News

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…

Former Durango mayor Jeff Morrissey is accused of striking a low blow in the fight for a controversial southern Colorado water project that he supports. As a result, he faces two counts of disorderly conduct for allegedly making lewd comments to two women who oppose the Animas-La Plata water project…

Enough. By the time he was on the homestretch of his 1,200-mile tour of the Fourth Congressional District, independent candidate Wes McKinley had had enough of Marvin the mule. Especially since the Greeley Tribune had passed over both the name-party candidates–Democrat Guy Kelley and Republican victor Bob Schaefer–in order to…

The Die’s Typecast Steve Jackson’s Bobby Hornbuckle profile (“Last Call,” October 31) was probably the worst article ever written in the very galaxy. Why? Because Bobby’s always been a monster bluesman, the baddest for miles around, but you slimebags wait until he’s dying to give him some press! Why weren’t…

It’s been eighteen months since Bobby Hornbuckle sat in the same muted yellow light that now filters through the windows of Ziggie’s Saloon, talking about his battle with hepatitis and the lifestyle that had given him the disease. Heroin. Needles. Cocaine. Playing and living the blues. “If you want to…

In past years, the Regional Transportation District board elections have had all the political excitement and heart-pounding suspense of a Ross Perot infomercial. But this fall’s slate offers more drama than most congressional races; candidates have squared off over the future of Denver’s light-rail system, swapped insults over the accomplishments…