In the mid-Eighties, investors from around the country began pouring money into a proposed real estate development just outside the town of Morrison. Over the next few years they wrote checks for tens of millions of dollars; one Pennsylvania bank alone injected close to $50 million into the project, called…
Flight attendant Joanne Berg-Goehl figured she’d hear from the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s office about why her ex-husband’s child-support payments had dropped off. Last year he was threatened with jail time if he didn’t pay her $1,000 immediately. Berg-Goehl got that money, thanks to a check processed by a company…
If it’s true that the pen is mightier than the sword, it is equally true that the pen is not as tough as the almighty dollar. Knowing this, town officials who take offense at newspaper coverage of them have sometimes retaliated by pulling advertising from the offending publications. Those days…
Prints charming: What was Wellington Webb press secretary Andrew Hudson doing in the September 3 Denver Post, staring bug-eyed from the editorial pages as though he’d just been goosed by his former employers at RTD? Getting ready to goose much of the local press, it turns out. Riding the anti-media…
With something like a half-billion dollars for construction of the Pepsi Center and the new Broncos stadium about to pour into Denver, questions about who will do the work are bubbling to the surface. And one of the biggest questions concerns the percentage of minority and women contractors–as evidenced by…
Every horse on the grounds comes equipped with four legs. It doesn’t really take Magellan’s navigational skills and two tanks of gas to get out there. The jockeys don’t lift your wallet in the parking lot, and anyone who brings three kids along is pretty likely to go home with…
Princess Diana’s body was barely back on British soil when the most unlikely people began acting like royal pains, comparing their own plights to that of the deceased princess. On September 2, Larry King’s live show got a surprise call from none other than Patsy Ramsey, who wanted to pop…
Duty to Di Was Kenny Be’s Princess Di Hip Tip, in the September 4 issue, really necessary? I enjoy reading Westword, but I think that cartoon was tasteless and disrespectful. Dana Murphy Northglenn Your last issue was another one avoiding all important life-and-death issues: this time, the untimely death of…
The tango fanatics are easy to spot on a recent weekday night at the Washington Park Grill; they’re the ones crowding around a makeshift dance floor they’ve created by shoving a few tables out of the way. Already the room is buzzing, and the women, many of them older and…
Marshall “Slim” Hopkins stands on a windswept precipice in southern Teller County, a couple of miles outside the town of Victor. It is a place he comes to often, to take in what may be the most sobering view in all of Colorado. Looking west, Hopkins can see rolling hills…
Republicans in the Second Congressional District have ground a dozen different can-didates into fodder for David Skaggs and Tim Wirth. Next year, though, the name of the Democrat running for that seat will change, along with one other thing: The GOP may nominate somebody who has a chance to win…
Although two high-profile campaign-finance reform measures are grabbing all the attention–and threats of lawsuits–the City of Westminster has quietly instituted a reform that’s effectively changed the system. And so far, there isn’t a lawsuit in sight. Both Amendment 15 and a new ban on contributions to RTD’s latest tax-hike measure…
Hail Mary: After Sunday’s Mile High opener, the most intriguing Monday-morning quarterbacking focused not on the late hit on John Elway, but on whether a deal’s in the works that could rid Denver of Pat Bowlen and ensure that any stadium vote is a hit with voters. Everybody knows that…
The nation’s top outdoor-recreation official, Lyle Laverty, isn’t scheduled to take over the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain region until November, and Colorado environmentalists are already howling like a pack of wolves. “Recreation is the new game,” says Roz McClellan of the Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project, “and as a result,…
Now that the Padres and Rockies, newcomers to these proceedings, are peering up from the darkness, it cannot hurt to examine what they see high above. They see the Giants and the Dodgers, a couple of storied teams that would just as soon slash each other’s throats as exchange pre-game…
Since I last visited the Lace House, back on Memorial Day, an entire tourist season has come and gone–without one tourist touring through what was once Black Hawk’s top (and arguably only) attraction. But that was in the days when people enjoyed the ramshackle charms of the old mining town…
Rush to Judgement Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s August 21 column, “Once Upon a Mattress”: KOA should fire Keith Weinman. The only reason to listen to any Jacor station is to hear Rush. Don L. Lewis Aurora It’s very appropriate that in last week’s letters column, Mike Cooper compared Keith Weinman to…
Arnold Schwarzenegger smiled for the photographers on a chilly day in March 1995, strolling down Wazee Street with a retinue of overawed city bureaucrats, retail CEOs, neighborhood potentates and bodyguards. The beaming actor told reporters that he thought lower downtown was “fantastic” and that he wanted to do a project…
Paula Larsen, the first woman in America to use a new federal law to help her collect child-support payments, didn’t get a lot of attention for earning this pioneering title. Her ten years of effort, which included a lawsuit against such notables as Denver’s district attorney, didn’t go unrewarded, though…
As recently as last spring, it looked like the Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation was on a roll that would never stop. The nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain, which controls one third of the hospitals in metro Denver, was racking up record profits and acquiring community hospitals at a feverish pace. Now…
The Reverend Henry Lyons, the embattled president of the nation’s largest black denomination, has come under fire in recent weeks for driving a Rolls-Royce that he allegedly purchased with church funds. Perhaps when Lyons is in town this week for the annual meeting of the National Baptist Convention USA, he…
Armed with industrial-strength paint remover and blessed with a face that apparently melts into a crowd, a midnight marauder has targeted the ski town of Breckenridge where it hurts the most–right in the tourist industry. Breckenridge police call the culprit, who’s been tossing batches of caustic liquid onto cars with…
