Public Service Company of Colorado wants state lawmakers to approve its self-styled proposal for cleaning up Denver’s air. But the $200 million-plus plan may make consumers gag. Though it’s been wrapped in a green bow for legislators–several environmental groups have even given it their blessing–the bill violates Public Service’s recent…
It’s been nearly four years since a young woman sent by Local 7 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to help organize grocery workers in Alamosa was sexually assaulted by her boss in a room at the Holiday Inn. Two weeks ago the woman, now 24 years old,…
Make no mistake about it, the inmates in the Colorado Department of Corrections are paying dearly for their crimes. So are their families. Just look at their phone bills. One of the privileges prisoners lose when they go to the slammer is their choice of long-distance carriers; their calls to…
When millionaire NHL celebrities like Adam Deadmarsh, Brett Hull and John Vanbiesbrouck take the ice this week wearing the colors of the United States, the media glare will be hot and the cheers deafening. But no U.S. Olympic hockey player will be prouder than an unknown, unpaid defenseman named Merz…
Paper Trained Patricia Calhoun’s “Birth of a Notion,” in the January 29 issue, gave me chills. I didn’t live in Denver in the Seventies, or even the Eighties, so I appreciated learning how far we’ve come and also what we’ve lost. Congratulations, Westword. Larry Smythe Denver I just wanted to…
From wowtown to cowtown. Just a week ago, Denver was recovering from the largest collective hangover on record. On Super Bowl Sunday, in a wannabe major-league “riot,” crazed Broncos fans fueled by Jell-O shots looted an athletic-goods store. (This is Denver, after all.) On Monday, thousands of slightly more sober…
Making book: Oprah’s book club it’s not, but KHOW-AM now has its own recommended reading list, with the picks of four talk-show hosts on display at both Tattered Covers. Not surprisingly, Dr. Laura’s choices are all books and tapes by Laura Schlessinger, who happens to be the good doctor. Surprisingly,…
One night in 1968, a 29-year-old Phil Anschutz sat in the bar of the Casper, Wyoming, airport cutting the biggest deal of his life with an oil wildcatter named Jeff Hawks. Outside, in the direction of Gillette, the sky was on fire, the result of an inferno that had erupted…
Anyone else would surely have given up by now. Here it is, a beautiful Saturday afternoon, the powder steadily accumulating on the Copper Mountain slopes, creating the kind of ideal conditions that serious shredders only dream about. But Tim Gill is stuck teaching a rank amateur the basics of ‘boarding…
Writers for Soldier of Fortune magazine probably don’t complain too much when editor/publisher Robert K. Brown monkeys with their stories. After all, how many editors keep a pair of Soviet assault rifles next to their desks? Brown grabs the rifles to emphasize a point. “The anti-gun forces are fucking irrational,…
Susan Barnes has made some pretty powerful enemies over the past five years, including countless officers and enlisted men in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, Washington politicos and the presidents of a couple of right-wing think tanks. She’s been accused of being a “femi-Nazi,” of ruining careers, of…
Bill McCartney has never been able to stop thinking about men. When he landed in Boulder in 1982 as the new coach of the University of Colorado’s moribund football program, he had a wife and four kids. But he had to find some young men to make his dreams come…
Nita Gonzales has shot her mouth off so many times–and gotten in trouble for it so many times–that she doesn’t know where to start. But there was this one time at Annunciation School when she first got a taste of what lay ahead for her as one of Denver’s most…
Paul Stewart, founder and curator emeritus of Denver’s Black American West Museum, stands before the third group of schoolchildren he’s seen today, this time at Greenlee Elementary School, where the students are mostly Hispanic. He’s here for an assembly celebrating Martin Luther King Day, just another in a long line…
Dottie Lamm, currently a candidate for the U.S. Senate, is known throughout Colorado because of her husband. That may be her biggest blessing–or her biggest curse. The frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Dottie Lamm seems likely to face incumbent Republican senator (and turncoat Democrat) Ben Nighthorse Campbell in November. That…
Sage Douglas Remington marches to a different drummer. A Southern Ute drummer these days–but that’s just one of the beats that’s driven him over the years. Remington, 48, came to activism early in life. “My father worked very hard and taught me the value of hard work and to also…
When Barry Fey sold his interest in the concert firm that bore his name late last summer, a lot of his competitors figured that, career-wise, he was as good as dead–but the old cuss won’t lie down. Since then, the man who was Denver’s most successful, and most feared, promoter…
It’s a typical morning for Essie Garrett, in that she ran the five miles to her job at the Emily Griffith Opportunity School, where she has been in charge of the refrigeration department for fifteen years. As usual, she’ll run back home at the end of the day, her backpack…
1977: Colorado is in the grip of a severe drought, yet permits for construction of new homes top 20,000 annually, to better accommodate the thousands of immigrants inspired by John Denver’s lyrical vision of the state (1973’s “Rocky Mountain High”) and James Michener’s bestselling novel Centennial (which celebrates the state…
It seems impossible–doesn’t it?–that on the first day, he was terrible. Facing the Pittsburgh Steelers at Three Rivers Stadium, he completed just one of eight passes for a measly fourteen yards. He got sacked, hard, four times, and by game’s end looked like a deer in the headlights. Because those…
Clarissa Pinkola Estes is thinking about what story she would tell to residents of Denver in 1998. She settles on “Stone Soup,” an ancient tale–but not an ancient idea. The people are starving–for soulfulness, for spirit–and they shut their doors and live behind them, and what little they have they…
Noel Cunningham is almost too good to be true. The owner of two of the town’s best restaurants, Strings and 240 Union, and the driving force behind several charities that have raised more than a million dollars in Denver, Cunningham is one of the few people in the back-stabbing, chef-eat-chef…
