Heaven, December 31, 1999 Once again, it’s time for the millennial survey of all that is my dominion. And as I look out over the heavens and Earth, one thing troubles me greatly: the state of Colorado. Those people live in the closest thing left to Eden, but I haven’t…
All right, then. Just how long has it been since your Denver Broncos rose from the slough of despond to win a pair of Super Bowls? A thousand days? How long since the icon John Elway hung up his cleats and Terrell Davis went into traction and Shannon Sharpe decided…
John Stone As chaos reigned inside Columbine High School on April 20, Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone told reporters that as many as 25 people could be dead as a result of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s rampage. Eight months later he defended those erroneous statements, telling the Rocky Mountain…
Welcome to Colorado — Now Go Home At the beginning of 1999, the state began replacing its fading purple-and-orange “Welcome to Colorado: Mountains and Much More!” border signs, which had been criticized as “too California.” For $133,000, the signs were replaced with brand-new “nostalgic” brown highway signs with jagged edges…
Beer Wolf (not his real name) steps from his bedroom into his basement studio, a large glass jar in his hand. As he unscrews the lid and presents the jar to a visitor, a musty aroma wafts up from the leafy green resinous material within. “You can’t buy this around…
It’s a cold Friday evening in Denver, and 100 people have gathered at the Catholic Worker Soup Kitchen for a free meal. Steamy bowls of cream of chicken soup sit next to servings of tossed salad and slices of apple pie; a friendly volunteer walks around the room, pouring coffee…
Warning: The language in this story may be considered inappropriate for children and quite possibly revolting by any adult not employed by the Colorado Department of Corrections. Whatever else you might say about Joe Paolino, he’s not shy about handing out compliments. One woman who worked for him says he…
Coloradans have watched in despair the past few years as ticky-tacky subdivisions and ugly big-box retail stores have sprung up in once-bucolic landscapes. Growth now routinely tops the list of issues residents are most upset about, and the coming year will be a pivotal one for those who want to…
In 1989, Denver voters approved a $2.5 million bond for what would have been the city’s eighth golf course on an empty chunk of land close to the area where Denver International Airport would be built. Throughout the 1990s, the city talked a good game about building the course at…
In a class by itselfIn the next two months, juniors and seniors in a civics class at Alta Vista High School in Mountain View, California, will get a chance to do something that Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter probably never will: interpret the evidence in the JonBenét Ramsey case and…
It’s consuming him, the murder of his daughter. He knows this, feels himself becoming overwhelmed, but he can’t stop. “I think about it before I go to bed. I think about it when I wake up in the middle of the night. I think about it when I get up…
Steve Grund may be the news director at Channel 2, but a big part of his approach is pure show business. And why not? News is an important profit center for stations, and those profits go up, up, up when more people tune in, just as they do with entertainment…
Look behind us,” says Eric Nellis. “It’s the highway patrol.” Damn straight — zooming up behind the sedan Nellis is driving along a lonely stretch of Wyoming road on this crisp but clear November morning is a squad car with its light rack percolating. Nellis, a clean-cut 22-year-old with a…
It’s early in July 1997, and Jack has just turned three. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t respond to directions. He can’t sit still for fifteen minutes. He shuns everyone around him, including his parents. On the rare occasion that his dad is able to make eye contact with him, Jack…
William Vance Turner told them he didn’t do it. They didn’t believe him, of course. Three years ago, anything a prisoner had to say about what was going on inside the special housing unit (SHU) of the federal penitentiary at Florence would have been dismissed by authorities as pretty damned…
At a hearing last week, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission invited anyone who wanted to comment on US West’s pending merger with Qwest to come forward and speak. Only a handful of people showed up at the meeting overseen by PUC chairman Ray Gifford, but those who did had a…
The ongoing saga over a proposed northwest Denver elementary school has taken an ironic turn. Parents who spent months trying to convince the Denver Board of Education to offer a dual-language/Montessori program at the new school found out last week that their wishes had been granted when the board voted…
Deck the hallsTime’s Denver bureau had real reason to celebrate at its annual Christmas party Monday night. The big-scoop Columbine issue, with its summary of the Eric Harris/Dylan Klebold videos, was just hitting the stands (a week early, to counter the Rocky Mountain News’s three-part series that started Sunday); several…
The man speaks slooow and LOUD, as if to a person who doesn’t know her hearing aids have failed. “It’s just stuff I have,” he says. “And now I’m getting rid of it. We’re moving.” “But how do you happen to have three glass jewelry display cases?” I ask. “At…
Brian Christopher, known to his loyal listeners as B.C., mans the 7 p.m.-to-midnight slot weekdays on the Fox, and he does so with an extremely local slant, talking knowledgeably about Denver happenings and interacting directly with Colorado callers who make the classic-rock requests that dominate the program. But there are…
The little blond boy looked out the window of the United Airlines jet as it left Denver. Raoul Wuthrich had just turned eleven in the Jefferson County juvenile detention center, where he’d been placed for sexually assaulting his five-year-old sister, but now he was free to go. “Bye-bye Denver, I…
Dick Schwarz has had enough. His family has been selling books, antiques and art in Boulder County since his parents opened a shop in an old stage house in Lyons back in the late Fifties. But his Stage House Two, on Pearl Street just west of Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall,…
