To live in Denver in the spring is to enjoy the songs of birds, the warmth of sunshine, the scent of blossoming flowers. Other pleasures include the sight of abandoned cars at the curb and the stench of slow-dripping oil and gasoline puddling beneath metallic heaps of junk. Each day,…
The kill is the easiest part of the job. People kill one another every day. It takes no great effort to pull a trigger or plunge a knife. It is being able to do so in a manner that will not link yourself or your employer to the crime that…
The Hating Game In the May 6 issue, I read first in Patricia Calhoun’s “The Ten Commandments,” then in Kenny Be’s Worst-Case Scenario, of Vikki Buckley attributing the Columbine shootings to “new-age hate crimes.” What I want is for someone to corner this feeder at the public trough and ask…
In spring, John Starnes, better known as the Garden Doctor, is exhilarated whenever he isn’t exhausted. Daily, the UPS man brings him roses from all over the country. Weekly, he visits a long list of landscaping clients. Nightly, he sits at his computer, drawing up plans for his yearly tour…
Dessert at the opening gala of Colorado’s Ocean Journey is sure to be tasty, and a clever trick for the eye: a milk chocolate seashell filled with vanilla-bean mousse, then topped with an edible pearl. The delight of illusion, after all, is the secret to a splendid soiree–and key to…
Judy and Bill Fleming had a dream. And it was full of slippery, slimy, buggy-eyed fish. Michael Weissmann also had a dream. And it was full of creepy, crawly, hairy insects. Together these visions built two of the Denver area’s most talked-about tourist destinations. While the Flemings founded Colorado’s Ocean…
In the end, it wasn’t so easy to kill Robert Lee Riggan Jr. after all. The 39-year-old drifter from Iowa was convicted last fall of the May 1997 murder of 21-year-old prostitute Anita Paley, the mother of two little girls. Riggan had taken Paley up to the mountains outside of…
Editor’s note: We requested an official copy of Mr. Heston’s remarks to the National Rifle Association convention in Denver last week, held under massive protest in the wake of the fatal shooting of a dozen students and one teacher at Columbine High School. Along with the speech, an anonymous source…
They’re usually called fender benders: Cars and trucks traveling at low speeds hit each other, causing dings and dents. The worst of the physical injuries are often headaches from filling out insurance claim forms. In fact, low-speed accidents do no more damage than sneezing, coughing, riding a roller coaster or…
Hell to pay: Organizers of the April 25 Columbine memorial service continue to express their dismay over complaints by liberal Christians, blacks and Jews that the service was too white and too evangelical. “There were fourteen different speakers and singers, we had the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Denver, two evangelical…
After three years on the waiting list, Walter Andre finally got a kidney transplant at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center on January 27. He came out of surgery quite well and was soon able to call his out-of-town friends and family to tell them he expected to be discharged in about…
When it was over, the big, blue-eyed man wearing the beautifully tailored charcoal suit and the pale-gold necktie left a box of Kleenex untouched on the podium and followed his blocker, wife Janet, through one last Sunday-afternoon sea of photographers. They vanished through a side door of a hotel ballroom…
What’s the Agenda? From Patricia Calhoun’s “Opportunism Knocks,” in the April 29 issue: “On Sunday, Colorado Right to Life gave birth to this announcement: ‘Today our organization reminds Governor Bill Owens and all Colorado elected officials that 32 years ago–April 25, 1967–this state signed into law the first in the…
On the day that fifteen people died at Columbine High School, Rebecca Oakes tried to block out the barrage of news reports, the sirens and the shocked expressions on the faces of her colleagues. She closed her office door, shuffled papers on her desk and attempted to concentrate. She couldn’t…
1. Thou shalt be careful in the big city. Early Saturday morning, the mall shuttle fills quickly as it passes through LoDo and heads toward Broadway. There are grandmotherly women who’ve bused down from Boulder, bleary-eyed hipsters clutching their Starbucks cups and anti-gun leaflets, families with babies in backpacks. “Let’s…
This December will mark seventy years since the Royal Gorge Bridge was strung 1,053 feet above the Arkansas River where it cuts through a sheer canyon a dozen miles outside of Canon City. The project was the brainchild of Lon Piper, a San Antonio toll-bridge promoter who conceived the undertaking…
Northwest of downtown Denver, a neighborhood peers out over the city’s skyscrapers and railyards. In the late 1800s, Highlands was a pristine city whose residents were proud of their elevated metropolis, separated from Denver by a valley through which a highway now runs. The Highlanders pitied the poor souls below…
Parents in northwest Denver say the Denver Public School District is neglecting its Hispanic students. But some people are looking out for them. Four years ago, members of the congregation at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on West 36th Avenue started discussing how they could address some of their community’s…
Gardeners tend to be an unobtrusive breed, most often found grubbing in soil and mumbling in Latin while presenting their rumps to a peaceful blue sky. But threaten a garden and you find in its creator an opponent as implacable, as blindly persistent, as any plant pushing its roots through…
For fifteen years, Dana Line has served Denver as a sheriff’s deputy at the county jail. Dealing with inmates can be risky, but Line always assumed that if he were hurt on the job, he would be taken care of. Today he no longer believes that. In 1992 Line was…
Calling All (Inexpensive) Social Workers Parents, teachers and authorities are struggling to understand how two kids at Columbine High School could have murdered twelve of their classmates and a teacher without anyone paying attention to the warning signs. At the same time, social workers, nurses and psychologists in the Denver…
Since Westword went to press last Tuesday just as news of the shootings at Columbine High School was beginning to leak out, it wouldn’t be fair to criticize how the rest of the media handled the coverage. But then, as last week’s tragedy so amply illustrated, life isn’t fair. The…
