part 1 of 2 Barbara Huttner pulls a thick wedding album from a shelf in her family room and flips through it, looking for a picture of her daughter. The volume contains dozens of photos that have been ripped into pieces and defaced with a black marking pen, the faces…
It has been four and a half years since Colorado’s state health department began a study of the health risks posed to Denver area residents over the past four decades by the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons factory. In that time the study has consumed $8.7 million in federal funds and…
part 2 of 2 In the weeks following the original confrontation with her daughter in the therapist’s office, Barbara Huttner succumbed to serious depression. For the first month, she says, “I’d sit around the house in dirty sweats, watching TV and drinking coffee all day long.” Her face broke out…
Hi-ho, Silverado! If you’ve got a great big new airport and no business around it, who’re you gonna call? Paging Bill Pauls. Recent media accounts of Pauls’s planned purchase of a huge chunk of land around I-70 and Pena Boulevard hailed him as a captain of industry. Those stories neglected…
Don’t let this get around, but any foreign power still interested in invading the United States would do well to try it, say, this Saturday. Half the nation is already catatonic from watching the O.J. Simpson trial, and by Saturday night the other half will be in college-basketball-induced shell shock…
A few blocks west of I-25, along 46th Avenue in an industrial area of northwest Denver, four boys from the nearby Quigg Newton housing project finish stoning a discarded TV and scurry up a stack of pallets to point out the scene of some of their recent exploits. “We play…
The Art of the Deal Regarding Michael Paglia’s “A Site for Sore Eyes,” in the March 8 issue: Bravo to Westword–Michael Paglia unmuzzled! To those of us who stopped reading Westword three articles into your former art reviewer’s mush, it is the honest, stinging, insightful prose of Paglia that marks…
An Aurora waitress was on a Rocky Mountain high last September 5, five days before her marriage, until a minor fender-bender resulted in her losing her driver’s license for drunken driving–despite having had drunken-driving charges against her dismissed in court. Terry Faust’s situation isn’t quite the same as singer John…
Has Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Colorado secretly been nickeling-and-diming its clients so it can earn extra millions of dollars in profits? The company denies it, and in a lawsuit settlement reached last week it admitted no wrongdoing despite shelling out $3 million to consumers. Yet officials in states…
The brochure showed a lake surrounded by snow-capped peaks, with horses gamboling about in the meadow. It looked like the place Elena and Larry Crossgrove dreamed of: a little ranch of their own. They were sold before they ever stepped foot on the land. Four years later, the Crossgroves’ bank…
In 1972, when Nixon was in the White House and the notion of a black hole first was conceived, two promising young scientists met and became close friends. One was an academic who went into university research. The other worked for a huge drug company. Over the years, both rose…
Seeing redskins: Would Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell have switched parties if he’d realized it had been a while since Abe Lincoln was an active Republican? Maybe Campbell would have thought twice if he’d checked out the Jeffco GOP Men’s Club, the regular breakfast gathering in the largest and most powerful…
Behold the joys of spring. Tulips in bloom. A fragrance of love on the soft breeze of evening. Arrival of the, uh, new Michael Jordan-model baseball bat. And the spectacle of the grand old game’s canny geniuses trying to replace everything they can replace without closing the place. To begin…
When local journalist Stephana Major takes the stand to defend herself against charges that she diverted nearly $10,000 from bank accounts of the Colorado Association of Black Journalists, she might well claim her arrest was a case of mistaken identity. Major, after all, has told police that the blame for…
Stashed in the far reaches of Associates of Otolaryngology, a group of south Denver ear, nose and throat specialists, is a stack of autographed eight-by-ten glossies. At some point during every working day, nurse practitioner William “Buzz” Riefman will flip through them with a certain possessive glee. There’s Bonnie (Raitt)…
A crucial deal to redevelop now-abandoned Stapleton International Airport has crashed and burned. After months of delays, King Soopers has checked out of a much-touted city plan to make the grocery chain the anchor tenant at the old airport. Generating economic activity at the 4,700-acre Stapleton site is critical, because…
Lakota Indian who billed himself as a spiritual leader has been found guilty in Larimer County of raping a Boulder woman who helped him perform Native American ceremonies for a largely white clientele. The Colorado case comes at a time when Lakota tribal elders are expressing increased concern about the…
The Sound and the Furry Robin Chotzinoff is a national treasure–the Studs Terkel of our time. Her ability to burrow into a person’s life and extract its essential juices is uncanny. She helps make Westword by far the most intelligent newspaper in Denver. Please renew my lifetime subscription! Albert A…
Mable Mauser is sitting at her antique desk with the spindly legs when the phone rings. The man on the line is not one of the Denver society people with whom she’s worked for more than forty years. Nor is he a New York fur designer, or a rancher somewhere…
part 2 of 2 Something has gone awry– How many poets have hocked their books for junk money, waiting on the poem? Curse you Burroughs! for being an exception to rules every junkie/artist’d liketa break simultaneously reminding us just how ugly the whole life gig can go down… Don’t haveta…
part 1 of 2 The rain-slick road whispered beneath the car, the windshield wipers keeping the beat as he drove south into Chicago through the gray evening. Bill Harper felt drained. Empty as a chapel. There hadn’t been much rest in the four days since the telephone call. Chris is…
End of the line: Now that Brian Propp’s resigned–by fax from Kiev–as Regional Transportation District chairman, he would have you believe he was driven out of public service by the nasty ol’ press that portrayed him as an AWOL, radical anti-RTDer whose strings were being pulled by the Independence Institute’s…
