Runaway train: If the primary election seemed rough, fasten your seatbelts–we’re in for a bumpy ride through November 5. But the toughest fight promises to be not the Senate race (pitting the Pillsbury Doughboy against the Democratic doughboy), not the First Congressional race (Pat Schroeder Jr. against a guy named…
The attorney for the plaintiff wore a khaki jumpsuit and leg irons. Most of the witnesses were merely disembodied voices in the air. The audience, made up chiefly of agents from the U.S. Marshal’s office, looked bored. But David Merritt pressed on anyway, trying to show that the nation’s most…
When Andre Dawson announced his retirement last week, a couple of astonished doctors pointed out that the great slugger had undergone twelve knee surgeries in his 21-year career–seven on the right knee, five on the left. Both ravaged knees, the Hawk allowed, are now creaking along “bone on bone.” That’s…
T and Sympathy Regarding the August 8 Off Limits item about Peter Boyles, Wilma Webb and Mr. T: Throughout the radio interview on KTLK-AM, Peter Boyles addressed Wilma Webb respectfully as “Mrs. Webb,” and Wilma Webb addressed Boyles condescendingly as “Peter.” To get respect, you usually have to give it…
It was a hot July morning, and the Reverend Robert Woolfolk mopped at the sweat that beaded on his dark brown face with a white handkerchief. With his other hand, he grasped the thick rope that hung from the ceiling just inside the oak doors of the church and pulled…
So far, the only organized opposition to the Public Service Company merger is coming from environmentalists, who fear that one consequence of tying Colorado’s power supply to Texas could be more air pollution in Denver. To link the two utilities, a $150 million power line will have to be built…
Stockholders are not usually a hostile crowd, especially when a company is posting record profits. At annual meetings, where the audience typically is made up of men in Brooks Brothers suits and women in pumps and pearls, the emphasis is on making money, not storming the barricades. Conservative investors complain…
It is undisputed that Karen Ann Shain’s boss used to measure her skirt lengths against those of other women in the office. He admits that he called long skirts “Karen length” skirts and used to kid her for not showing any “skin” on either her legs or her neckline. There…
Printer, investor and socialite Barry Hirschfeld has a reputation as someone who knows a good deal when he sees one. But he appears to have stumbled badly in his attempt to run in the foot-race business. Not only did Hirschfeld lose his initial investment in the Denver International Marathon, but…
It’s my party…: After Sunday’s final Reform Party vote, former governor Richard Lamm may have second thoughts about a third party. But the country’s first third party, the Libertarian Party, is still going strong, with 125,000 registered voters. And on August 15 the party marks the 25th anniversary of its…
The number of people who could not imagine missing the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of Tosh’s Hacienda restaurant is about 500. The menu is ready. The mariachis are on deck. Where everyone will park, though, is a bit of a mystery. The valet parking guys, who are somewhat out of their element…
Now that Amy Van Dyken’s gold-medal perkiness is finally subsiding and your Colorado Rockies are on a road trip to respect, let’s turn our attention for a moment to the game with the big helmets. The National Football League pre-season is two weeks old, and on September 1–the same date…
T’ed Off This letter is to express my outrage at the poor taste that Westword used in placing a picture of our First Lady, Wilma Webb, over the picture of Mr. T in the August 8 Off Limits. Peter Boyles’s comments on KTLK were crude and disrespectful; the characterizations, even…
The Insiders The Colorado Department of Corrections has spent millions of dollars in recent years to accommodate its new crop of “special needs” inmates–youthful offenders charged as adults but deemed too green to do hard time; elderly prisoners grown fragile in the joint; and the chronically mentally ill, who now…
Jim Lucero opens the small white booklet to a crude map with black boxes representing buildings, most of which no longer stand. Facing north, he points first to a gray stone structure across Iliff Avenue and then to its corresponding mark on the map. “That was the Dora Reynolds school,”…
The following account of a day in the life of a Colorado inmate housed at the Karnes County Correctional Center in Texas was written by Garry Izor, who is serving a life sentence for murder. “A day in the life of a pod begins at 6 a.m., when the overhead…
Doug Gertner became a convert to the secular religion that bloomed around the Grateful Dead when he first saw the band in concert during the early Seventies. Yet as transfixed as he was by the music, he was equally taken by the sight of certain audience members. “I was wandering…
The Colorado governor’s mansion is the closest thing to a palace the Centennial State has, and a silk-stocking state commission aims to keep it that way. Members of the Executive Residence Advisory Commission meet periodically to pass judgment on draperies and fuss over frayed carpets. For example, the commissioners recently…
I pity the fool: On August 1 radio newscasters were predicting a blistering weekend. But the temperature shot up sooner than expected, when Peter Boyles, host of the early blabathon on KTLK-AM, got an unexpected call that morning from First Lady Wilma Webb, who said she’d phoned not because she…
When a Colorado prison inmate brought suit against the Department of Corrections four years ago alleging discrimination against disabled inmates and claiming that the prisons fail to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act, lawyers with the Colorado Attorney General’s office denounced the charges as erroneous and “premature.” They were…
While assorted waterbugs from Romania and Belarus and the suburbs of Cleveland bounded all over the mat and flung their tiny bodies back and forth between the uneven parallel bars, we had the whole thing explained to us on the boob tube by…John Tesh. Now it’s a good bet that…
Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years, give or take an eon. The saga of Colorado special grand jury 89-2 could stretch almost as long. On August 1, 1989, Judge Sherman Finesilver impaneled the state’s first-ever special grand jury, charged with evaluating the evidence seized when the FBI raided the…
