News

All Fired Up The last issue was a real keeper! Marty Jones’s story on the Denver Turnverein (“Harmony, German Style”) was an important counterpoint to the hate crimes in our city, and Eric Dexheimer’s story on Dottie Grisby, “Dry Society,” was the sort of story about the forgotten “little people”…

At precisely 10:15 p.m., 75 fashionably late minutes from the start of her annual Halloween party, Dottie Grisby parts the orange and black crepe-paper streamers and glides into her dream. Dottie’s Social Club is starting to hop. Dottie is gotten up as a French maid: short black dress, white apron,…

One day this past August, fourteen-year-old Justin Gilman of Colorado Springs asked his friends to set him on fire. So the teenagers got some gasoline from the local 7-Eleven and soaked Gilman’s blue jeans with it. Gilman lay down on the grass in the backyard of a friend’s home, and…

Hard of hearing: The voters have spoken, but apparently RTD didn’t listen–because on Thursday, attorney Walter Gerash is scheduled to be in U.S. District Judge John Kane’s courtroom, pleading the RTD board’s already lost cause. In September Kane had issued a preliminary injunction against RTD’s hastily adopted limitations on donations…

All winds have swept through a state-sponsored and federally funded series of forums on global warming and its alleged effect on climate change. Complaints that the first two of six scheduled forums at various Colorado cities were either biased in favor of the manmade global-warming theory or sabotaged by industry…

There are a few things Danielle Marie Dixon doesn’t like about her east Denver apartment. There’s the toilet on the sagging floor that she worries is about to collapse into the apartment below. There’s the crumbling tilework in the shower, so powdery she has to rinse her hair three times…

For years, a half-dozen concrete bridges have spanned the streets of downtown Denver, the legacy of an ill-conceived 1960s urban-renewal project aimed at taking pedestrians off the sidewalk. Now the little-used “skybridges” are starting to come down, closing a chapter on one of downtown’s more bizarre redevelopment efforts. Two of…

John Hellner waited five years for his day in court. Last week it took less than two hours for a Fort Collins jury to decide that Hellner and eight other parents hadn’t defamed a local elementary-school counselor whom they’d accused of abusing their children. For Hellner, the verdict was grim…

Tot off the Presses Patricia Calhoun’s “Sitting in Judgment,” in the November 13 issue, was a phenomenal piece of work that said many things that needed to be said. We are indeed “sitting in judgment” of a case in Massachusetts, when similar situations in our own backyard are completely ignored!…

The best argument against the death penalty may be a death-penalty trial. Four weeks after opening arguments in the People v. Jon Morris, the prosecution is still trying to put out all its evidence against Morris, who is on trial for the brutal rape and murder of five-year-old Ashley Gray…

If you liked Envirotest, you’ll love Insure-Rite. Envirotest is the company that lobbied hard to persuade Colorado lawmakers in the early Nineties to change the state’s system of auto-emissions testing. The company then won a lucrative contract to set up testing stations, despite submitting the highest bid. Grousing about Envirotest’s…

Charles “Binx” Rugg looks out his living-room window in the town of Eldora and can see all the places that have shaped his life. Next door is the small, one-story wooden house where he was born 78 years ago. On the other side of the narrow valley are the stables…

The former Bonfils Theatre was once one of Denver’s cultural jewels, a community playhouse that brought thousands of people a year to East Colfax Avenue to watch everything from fairy tales to Shakespeare. For the past decade, however, the 1953 building, which was renamed the Lowenstein Theater in 1985, has…

No-tell hotel: Fred Kummer, owner of the Adam’s Mark, got slammed by a federal magistrate for discriminating against employees at his St. Louis hotel; knocked down the I.M. Pei-designed hyperbolic paraboloid on the 16th Street Mall; gave Denver those odd, alien ballet dancers as a consolation prize; and is in…

Local boxing aficionados are so desperate for a revived state boxing commission that one of them, Dr. Russell Simpson, even attempted to recruit his friend Liz Romer, the governor’s daughter, to deliver a message to the governor beseeching him to appoint a commissioner by executive order. But despite the unorthodox…

Info: Letters Life in the Fast Lane Wow! Steve Jackson’s “Live Fast, Die Young,” in the November 6 issue, was really powerful. It was a great true-crime story, but also a very telling indictment of a throwaway segment of our society. How could any mother abandon a thirteen-year-old child? And…

I was holding my sister’s one-month-old son in Framingham, Massachusetts, a mile away from the women’s prison, when a jury found its most famous resident, Louise Woodward, guilty of killing eight-month-old Matthew Eappen. Around Framingham–if not in England, the nanny’s native country–people were cheering. I could only hope that somewhere,…

Surprise! Colorado is a primo place to ski and snowboard. Oh, you knew that? Well, did you know there’s a secret stash on Aspen Mountain that only the locals have found? Did you know there’s a place near Vail that offers six tacos for $2 during happy hour? Or that…

The sun was just beginning to dip behind Pikes Peak when Detective Mark Finley turned off the highway between Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs and onto a narrow back road. Gravel crunched beneath the wheels of his car as he steered through the seedy collection of single-wides that made up…

The beginnings of WCCR/88.3 FM (“grassroots radio at the bottom of your FM dial”) probably can be traced back to Angel Babudro’s childhood fascination with radio. But being forcibly banned from KVNF, the public-radio station in the western Colorado town of Paonia, was a crucial factor, too. Still, that’s being…