenience stores that have sprung up on every street corner over the past ten…
