Conservative Estimates Regarding Ward Harkavy’s “Life of the Party,” in the April 9 issue: Okay, I get the impression that Ward Harkavy won’t be voting for Bill Owens for governor. From the cover of your paper, showing him with fingers crossed (implying that he’s a liar), to the negative spin…
He can almost see her. Henry Johns stands in the back of his mother’s house on Monroe Street and pictures her kneeling beside the fence, turning soil, planting seeds. She liked to grow things. The smell of wet dirt, the way flowers unfolded to the sun. Hollyhocks and tiger lilies…
You take your chances walking into a political rally with no stickers on your body. You feel like the first sailor off the boat stepping into a gaggle of prostitutes. Smiling people move toward you, seeking to press your flesh and slap names on your chest. Hands come out of…
What happens when the city wants to evict you but your landlord doesn’t? He could lose not just a tenant, but also his property. Bob Brown owns a house at 1339 Ogden Street; for the past five years he’s rented the carriage house to Michael Pisarck. Last December Pisarck was…
Neighbors of the old Lowry Air Force Base are teed off over a proposed golf course that would locate several holes on top of an abandoned landfill there. And while the Lowry Redevelopment Authority has signed off on plans to build the course, which is supported by hundreds of senior…
Beware of geeks bearing gifts: Where do you want to go today? Well, if you’re Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, we know where you don’t want to go: down to the Denver Public Library to read a children’s story to a bunch of future customers. A group of local kids had…
As Pokey Reese can tell you, this is the year in which some of baseball’s most cherished records are likely to be demolished. Pokey himself got the ball rolling on opening day by committing four errors at shortstop in support of his Cincinnati Reds’ 10-2 loss to San Diego. There’s…
Cockeyed Optimists Wonderful column by Patricia Calhoun on the legacy of Gary Hart’s Monkey Business (“Ship of State,” March 26). It’s hard to believe that this country has gotten even more cynical than it was a decade ago, but reading through all those hopeful letters to Hart, I realize it’s…
Monica Thomas is in the enviable position of being able to say yes to almost all the requests she gets–and she rarely gets the same request twice. “Now, who is that woman in Arvada?” Thomas asks herself. “She called for permission to dress up her RTD stop, to change it…
For years, Ann Bonnell has been a volunteer at the Denver Botanic Gardens’ Chatfield Arboretum. The former farm next to the Chatfield Reservoir has been operated as a nature preserve since the 1970s, and volunteers have planted thousands of trees and bushes on the property that parallels Deer Creek. Bonnell…
Bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman may be about to retire, but he still looks like a Hell’s Angel. His hair is long and blond, and his teeth look like they’ve been regularly kicked out and then put back in place. His upper canines are as big as fangs, and his…
This past summer, Joe Smith, a young, up-and-coming Colorado deputy attorney general, decided to run for the top law enforcement job in the state. He has already gotten off to a rocky start. For beginners, on the day that he notified the secretary of state’s office of his intention to…
How much does one ten-hour hostage situation cost? Plenty, if you’re talking about the United States Postal Service. This past Christmas Eve day, seven postal employees at the USPS’s General Mail Facility, situated near the old Stapleton airport, were taken hostage by a former postal worker. They were released, unharmed,…
Good fellows: An effort to recruit minority teachers to the Denver Public Schools spearheaded by Denver mayor Wellington Webb hasn’t done diddly to get black and Hispanic role models into teaching jobs at DPS. In fact, the “Mayor’s Fellows” program produced such lackluster results that it’s been given the ax…
Colorado’s future ran headlong into its past on a dusty piece of land north of Pueblo last month. A bulldozer driver preparing the ground for a new Wal-Mart store unearthed a grave site within view of Interstate 25. At first he thought he’d found animal bones. But when he saw…
When Mike Tyson announced last week that he was willing to part with the unabridged, uncensored story of his life for, say, three or four million bucks, you can bet the Pulitzer Prize committee and the people who hand out the Nobels sat up and took notice. Listen. Solzhenitsyn may…
Who knows what compelled the man–if indeed it was a man. Clues are few. One day about ten years ago, someone walked into the First National Bank in Cortez and rented safe-deposit box number 509. Inside it, he placed a battered 1979 Durango phone book, an empty 89-cent box of…
A Big Zero Regarding Michael Roberts’s “Double Trouble,” in the March 26 issue: One would have to be a masochist to call the Jay Marvin radio talk show, particularly if one doesn’t agree with the so-called leftist’s rantings and ravings. The man can’t have a reasonable conversation with anyone with…
The federal law enforcement officer lurking around the downtown studio of KHOW-AM/630 pleads to remain anonymous. Not that he’s doing anything wrong. It’s just that his visit to KHOW isn’t official. He’s on a break, see. His time is his own for the next few minutes, and he’s spending it…
For such a high-stakes game, not many people knew about it. After years of struggle, a cowboy named Glenn Miller and a ragtag assortment of investors lost a potential pot of gold to lawyers bankrolled by the giant Vail ski resort. If it had been a poker game, Glenn Miller…
Captive audience: The bad news at the Arapahoe County Jail is that the video rentals once available to inmates on weekend nights have been discontinued. The good news: We got cable! Yes–in the future, should you find yourself a weekend guest of Sheriff Pat Sullivan and his deputies, you can…
The whole mess may have started with an argument over carpets. Or maybe it had to do with a few hundred dollars’ worth of phone calls. No matter how it began, though, the dispute between Rabah Khatib and Herbert Wasserman just keeps getting more expensive–and the fate of downtown Denver’s…
