When the Colorado Convention Center was dedicated on a spring day in 1990, the promises flew as fast and furious as a March snowstorm. Politicians who had spent years campaigning for the new center didn’t disguise their delight with the opening of the tenth largest convention center in the United…
The day was chilly, Teri Ralya recalls, when she returned to her Arvada apartment in March 1994 to air out the pesticides that had been sprayed there that morning. As she opened up all the windows in her third-story unit and switched on the stove’s exhaust fan, she hoped that…
The thigh’s the limit: Toe-sucking Dick Morris, the just-deposed Bill Clinton campaign strategist whose extracurricular efforts with a prostitute are splashed across the Star this week, once displayed his fancy footwork here in Denver. Back in 1983, when six candidates were challenging longtime mayor Bill McNichols (including then-state bureaucrat Wellington…
If you walk along the quaint quarter-mile stretch of Main Street in downtown Lyons, you can find a florist, a handful of antique dealers, Germanic knickknacks, a hearty omelet at the Gateway Cafe and the prototype for a radical new internal-combustion engine. Vern Newbold invented it; engineers from around the…
One Saturday last month, Sharon Storlie answered a knock at her apartment door. It was a young salesman, about thirteen years old, hawking the Boulder Daily Camera. No, thanks, Storlie told him. But that wasn’t enough. “Are you sure you don’t want to buy the paper?” he whined. Yes. “But…
One hundred bottles of wine on the wall, one hundred bottles of wine, you take them down, pass them around, and…you’ve got one hell of a headache if you’re Denver bankruptcy trustee David S. Cohen. The 100 bottles in question once resided in the wine cellar of the Stanley Hotel…
Beyond the Gainesville city limits, cocky Steve Spurrier may be the least popular head coach in big-time college football. But even those who’d like to see the man vanish in the Everglades may have sympathized last January when his high-octane Florida Gators were blown out of the Fiesta Bowl, 62-24…
The Colorado Rockies protect their turf–both on and off the field. When fans trying to avoid opening-day traffic bicycled to Coors Field, the team called the cops, and the bikes–which had been chained to the stadium built with taxpayer money–were impounded. When vendors outside Coors Field began cutting into the…
The Blackboard Bungle Kudos to Eric Dexheimer for his story on the plight of John Hart, recently canned part-time faculty teacher at Aurora Community College (“Teacher’s Fret,” August 29). The article revealed not just a personal story but the workings of a whole system run with an iron hand by…
Southwest Plaza has, like, fifteen entrances, and that’s not counting the downstairs at Sears where you go in next to the Die-Hard batteries and radial tires. As if. As if you would ever go to the mall to buy a tire. The fourteen-year-old girls who live in my neighborhood will…
John Hart is a fine writing teacher; his student evaluations are nearly unanimous on that. Last year his students nominated him as Teacher of the Year at the Community College of Aurora, where he also served as co-chair of the faculty senate. He has a graduate degree in fine arts,…
Down at the Regional Transportation District’s lofty LoDo headquarters, good help has never been hard to find. The pay at the troubled transit agency is competitive, the benefits are excellent–and in some cases, there’s even a bonus for quitting. Paying employees to leave isn’t yet common practice at RTD, but…
Social climbers: On Friday, gossipmonger Bill Husted told the Rocky Mountain News he was entertaining an offer from the Denver Post. Apparently the News wasn’t interested in countering: When Husted showed up for work Monday, he got the boot instead of a boutonniere and was escorted from the building with…
Former Fort Morgan pharmacist and self-confessed morphine addict Andrew Komesu was lucky to get out of Colorado with little more than a slap on the wrist. Now, however, he just might be forced to make a return visit–a possibility that both satisfies and frustrates drug-enforcement officers. In 1995, Komesu served…
At Ted Nugent’s Kamp for Kids in the Michigan woods last week, you had two choices. You could get a bow and arrow and hunt deer, elk, bear or what Nugent called “a great big Commie Russian hog.” You could gut it out, haul it home and help feed your…
As officials of the Winter Park ski area prepare to raise the curtain on what’s supposed to be a new era of accountability, questions continue to swirl about the finances of the city-owned resort. The Winter Park Recreational Association, the secretive private board that runs the lucrative resort for the…
Cradle to Grave Thank you for running Karen Bowers’s August 22 article “Older but Bitter,” about the shocking crimes of Wanda Crawford. My heart goes out to Troy, Selina and Stephanie De La Rosa. It is such a tragedy to have a healthy, happy baby hurt–especially by a caregiver. The…
On July 1, several children in the Baker-La Alma neighborhood were playing in back of the storefront offices of Weed and Seed, a federally funded anti-crime program that pumps money into several impoverished Denver neighborhoods. Suddenly, nine-year-old Ivan Jorgensen was hit under the eye by a rake that another boy…
Colorado Springs babysitter Wanda Crawford was 66 years old in 1994 when she was found guilty of shaking a nine-month-old infant so severely that the baby was left brain-damaged and permanently disabled. So abhorrent was the crime that, despite Crawford’s age and the fact that it was her first felony…
The rising popularity of a spot of natural beauty southwest of the city of Golden has prompted a plan that strikes some Jefferson County residents as decidedly unnatural: paving a short stretch of Colorow Road that leads to the Lookout Mountain Nature Center. County officials insist they are paving with…
Of all the indignities Elizabeth Matteson says she suffered at the hands of the government, the worst came after the Environmental Protection Agency had frightened away a tenant occupying the industrial building her husband built. It was after the agency had put up a chain-link fence around the property overnight…
The baggage system from hell at Denver International Airport still isn’t working properly–but the lawsuit it spawned has turned into lawyer heaven. The case, which fills a two-foot-thick file at Denver District Court, is generating sky-high fees for some of Denver’s most powerful law firms. And it promises the potential…
