The last person to see Richard Rother alive was probably the young lover who stepped off the elevator around half-past midnight, heading for his girlfriend’s place. This was Monday, November 9, 1998, on the top floor of the Bank Lofts, an apartment complex in the old U.S. National Bank building…
The bill-signing at the Library of Congress was meant for the history books. To mark the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, President Bill Clinton flourished a pen used by Dwight Eisenhower to approve the legislation that created the interstate highway system in 1957. The signing marked the birth…
Visions of the Apocalypse: Last September, head Promise Keeper and former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney secured a commitment from 9,000 men gathered at the Colorado Springs World Arena–they would each bring ten other families to rallies at state capitols across the country on January 1, 2000. “May…
Just about the time that life is supposed to get easier, Jacqueline Hope’s got harder. After her husband died in December, and his pension and Social Security benefits were cut off, Hope was faced with the prospect of supporting herself and four grandchildren on just over $400 a month. Like…
Ellen Golombek has one of the most thankless jobs at the Colorado Legislature. The 44-year-old flight attendant serves as the main lobbyist for the Colorado AFL-CIO, the federation of state labor unions. With the election of Bill Owens as Colorado’s first Republican governor in 24 years, as well as Republican…
The courtroom was quiet. Vivien Spitz walked toward her station beneath the panel of four American judges and, as protocol required, sat directly across from the defendant’s box. Military policemen stood ready. The tension was palpable. Vivien placed her court reporter’s notebook on the full-length desk, clicked her headset to…
Colorado has always been quick to forgive–and forget. In the midst of the current economic boom, with houses selling within a day for more than their asking price and the daily papers offering cash signing bonuses for new delivery people, it’s hard to remember just what a bust Colorado was…
The first time he disappeared, John Zangrando was ten, maybe eleven years old. “I realize now, looking back, that I had experienced not being totally in my mind,” he says. “I disappeared. I disappeared, and there was just the saxophone. I remember feeling there was nothing else on earth. There…
He Lives! Although I’m pretty much a garden-variety atheist, count me squarely with the “shitcan it” camp on the Jesus of the Week question. At its best, this new feature is just another (yawn) style-without-substance trifle that only other hipper-than-thou types will “get.” At its worst (which it usually is),…
The turks of Wellington Webb’s generation were bound by common threads: Almost all were lawyers, they were close in age, and they worked together in the Sam Cary Bar Association and the Colorado Black Caucus. In the more free-spirited ’90s, things have changed. Here are six men poised to take…
Superfund was created to clean up toxic messes. Robert J. Martin’s job is to clean up Superfund’s messes. For now, though, he’s just a fly on the wall. In a meeting room in the Commerce City town hall, Martin stays to the back, leans, paces, whispers something into his investigator’s…
One night in August 1975, Colorado lieutenant governor George Brown stepped to the podium to give a speech at the National Lieutenant Governors Conference in Alabama. He almost ruined his own political career and certainly hastened its end. Brown, a Democrat, was one of the first two black lieutenant governors…
It was conceived in a warm, moist place. Since its birth, it has been festering in the dank recesses of the crawl space beneath Brenda Everett’s home. As it matured, it started invading the rest of her house, its rancid odor seeping through any space that allowed. The ranch-style house…
Hey hey, Cripple Creek Fuhrer: Dollar signs still outnumber swastikas in Colorado’s casino-glutted mountain gambling towns, but the folks at the Cripple Creek & Victor Eagle see a connection between the two. In an editorial titled “The Coming of the Fourth Reich?” slated to appear in the April issue of…
A sexy little secret was unraveling inside the cockpit of United Airlines flight 585 when it crashed eight years ago in Colorado Springs, killing all 25 passengers and crew members aboard. The cause of the March 1991 crash remained “undetermined” by the National Transportation Safety Board until last week, when…
By acclamation, April is the coolest month. Confident that last year’s ignominy will be transfigured into this year’s triumph, baseball players and full-grown fans enter this month with the wide-eyed wonder of children, fond dreams intact and energies aloft. In Pittsburgh’s April dawn, the Pirates win the pennant going away…
Jefferson County’s first synagogue ever is a ranch house located between a nursing home and a vet’s office in Evergreen. “It was built in 1962,” says congregation president David Froman, the man who galvanized members to raise enough money to buy the building. “At this point, we could turn it…
All Vets Are Off After reading Gayle Worland’s March 25 “Doctor’s Orders,” about a distinguished physician dying in his own hospital, I’ve decided to take the necessary steps. Instead of sending my ailing body for treatment to Presbyterian/St. Luke’s, I’d investigate the possibility of a good veterinary hospital close by,…
It’s a sunny morning, with no clouds overhead–a perfect day for shooting prairie dogs. Mark Mason is dressed in Carhart coveralls and a camouflage cap emblazoned with the logo of his group, the Varmint Militia. Patches decorate his khaki jacket: One has the NRA insignia and the other, which bears…
On a golden September afternoon, Karl Shipman climbed two rungs up a ladder to trim a tree near the 150-year-old Vermont farmhouse he owned with his wife, Claire. Shipman had grown up near this maple-lined patch of countryside; from the ladder, he could see the cemetery where years ago he’d…
An endangered species is one that is threatened with extinction; a threatened species is one that is likely to be endangered in the near future. When a species is protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, people are not allowed to hunt, import, export or sell the animals. People who…
As far as Tracey Bolton is concerned, the argument simply comes down to this: “I deserve the right not to have anyone looking at my cooch if I don’t want anyone looking at my cooch.” It’s an argument she believes a jury of her peers will agree with come July,…
