CAN WE TALK?

I’m a hugger,” confesses voice-over artist and teacher Dick Terry. He draws nearer, his smile exuding a blinding white glow. “Did you know that your voice changes when you smile?” he asks. With each elongated, oddly cadenced syllable, he broadens his already enormous grin until his face is all but…

OFF LIMITS

Up a creek with a paddling: It seems like just yesterday that loudmouth homophobe Bob Enyart was your average divorced, lonely talk-show host, packing a gun to work at his gig for KHNC, the “patriot” radio station way out there in tiny Johnstown. Now he’s married and a convicted spanker…

A SPORT PULLS UP LAME

At the five-eighths pole, Cigar and the big gray colt, Holy Bull, were dueling for the lead when rider Mike Smith felt a thump, like a car tire going flat. Jerry Bailey, on Cigar, said he heard a loud pop. “Oh no!” Smitty cried out–and just like that, Holy Bull…

THE MUD’S FLYIN’

Three months ago, when the Aronson family of Evergreen filed a lawsuit against their neighbors the Quigleys, charging them with anti-Semitism, it set off a barrage of criticism against the Quigleys and inspired a slew of soul-searching editorials about how Jew-haters still roam Colorado. Following a round of outraged newspaper…

MILKING THE RAMS

Hey, CSU! You’ve just hit the ranks of big-time football! You’ve got a conference championship, a national audience, TV contracts and a big bowl game! Whaddaya gonna do next? Forget Disneyland. It’s time to fire up the cash registers. The real test of whether you’ve found the college-football limelight is…

INDEPENDENCE’S DAY

The state chapter of the Democratic Leadership Council is about to announce that it’s forming its own public-policy think tank. Not surprisingly, politics already is intruding. Gleeful members of the right-thinking Independence Institute, a Golden-based tank that has enjoyed a recent flurry of publicity, are touting the Democrats’ action as…

BURIED ALIVE AT WINTER PARK

The City of Denver’s Winter Park ski area made a mostly smooth run through the state legislature last week, winning preliminary approval for a bill abolishing its rivals at the Moffat Tunnel Commission. But the Winter Park Recreational Association is headed for a few moguls–including a Denver city councilman who…

LETTERS

Fill in the Blanks After reading Patricia Calhoun’s “Blank You Very Much,” in the February 15 issue, I’m ready to apply to the city for a job. We paid $116 an hour for someone to copy documents and put a “confidential” stamp on them? Hell, I’d do the same thing…

CORPORATE SWINE

part 1 of 2 It took less than 24 hours for Galen Travis to go from feeling like a very lucky man to someone whose luck had run out. Last fall, Travis, a beefy-faced man who grows alfalfa and wheat outside of Burlington, thirty miles from the Kansas border in…

CORPORATE SWINE

part 2 of 2 Rol Hudler looks like an English professor and smells of pipe smoke. A thin, balding man with round glasses, he is the third-generation Hudler to be editor and publisher of the Burlington Record; his son, who has begun working for the paper, will be the fourth…

WOULD YOU BUY A USED RESTAURANT FROM THIS WOMAN?

part 2 of 2 Chiffon began studying classical piano at age twelve, “kind of old to do a career in music,” she says. But she loved it–and she excelled. “I did seven years’ worth of lessons in two years,” she says. “I can go to any city any time and…

CHIFFON PART ONE

part 1 of 2 The Maine lobsters were delicious. No, they were better than delicious. Fresh, sweet and juicy, at $17.95 per person for all Rick Gottdenker and Marilyn Richter could sink their teeth into, they were wonderfully, absurdly priced. But that’s what the ad had promised, and that’s what…

OFF LIMITS

Resign of the times: After an almost unbroken 35-year stretch at the Denver Post, columnist Tom Gavin’s recent “retirement” seemed a tad abrupt. And so it was. Having already been eased out of his desk (the prime spot was turned over to Pulitzer winner and special-projects czar Lou Kilzer), last…

GOING, GOING, GONE

Okay, let’s hear it for Fat Billy Maharg. Whaddya mean you never heard of him? Spring training opens today, doesn’t it? Just about the time many of you see this, the boys of summer will be cantering onto emerald outfields in camps from Kissimmee to Tucson, feeling their spikes grab…

LETTERS

An Open Book Read Calhoun’s latest, “Open Wide,” in the February 8 issue. All I can say is: Good work, Westword! Glad you have the guts to go after those city-attorney records. Too bad the dailies don’t. Harry Ellis Denver Bayou Leave I was very disheartened to read about Wellington…

WINNERS’ CIRCLE

Westword has been named a finalist in the Free Press Association’s prestigious Mencken Awards for investigative journalism. The newspaper was honored in the national contest for its 1994 series examining waste and mismanagement at Denver International Airport. Written by former staff writer David Chandler, the series exposed problems with the…

COPS AGAINST COPS

Arizona sheriff Richard Mack says he’s not interested in feuding with Denver police, but events are heading in that direction anyway, with a little help from a coterie of “patriots.” Mack, who heads up the thirteen-member Graham County Sheriff’s Department in eastern Arizona, says the issue concerns a miscarriage of…

SMOOTH OPERATOR

A woman enters the elevator at the extreme rear of the Jean Nicole department store on the 16th Street Mall. A choice is at hand. Either she travels up one floor, to 2, or down one, to B. In order to do so, she will have to select one of…

NOW DEPARTING…

9 a.m., Main Terminal Flight attendant Eric Blake looks at himself in the mirror of Stapleton Terminal Barber Shop and waits to be noticed. “Pretty handsome, right?” he says, without a trace of irony. “I’m growing out a flat-top, I’ve got the greatest job in the world, it’s my first…

THE HEP-C GENERATION

part 2 of 2 In 1990, Cathy, who had moved to Manitou Springs with her husband and nine-year-old daughter, went to donate blood, something she had done regularly in the past. A few days later, though, she received a call from a blood bank official who told her she couldn’t…

THE HEP-C GENERATION

part 1 of 2 The gravel crunches beneath the slow tread of Mike Lamb. Every so often, he pauses to gather his strength, then continues on up the trail that winds into the heart of the Garden of the Gods. One of his old drinking buddies is getting married at…

THIS IS ONLY A TEST

The envelope from the Bonfils Blood Center was addressed to her husband, but Valerie Sportsman opened it. The letter inside said that Dennis Sportsman had a disease, one that apparently could be contracted through drugs or sex. Valerie knew her husband didn’t use drugs, so that meant… Dennis Sportsman arrived…