News

Our daily dread: As if Denver’s newspaper war weren’t already hell, another combatant has entered the field: the New York Times. The venerable newspaper has poured $20 million into a national advertising campaign, promising not only that readers across the country can “expect the world,” but also have it delivered…

The Boulder apartment David Wittlinger rented for his final year at the University of Colorado wasn’t great, but it was okay–until the weather turned cold. The furnace never worked, and calls to the owner and the property manager yielded no heat. Because space heaters would blow a fuse, Wittlinger shivered…

A quixotic effort to run English-style punts through downtown Denver got off to a slow start last summer, but that hasn’t deterred promoters of the boat trips from planning a $2 million expansion of the unusual network of dams and locks along puny Cherry Creek. Punt the Creek was launched…

Like a lot of residents of southeast Denver, Judy LaMar has come to embrace the High Line Canal trail as a refuge from the urban madness. Joggers and strollers, horseback riders and bicyclists all flock to the cottonwood-shaded trail, which offers a weathered asphalt path flanked by what LaMar calls…

Stephen Goodman is a hapless victim of the U.S. Postal Service’s Neanderthal personnel policies, another cog worn down and abused by an agency with a reputation for treating its career servers with the same amount of common sense found in Alice in Wonderland. Either that, or he is the employee…

Roy Romer doesn’t know who Martha Stewart is–and it’s a good thing, too. The high priestess of high-class living is a menace to women everywhere, and particularly here. That by-the-book (her book) lifestyle is precisely what people move to Colorado to avoid. After all, hydrangeas are not xeriscape-approved. And how…

Read It and Leap Patricia Calhoun: What happened to you? Your April 17 column, “Look Before You Leap…to Conclusions,” was sensible and well-reasoned. In short, it was a refreshing change from your usual strident harangues. Sal Connors Denver Denver P.D. Blues Regarding Karen Bowers’s “Sliced and Dicey,” in the April…

It’s Tuesday morning, and Thierry Smith, Denver’s most unlikely radio sports-talk host, is on the air. Sporting a yellow polo shirt and seated in the motorized scooter he’s been forced into by multiple sclerosis, he moves across a variety of subjects. Surgery on John Elway’s arm. (“Just maintenance. Nothing to…

The Greeley sniper’s shot was on target last September 24, hitting teenager Joe Gallegos just below his Adam’s apple. Blood gushed from his back where the bullet left his body. The day had been bloody enough: Gallegos had killed three people 400 miles away, including one who had tried to…

Author! Author!: A twofer of Coors is coming right up, with a pair of books due out on the Golden brewery and the family that founded it. One of the tomes is the official Coors history, authorized–and subsidized–by the brewery in time for Coors’s 125th anniversary in March 1988. According…

An anti-union lobbyist has so angered normally unflappable state senator Don Ament that he may be the first lobbyist ever banned from doing his job at the State Capitol. The irony is that Ament and the lobbyist, Guy Short, are on the same side. Short is director of Colorado Citizens…

Recently, on an obscure cable-TV channel, dedicated amateur Tonja Roi–the co-host of Cineview–took her best shot: After a clip from the action yarn The Long Kiss Goodnight, in which Geena Davis plays a CIA assassin, a “robber” burst onto the set of the public-access TV show and snatched Roi’s purse…

The Denver Police Department, already beset by accusations that its officers manhandled a suspected car thief who crashed into the car of a rookie cop, is reeling under a new round of allegations. And this time, police officers are the ones pointing the finger at their colleagues. Internal scuttlebutt has…

Throwing Fits Alan Prendergast’s “All the News That Fits,” in the April 10 issue, was both amusing and informative. Having worked in the editorial department at the Rocky Mountain News for three years, I saw firsthand the carnage that Prendergast describes so well. It is both depressing and sad to…

Memo to Denver: With all the national media in town for, and already bored by, the Oklahoma City bombing trial, this is no time to misbehave. For example, no matter how peeved you might be after some seventeen-year-old punk in a stolen car broadsides your buddy–your cop buddy on only…

1895–Local curio magnate Harry Tammen and Kansas scoundrel Frederick Bonfils buy the fledgling Denver Evening Post for $12,500 and start shaping it into a lurid, red-headline scandal sheet that will rob readers from the venerable Rocky Mountain News, established on the banks of Cherry Creek in 1859. 1907–Seething over criticism…

Last October, two women accused former Durango mayor Jeff Morrissey of making lewd comments. His apparent inspiration: bumper stickers on the women’s cars opposing the proposed Animas-La Plata water project. One sticker boasted the acronym A-LP with a red slash through it. The other read “A-LP sucks.” Did that mean…

From the moment he flew into town early last year, Dennis Britton noticed something strange about Denver’s daily newspapers. A former editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, soon to become the Denver Post’s editor-in-chief, Britton knew all about the inexorable dynamics of newspaper wars; in the white-heat of competition, dailies often…

Paul Orosz was willing to pay for his crime. Like thousands of others who commute through Commerce City, the 33-year-old software engineer had been caught speeding by the city’s photo-radar system. “I saw a flash,” says Orosz, “and thought to myself, ‘What the hell?’ Then two weeks later I got…

Less than a year after losing the battle over Amendment 2 in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Colorado Attorney General’s office is on the cutting edge of another 1990s-style controversy, although this one has nothing to do with lawsuits. Not yet, anyway. A male lawyer with more than a decade’s…