Fortunately for Coloradans, the biggest local story on September 11 and the days immediately thereafter wasn’t collapsing buildings or appalling casualty totals. Rather, it was the closure and subsequent reopening of Denver International Airport — a logistical nightmare that required immediate action here, as well as coordination with facilities across…
On a sunny day in 1974, I stood in the awestruck company of thousands of my fellow native New Yorkers as a tightrope walker named Philippe Petit crossed the dizzying void between the tops of the two towers of the World Trade Center. A quarter mile above our craned necks…
Firing Blanks A shot in the dark: What were you people thinking? Eric Dexheimer’s “Let Freedom and Gunshots Ring,” in the September 20 issue, gave way too much space to a bunch of blowhards shooting off not just their big guns, but their big mouths. What brave patriots! Not one…
After nearly two dozen surgeries in twenty years, Nyla Bailey thought she knew what doctors could do about her excruciating pain, which wasn’t much. They could make her feel worse, certainly. They could anger and humiliate her, labeling her a hysterical female — or, as one skeptical internist put it,…
When Ben Covalt moved into his small home in northwest Denver in 1996, he looked forward to renovating the house and turning the large yard into an oasis, a quiet retreat from the hassles of city life. Instead, he spent the next four and a half years in an escalating…
Suddenly, it was Groundhog Day. Sunday evening, ABC ran the very same Who Wants to Be a Millionaire that it had shown last Monday night, just twelve hours before the world exploded. Intended as a kickoff to Monday Night Football, whose first match of the season featured the Broncos and…
September 16, 2001, Indian Hills Here, we are far from trouble. No one would have said so during the wildfires last summer, but that was before what happened last week in the East. Now we know very well how safe we are. All of the rural foothills fire departments have…
On September 13, two major stories took place in Denver: Governor Bill Owens announced the grades earned by public schools across the state as part of the sweeping, much-discussed educational reform package put in place by the Colorado legislature, and Assistant Denver Fire Chief Charles Drennan Jr. was shot to…
In the days following the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., the majority of the sporting world, a place defined by its motion, stood still. Major League Baseball suspended play for nearly a full week — 91 games in all. “Who cares about baseball right now?” Rockies…
The Morality of the Story Past imperfect: I picked up the September 13 Westword to get some relief from the awful news on television and found myself engrossed by Jonathan Shikes’s “Forward Into the Past.” What an important moral that story on Camp Amache holds for all of us! It…
John Hopper got a job teaching history at Granada High on the day before school started eleven years ago. His predecessor had quit unexpectedly, leaving behind her students, her classroom and a single piece of yellow paper taped to the desk outlining her courses: world history, government, geography, U.S. history…
It’s 11 a.m., and two of the girls living in the treatment center in north Boulder are sleeping. The other four are still in their pajamas, lounging on couches in the living room and laughing hysterically as they recite lines from Sugar and Spice, the movie they saw last night…
After the Civil War, the legendary Colonel Little settled in Douglas County, seeking to build a new utopia. By the time he was planted in his tiny grave (not far from a former onion patch), “Littletown” had grown to 42 buildings and over 1,200 residents. To this day, no one…
I stare. Outside the window above my computer screen, rose hips on thorny stems are barely moving, making tiny anticipatory nods to a soft morning breeze. My wife calls down for me to come right away, something terrible at the edge of her voice. On the way up the stairs,…
Rules rule in Denver Public Schools, but there’s a difference between the golden ones and those that are tarnished with age. And as part of his effort to revamp DPS, new superintendent Jerry Wartgow last month created the Dumb Rules Committee, with the goal of getting to the bottom of…
Although I am a professional consumer of media (meaning that I get paid to monitor the press in all of its many facets), I am not all that different from the amateur kind — particularly at times when a single story dominates the national consciousness. As such, I imagine that…
You could say Jake Shannon’s big break — his biggest so far, anyway — came when he got the call from the people in California who told him the gig was his if he wanted it, and could he fly out right away? Jake hemmed and hawed. His work troubleshooting…
We’ve Got You Covered A true gift: What a gutsy call to make Harrison Fletcher’s “Touched by an Angel” your cover story for the September 6 issue. Few people know anything about gifted kids or care, something you no doubt know, yet there are Linda Silverman and the remarkable Justin…
Linda Silverman began with the vocabulary, working from the high end of the IQ test, using words so obscure that even she, with a Ph.D., would have trouble with them. And yet the six-year-old boy sitting across from her defined most of them correctly. “What do you do?” Silverman joked…
He’d dressed for the surgery in a dark-blue bow tie, light gray blazer and white-striped shirt, hair perfectly combed, stethoscope dangling from his neck. When the video crew signaled, Akrit Pran Jaswal — sitting behind a desk cluttered with anatomy textbooks, parents hovering nearby — gazed into the camera and…
Just south of Lincoln Avenue on I-25, the cityscape ends, and the old Colorado — the one that preceded the shopping malls, office parks and sea of suburban roofs — comes back into view. Prairie grasses, sage and yucca fill the land, which rises up into the striking bluffs that…
Are coin collectors being buffaloed by Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, or will a slightly altered reissue of the popular American Buffalo Silver Dollar be money in the political bank for Colorado’s senior senator? Earlier this year, the U.S. Mint’s initial offering of 500,000 commemorative silver dollars featuring James Earl Fraser’s…
