PLAYING BALL AT DU

Big-league baseball may be on strike, but Jack Rose plays on. And on. When the University of Denver baseball team opens its 127th season of play next February, its fearless leader won’t feel many butterflies. In 33 years as DU’s head coach, Rose has piled up 743 victories (fourth among…

LETTERS

On Your Mark! Regarding Andy Van De Voorde’s “The Alaskan Pipeline,” in the August 10 issue: Wait a minute. Let’s see if I’ve got this right. We have an unusable $3 billion airport because a contractor can’t get a $190 million baggage system to work. So the city is going…

CHOPPERS GET AXED

Eight years ago area transportation officials pronounced that Denver needed a public helicopter landing facility near its downtown to accommodate the growing demand of business executives and to keep the city on par with other financial hubs around the country. Consultants have spent the past two years–and more than $125,000…

DOCTOR VS. DOCTORS

When he was booted from school, Terry Hamburg did what any student these days would do. He sued his teachers. Except that Hamburg was no ordinary student. At the time he was shown the door, he was in the final months of the family-practice residency program at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical…

MT. PAPERWORK

For anyone who has ever attended a local government planning meeting, it is a familiar sight: A developer or lawyer wheels in a stack of boxes, crammed full of what are presumed to be crucial documents necessary to make a convincing case to decision makers. Not necessarily, it turns out…

LET’S SEE WHAT DEVELOPS

Seven years ago, when Glendale mayor Steve Ward was a law student at the University of Denver, he learned of a midterm vacancy on the city council of the small municipality on Denver’s southeast side. He was then 27 years old and three years out of the Marines, where he…

CRACKS, TRACTS & COLFAX

In the beginning, there is Tower Road. A vanishing point leads east toward I-70 and the rising sun. The view offers not just amber waves of grain, but purple mountains’ majesty as well. Downtown Denver hangs fifteen miles to the west, a few water towers impersonate giant golf balls on…

OFF LIMITS

Color my world: Although Denver International Airport won’t open for months, it’s clearly ready for takeoff. Witness the hot-off-the-press Denver’s International Airport (In)Activity Book, by (no joke) Ellen Cockshoot. “If I were using that as a pen name, I’d be doing porno,” she says. Instead, she’s done a sendup of…

BOXING’S AGE-OLD QUESTION

Early in the second round, Jesse “The Boogieman” Ferguson, all 242 1/2 pounds of him, caught Larry Holmes with a monster left hook that buckled the ex-champ like a man hit in the shins with an ax handle. Deep in the fogs of Queer Street, Larry reeled, pawed the air…

GO AHEAD, TOUCH THAT DIAL

There’s a Levi’s commercial,” notes Littleton political activist Donna Huffman, “where all of these young people are flipping through the air and sitting in a tree. It’s interesting, and the effects are good, but when you watch it you think, `What am I missing here? What exactly is being sold?'”…

CHANGING OF THE GUARD

Sometimes old soldiers don’t die–they just become political liabilities and get shuffled out a side door. And thus ends the career of Major General John France of the Colorado National Guard. France has been under scrutiny since last year, when he was named in a civil suit accusing him of…

UNGUARDED COMMENTS

Colorado’s prisons received a passing grade earlier this year from a U.S. Department of Justice consultant hired to conduct a study of sexual harassment in the workplace. The results could have been a point of pride for the state’s corrections system, which is badly is need of some positive press…

LETTERS

Brand X I am writing in response to Bill Gallo’s August 3 review of Spanking the Monkey. This response is directed not at Gallo’s opinion of the film’s merits as a story but at his opinions about the film’s raison d’etre. As I watched David O. Russell’s story unfold, not…

LOVE AT FIRST SET

Chet sits in a plastic-belted lawn chair facing the Washington Park tennis courts, classically dressed: white shirt, pocketed shorts, a white cap settled high on his head, smooth-soled canvas Converse sneakers, Jack Purcell edition. Next to him is a blue plastic bag. The handle of an off-the-shelf wooden multi-ply Cragin/Garcia…

THE PLOT THICKENS

On the surface, the battle for the Denver Botanic Gardens is nothing if not polite. The genteel institution on York Street has long been the pet project and preferred playground of Denver’s blueblood elite. Even after months of prim political fisticuffs, the prominent Denverites scuffling over its future decline to…

OFF LIMITS

Airport ’95: Although last Thursday’s Big Baggage Solution announcement originally was slated for Denver International Airport itself, the actual unveiling was held in the second-floor rotunda of the City & County Building. It seems that more than a few of the folks who were to gather in support of Mayor…

LAST CALL

At a time when baseball fans would rather be thinking about rally caps than salary caps, the Sultans of Snit and the robber barons who grudgingly pay them are taking the game from us. This will be the eighth interruption in twenty-two years. If present-day players were as good at…

THE ALASKAN PIPELINE

MarkAir, the Anchorage-based airline Denver officials hope to woo to Colorado with a $30 million incentive package, has a history of financial turbulence–including more than $10 million in delinquent loans to the state of Alaska. The troubled carrier, which operates eighteen flights a day from Denver, has said it wants…

LETTERS

Don’t Call Me Chief! Steve Jackson did a wonderful job reporting on University of Colorado professor Ron Grimes’s struggle with whether a European-American ought to be teaching Native American studies (“Family Feud,” August 3). Perhaps it would be better for colleges and universities to establish a general rule that Native…

LOW FINANCE

An economics magazine used as a teaching aid by the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs is giving the school a crash course in accounting. This spring, The Margin, a nine-year-old journal owned by the university, folded. Its demise has left UCCS holding title to several thousand back issues, its subscription lists–and…

FAMILY FEUD

One book at a time, Professor Ron Grimes clears the shelves of his small office at the University of Colorado. There are several hundred. Black Elk Speaks. The Book of the Hopi. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Grimes, who looks the part of a religious-studies scholar–which he is–with his…

MAMA’S BOY

part 2 of 2 Kyle Schoepflin appeared healthy when his mother carried him off the plane at Stapleton International Airport, says Dell Lofton, a National Jewish employee dispatched to escort the pair to the hospital. “She said the boy had been sick on the airplane, but he looked normal to…