News

It took years for Mary, a native of Peru, to escape the brutality and fear that her life in Denver had become. She finally worked up the nerve two years ago, when she took her five-year-old daughter and slipped away from the house where her American husband had virtually imprisoned…

Clayton Nelson very much enjoyed Unintended Consequences, a book by St. Louis stockbroker John Ross. Most of it, anyway. “It’s a hell of a good book,” says Nelson, a Gunnison gunmaker. “To a degree. It’s very anti-government and pro-gun. The hero ends up killing, by my count, 27 Bureau of…

Denver law enforcement authorities have long feared that the Oklahoma City bombing trial might attract riffraff, troublemakers whose presence in town would lead to friction or even violence. And the cops were right. So far, there’s been at least one adolescent shovefest, a fight over money and a threat of…

Run for your life! Coming right up on ABC this Sunday: Dying to Be Perfect, the story of marathon runner Ellen Hart Pena’s ten-year battle with bulimia, starring Wings’ Crystal Bernard as the woman who brought a touch of splash to the office of Denver First Lady long before Wilma…

Frank Rich took his first drink when he was ten years old. “My dad came home from work with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s,” Rich recalls. “He put on a Hank Williams record, poured my older brother and I a drink, and I thought to myself, ‘Today I’m a man.’…

The Real Thing Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “Real Life. Real News. Real Bad,” in the November 14 issue: Thank you, Patricia Calhoun! While zapping through the dial, I caught the “Real News” and Ms. Pujo’s Channel 7 debut. My reaction was so strongly negative that I thought, in fairness, I ought…

Tom Beck began hunting forty years ago, shooting squirrels outside his tiny hometown of High Springs, in north Florida, when he was six years old. As he grew, so did his enthusiasm for hunting. This year he bought five separate bow-hunting licenses in three states, and last month he killed…

Dr. Paul Hamilton always chose his own path. Sometimes he created one out of thin air. Or sand. His son Skip recalls one such incident more than forty years ago in Egypt. Taking his family on an adventure, the Denver physician drove a station wagon into a stretch of desert…

Contempt of her court: When Denver voters ousted Judge Lynne Hufnagel last week, they created the first vacancy on Denver District Court’s general bench in six years–which means that lawyers who think they might look good in black are polishing up their resumes. But it also means the people charged…

Denver’s Journal Graphics did a killer business last year thanks to the world’s fascination with the O.J. Simpson murder trial. But it took just one computer glitch this past summer for the local television transcription firm to lose two-thirds of its business and be forced to lay off thirty employees…

Politicians’ claims to the contrary, Colorado’s business climate isn’t all blue skies and sunshine. Just ask the folks at Juniper Valley Products, an umbrella group of production and manufacturing companies whose sprightly name dresses up the fact that its employees are prison inmates. The bottom line is that state prison…

African immigrant Tseghe Foote came to the United States and opened a small business, only to discover it’s a jungle out there. In a federal civil-rights lawsuit filed last month in U.S. District Court, the native Ethiopian accuses Denver’s Tabor Center shopping mall of trying to evict her because of…

Paul Russo is feeling like his old self again. Sure, it took a year’s worth of pulling, yanking, stretching, a few rolls of surgical tape and the help of assorted homemade contraptions, but he finally did it. The once-circumcised Russo has regrown his foreskin. Don’t believe it? Just look at…

Bench Marks My thanks and congratulations to Westword. Alan Prendergast’s article on Judge Lynne Hufnagel (“Motion to Dismiss,” October 24) may have made the difference in this election. The judge got the boot, and justice is the winner. Ralph Smythe Denver The voters last Tuesday sent a clear message to…

Get real: If Channel 7 had given it some thought–a commodity as rare as a newscast without a promotional puff piece–the station wouldn’t have mentioned that “pitbull” tag so proudly worn by its new mascot, Natalie Pujo. After all, the last time a local television reporter tangled with pitbulls, she…

Forget which ski area has the lowest lift-ticket prices and what mountain has the most high-speed quads–you already know that (or the resorts themselves will tell you). The 1996-97 season has begun, and now that the skis are waxed and the snowboard has been tweaked, the most important info to…

It was the dog that let them know something was wrong. His neighbors knew Steven Wickliff would never allow his beloved golden retriever, Jake, to wander the streets. So when they noticed the animal had been running loose in their southeast Denver neighborhood, they called the police. When the cops…

Gramma Blake is not alive to see the drunken woman staggering up Gregory Street, her slot-machine earnings clinking in her fanny pack. Gramma Blake never did like this sort of thing. In the 1930s she would stomp down from her house on Blake Hill and into a Black Hawk bar…

US West likes to highlight the diversity of its huge fourteen-state territory with TV advertising that periodically features cowboys chatting on pay phones and pickup trucks rambling through the Sonoran desert. Now the phone company’s opponents have picked up on the Western theme: They’ve formed a regional posse to hunt…

It’s my party and I’ll lie if I want to: Now that the elections are over, you can once again answer the phone at dinnertime, secure in the knowledge that it’s probably some annoying in-law rather than a candidate’s computerized whine. You can safely turn on the television without fear…