Independence daze: When candidates for Pat Schroeder’s congressional seat gathered at an Independence Institute forum last Friday, only the remaining Democrats–Tim Sandos and big-bucks-raiser Diana DeGette–were in attendance. Although he hardly would have faced a hostile audience (institute head Tom Tancredo is a former Ronald Reagan appointee), Republican candidate Joe…
Horseplayers and fight guys are carried through life by the same sweet torrent of optimism. Damn the facts. Sheer belief will get you back to the cashier’s window. Force of will can win the title. In the meantime, keep talking. Talking keeps the demons of doubt at bay. At the…
The Light Stuff Nothing quite so disappointing as the sight of a favorite doing something really dumb. Kenny Be’s pathetic stab at satire in your July 11 edition, “Let There Be Light,” is an unfortunate case in point. He was somehow suckered into believing that the Great Bicycle Incident on…
At midnight last Thursday, I was on the outside looking in, peering through the windows of the Palm, an establishment that now occupies the old home of Hooters just off the 16th Street Mall. For voyeurs, the scenery tops even that offered by the previous, tight-T-shirt-obsessed tenant: 200 cleaned-up (no…
In its advertising, US West boasts about how the phone company is making it easier for its customers to gather information. But there are some things US West doesn’t want its customers to know–such as salary levels for its top executives. Westword believes US West’s ratepayers in Colorado have a…
Solomon Trujillo, president and chief executive officer of US West Communications Group, is known for blunt talk. Trujillo, who started with the phone company in 1974 in an entry-level position, worked his way to the top through a combination of long hours and fierce dedication to the company. Those qualities…
Six months ago, Parker’s quintessential local bank–the Community Bank of Parker–was quietly bought by a group of investors with ties to Colorado’s largest homebuilder. It’s one more indication that Parker is booming, and the state’s most prominent businessmen are taking advantage. In the past two years, three of Parker’s four…
Westside story: They might have learned everything they needed to know in kindergarten, but when alumni of the Cheltenham School kindergarten class of 1936 gathered this past weekend, they still had plenty to talk about. “We had a blast,” says Mike Licht, the event’s master of ceremonies, who set off…
While members of Congress and the media investigate just how hundreds of FBI files on individuals not currently working at the White House ended up in White House security aide Craig Livingstone’s office, more than a handful of Colorado politicos are assessing their own history with the corpulent advance man…
In 1993, Lisa Lane, an assistant district attorney in Grand County, prosecuted a drunk-driving case against an occasional local named Jack Irving Ainsworth. Late on July 4, 1992, Ainsworth had been riding his motorcycle in an isolated location outside of Grand Lake; on the back sat a young woman he’d…
If the sign of a dysfunctional family is the inability to agree about anything, then I suppose that’s what we were. Every time we went out to a ballpark. Of course, no one in a ballpark ever used the word “dysfunctional.” But there were a lot of other, more colorful…
Sermon on the Mount Michelle Dally Johnston’s July 4 piece on the Shattuck contamination, “Down in the Dump,” was an excellent piece of work. There was one point that I was disappointed she did not address, however. Although the radium industry was once a thriving business, five decades later everyone…
There’s an ominous shadow hanging over Washington, D.C., and it’s no alien spaceship. The threat to the political status quo springs from a spot much more down-to-earth: Colorado, where third-party challenges are taking off faster than the grosses of this summer’s cinematic blockbuster. On Tuesday, former Governor Richard Lamm ended…
The split-level ranch house on the western outskirts of Fort Collins doesn’t look like a bunker, but it houses Colorado’s oldest war room in the battle against the New World Order. The HQ is the basement office of Colonel Archibald E. Roberts, a former Army information officer who for decades…
In 1988 Irma Zimmerman stood on the back porch of her lime-green house in Overland Park and faced a tornado. “We watched it come right up Asbury,” she says, shaking her head of tangled gray hair. “Stood there like idiots and just watched it come. Hurling doors and sheds and…
Aurora officials believe they’ve found an ideal mountain hiding place for part of the city’s future water supply, but residents of rural Park County are promising a fight before they let the fast-growing suburb tap into the huge aquifer that underlies the county. The controversy centers on a plan by…
Pei to play: Now that the pesky, if historic, I.M. Pei-inspired hyperbolic paraboloid is out of the way and the Denver Urban Renewal Authority subsidy safely pocketed, phase two of the $130 million renovation of Fred Kummer’s Adam’s Mark Hotel is going full-bore. And speaking of bore, Kummer’s company has…
In one of the stranger tests of the University of Colorado’s new get-tough policy on sexual harassment, an internal committee has found “no concrete evidence” to support harassment charges against a prominent Boulder professor–even though the committee’s report raises uneasy questions about the professor’s admitted “romantic” relationships with female students…
Sexual assault?” Dave Lawrence, who manages the Park Centre Lounge, a Westminster karaoke bar, is perplexed. “I guess you could call it that. If you want to get technical…I mean, most guys in a bar would kind of like that sort of thing.” Nonetheless, that’s the charge listed on a…
When they asked Ozzie Smith last week about the best plays of his career, it was a little like having Picasso pick out a couple of favorite pictures. Where do you start? Still, the slickest-fielding shortstop in the history of the game obliged his questioners. * On April 20, 1978,…
Off Track Stuart Steers’s June 20 article on the proposed Southern Pacific/Union Pacific merger, “Whistle Stopped,” is an interesting mix of old-time nostalgia and economic fantasia. What Mr. Steers completely ignores is that the Southern Pacific is the walking wounded of American railroads that has recently had its crutches removed…
I am sitting in a local bar, and I am thinking that I would like to punch Bruce Willis in the nose. The bar is a block from where the world’s billionth Planet Hollywood will make its debut next year. The 33rd opened in Seattle this past weekend, and according…
