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The breeze moves across the creek, turns the corner by the old porch swing, dallies with the ancient lilac bush and settles where the ladies sit in rockers with their quilting hoops: A mother, an aunt and three daughters, all taking refuge from the heat of the eastern plains. The…

The Turntable Restaurant is in a squat gray building that sits along the railroad tracks running through the small mountain town of Minturn. Just a stone’s throw from the Eagle River, the Turntable will never be mistaken for one of the many shops and cafes in Minturn that sell howling…

Tammy Montabon had high hopes of getting off welfare and finding a job to support herself and her son when she enrolled at Barnes Business College in January 1994. Those hopes faltered when the school declared bankruptcy in August 1995, five weeks into the eleven-week semester. But Montabon picked herself…

John Deans learned a hard lesson about office politics: Be careful what you say about your boss. Particularly if you’re a federal employee investigating possibly illegal fund diversions at Denver International Airport and your boss happens to be the godfather of DIA. Last year Deans, a criminal investigator with the…

A brush with fame: Sunday’s Rex Kildow & Co. auction offered a variety of pieces by local artists, none more famous at the moment than Peter Schmitz. But the painting by Schmitz, who is better known for his reported role in the death of Greg Lopez than he is for…

Looking up and down the seemingly peaceful 1200 block of Milwaukee Street, longtime resident Darby McNeal observes that there’s “inhibition all over the block.” That may be an understatement. After film crews from the miniseries version of The Shining descended on the block for a single day of shooting last…

Picture Perfect I don’t often see in your Letters column praise for the art that accompanies your lead stories, in this case Steve Jackson’s “Rough Waters,” in the June 13 issue. Tony Ortega’s cover really amounts to fine art; it’s much more than illustration. Steve Jackson’s article in itself is…

The wind people tug violently at the white flag above the corral’s only entrance–on the east side, as is proper. The flag proclaims that this is the Southern Ute Bear Dance in Ignacio, Colorado. The first few vendors have erected their tables outside the corral. Kiowa neck chokers. Navajo silver…

Park County, which borders sprawling Jefferson and Douglas counties, is where Colorado’s genuine horse country collides with the commuters of the Front Range who dream of pastures and idyllic canters through the mountain woods and meadows. So it’s no surprise that equine matters there can escalate into turf wars. That…

One day last week, LoDo artist Jorg “Peter” Schmitz accompanied his girlfriend, Ingrid Pfennig, on a shopping trip to the Cherry Creek Mall. “He was trying to get her to buy all these slutty things,” says an employee of one trendy clothing store. “When she hesitated, he told her, ‘You…

Lifestyles of the rich and infamous: The most telling statement yet to emerge from the calamitous Greg Lopez/Spicer Breeden/Peter Schmitz encounter came from one of Schmitz’s collectors last week. Learning that the alleged artist had just been indicted in Lopez’s death, he asked hopefully, “Do you think my piece is…

Jim Goble is obsessed with drive-ins, with what he calls “the atmosphere of the huge screen looming up out of the ground, looking at a wall of cars parked out there, even the gravel crunching under your feet.” So obsessed, in fact, that at the age of 47, he was…

Westword writers and editors took home prizes in a string of national, regional and local writing contests this spring. The International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors announced last week that Westword editor Patricia Calhoun has received the Golden Quill Award, presented annually to the country’s best opinion writer. Calhoun won…

Court and Spark Karen Bowers’s article on Peter Schmitz, “I Know Nothing,” in the May 30 edition, gave fascinating insight into a world almost too bizarre to be true. Apparently, truth is really stranger than fiction. So Schmitz’s grandfather, Otto KranzbYhler, who defended war criminals at Nuremberg, thought the trial…

You think the Avalanche won big Monday night? The real game begins when the triumphant hockey team’s owner, Ascent Entertainment Group, tries to have its cake and ice it, too, by freezing out any objections to its revamped plans for the Pepsi Center. But if this city’s track record is…

On the practice fields at Westminster City Park, as Denver’s newest pro sports team–the Colorado Rapids–runs through a few hours of drills quietly and with great discipline, one is struck by something amazing. These guys seem like ordinary people. There’s no doubt the players on the field are superb athletes,…

The spate of sexual-harassment controversies on the Boulder campus may have tarnished the University of Colorado’s reputation, but there’s still one area of endeavor in which CU leads the pack. When it comes to bureaucratic flimflam in response to requests for public information, nobody does it better. By state law,…

Jennifer Miller had put up with all she was going to take. An employee of the University of Colorado for almost thirty years, she’d risen from the ranks of the typing pool to a high-profile, $42,000-a-year job on the administrative support staff. But they couldn’t pay her enough to turn…

The Denver Metropolitan Major League Baseball Stadium District is a few bricks shy of a load–and of a promise. After the stadium district took apart a historic gas station brick by brick, it was supposed to painstakingly rebuild the structure outside Coors Field as part of a salute to the…

Billy Mullins has found faith. “The justice system of this great city has finally realized,” he begins, “that it was a bunch of fuckin’ lies conjured up about us.” Actually, he’s still a little bitter. Recently, after some deliberation, the city’s justice system concluded that Mullins did not commit several…