Westword staff writer Alan Prendergast won six individual awards in the Society of Professional Journalists’ “Best of Colorado” awards banquet last week. Prendergast received more writing awards than any other journalist in the contest’s top division, which pits Colorado’s wire services and newspapers with circulations of more than 100,000–the Associated…
In those places that tourists come from–Dubuque, Topeka, Lincoln, Rapid City–they’re already gassing up the Winnebagos and planning that Memorial Day weekend trip to the Colorado high country. Some will consult road maps and dining guides, but for a certain breed of summer visitor, there’s no better research source than…
Is Denver ready for an 86-story high-rise? A downtown Denver property owner is working on plans for the highest skyscraper ever built in the city, a behemoth that would tower almost thirty stories over the city’s existing skyline. While memories of half-empty office towers in the 1980s make many skeptical…
In honor of Take-Your-Daughter-to-Work Day, I am taking my daughters to fish. I am not much of a worker and even less of a fisherman, but everyone knows that fishing is more fun than work. Also, it requires two tons of mojo to raise a girl. Girls are scary. A…
Denver likes to bury its mistakes. And it’s made plenty. Ninety years ago, radium was a miracle cure, the turn-of-the-century equivalent of Viagra–and Colorado was playing doctor to the world. Marie Curie herself came out West, prospecting for uranium; Denver was a major ore-processing center. So major, in fact, that…
Coming Into the Country While reading Harrison Fletcher’s wonderful account of Morey Davolt’s life (“Country Cooking,” May 14), I found myself so nostalgic over his memories, I almost felt like I’d lived in his era along with him. Or maybe just wish I had? Great writing! Thanks. Bill Rupy Loveland…
It was an exquisitely uncomfortable moment, and one that would mark a turning point. Dr. Ted Cooper, a Denver obstetrician, was preparing to be installed that day as chief of the medical staff at Denver’s Rose Medical Center. Cooper, who had practiced at Rose nearly twenty years, was well-liked and…
Mike Quintana is still making headlines for spraying three graffiti taggers in the face last fall. Now he’s thinking about running for Denver City Council and has even hired a campaign manager. There’s just one problem: Quintana lives in Arvada. And his campaign manager lives in Pueblo. “I’m doing this…
When tobacco seller Douglas Primavera was charged two months ago with peddling drug paraphernalia out of his small shop in downtown Alamosa, more than a few eyebrows were raised. After all, if anyone should have been familiar with the state law covering the sale of bongs, it would be Primavera–who…
The Denver Broncos managed to score big in the legislature this year, winning the okay to conduct a November begathon for $266 million in taxpayer funding (plus $75 million for the inevitable cost overruns) for Pat Bowlen’s new pigskin theme park. While the Great Patsby passed around the champagne to…
1. INSPIRATION You could say Morey Davolt owes his big idea to a man who used goat glands to make guys horny. The man was Doc John Brinkley, and he thought impotent men could rise to the occasion with transplanted goat testicles. It worked well–for Doc Brinkley, anyway–and the Kansas…
Business as Usual Regarding Stuart Steers’s “Incident on 17th Street,” in the April 30 issue: I am absolutely amazed at the whining of the ex-Hanifen Imhoff corporate executives. These people were all on the topmost bloodthirsty rungs of an American business. They prate about loyalty and ethics. Didn’t their years…
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. At Maria’s Bakery, on the corner of 37th Avenue and Shoshone Street, the best seat in the house is actually in the garden out front. From there you can hear the children playing outside the elementary school down the street and watch as…
Anne Sulton’s ride looks like a gangsta Rolls-Royce: gleaming silver with flared fenders, spoked wheels and a long, snout-like hood. The car is a “Phantom,” a radically modified Pontiac Firebird, and Sulton, the controversial civil-rights attorney who defended cop killer Gil Webb II last summer, doesn’t look like she should…
If you’ve rigged the wires on your cable box so you can get HBO for free or bought a “descrambled” black box so you won’t have to pay for cable at all, a new law says you could be fined $4,000. The legislation, signed last month by Governor Roy Romer,…
Blues gaveler: Denver juvenile court judge David E. Ramirez didn’t go quietly when he announced his retirement last week. In fact, Ramirez, long controversial for his alleged coddling of hardcore juvenile offenders, sent out a press release trumpeting the earthshaking fact that he would be stepping down on September 1…
Jose Luis Olivas and Fernando Torres Hernandez were hanging out in the alley off 27th and Larimer at about noon on April 10, sharing a quart of beer, when a white pickup truck pulled up to them. The man inside the truck gestured at them with his hands, but his…
Is the Bolder Boulder a Racist Race? Everyone but Patsy Ramsey and a couple of blissed-out hippie leftovers up Sunshine Canyon seems to have an opinion on that. As the famous distance race draws near (May 25), organizers feeling pressure from the glare of a New York Times article and…
Jim and Amy’s most ambitious number may never be seen. Three years of practice, and it keeps getting tangled in twists of fate. Last year, just before the State Artistic Skate Meet in Greeley, Jim and Amy were rear-ended; the accident landed them in therapy for months. The year before…
It’s the Bomb! Patricia Calhoun’s “Civics Lessons,” in the April 30 issue, made me nostalgic and sad. Twenty years ago people in Boulder cared about something other than themselves and wearing the right clothes and driving the right cars. Twenty years ago we worried about the world and the global…
The ballroom of the Westin Tabor Center was filled with hundreds of couples one Saturday night this past March. Supporters of the Colorado Easter Seal Society had gathered to fete the winners of the society’s most prestigious honor, the Edgar F. “Daddy” Allen Award, given annually to the group’s biggest…
Lobbyist William A. “Art” Roberts and his wife, Roselee, also a lobbyist, own a rather special blue-and-white nineteenth-century Chinese porcelain bowl, once the property of Jacqueline Onassis. They bid $4,000 for it two years ago at the Sotheby’s auction of Jackie O’s personal possessions, where Art took Roselee to celebrate…
