News

In Jefferson County School District, where outcome-based education has been denounced as too radical, you’d expect administrators to be patted on the back for reviving elements of the fondly remembered one-room schoolhouse. But the move to “multi-age” classes has some parents in the state’s largest district angry. Because multi-aging combines…

This just in: Stapleton International Airport has disappeared. That’s the official verdict of the American Automobile Association, and it’s perfectly timed for the start of the summer tourist season. The 1994 AAA map of Denver, produced by H.M. Gousha, shows only blank, white space where Stapleton should be. Denver International…

The Doctor Is In…and Out Thanks for Eric Dexheimer’s well-researched and well-written article on Dr. Medenica and Charles Stevinson’s role in promoting him, “Trick or Treatment,” in the April 27 issue. I know nothing of Medenica but feel strongly that we must allow alternative medicine to flourish or die according…

If she feels at all beleaguered, Jennifer Moulton isn’t showing it. Standing behind a podium in the auditorium of Carson Elementary School, Moulton looks decidedly calm despite the anger and the heat. It is after 8 p.m., and more than 200 east Denver homeowners are in the audience, peppering the…

The beautiful Victorian castle above Colorado Springs where blue-collar bluebloods live out their final days proves that highly skilled manual labor can produce stunning results. But as the people inside the castle can testify, even the finest craftwork doesn’t last forever. Since 1892 the Union Printers Home has been a…

Hose job: If KCNC is “Working 4 Women,” as a current mailing announces, why is the station trying to get a leg up on the competition by suggesting that pantyhose is a crucial issue to female viewers? News 4 hyped its Monday night pantyhose “expose” with a glitzy four-color brochure…

A woman on Mayor Wellington Webb’s Black Advisory Council has received more than $47,000 in no-bid city contracts over the past fifteen months–including a controversial $16,500 award to provide “outreach” to minority artists that the city is paying for with money from the 23rd Street Viaduct project. The contracts signed…

Postal worker Terry O’Neill says he thought he was doing the right thing back in 1989 when the U.S. Justice Department first asked him to provide information about allegations of discriminatory practices against other U.S. Postal Service employees. Until he got that sick feeling in the pit of his stomach…

Eve Meelan bought purple laces for her green Doc Martens to make a fashion statement. But when the fifteen-year-old freshman set boot on the campus of Smoky Hill Senior High School last week, she found her laces tied to the First Amendment. Dean of Students Cathy Brondos told the surprised…

Last year, Bert Matthews had to fight the City of Denver and the Colorado Rockies for the right to hawk The Homestand Flier, the baseball-themed scorecard and paper he publishes and sells for a dollar a copy. This year, the city and the team raised the white flag, but another…

Breaking the Spell I’d like to know what it is with this band Spell. Is somebody at Westword sleeping with somebody in the band or related to them? All you guys do is write about them and write about them, and now they’re on the May 4 cover. C’mon already–enough…

The days should be getting sunnier for anyone living downwind of Rocky Flats. The Department of Energy facility is officially out of the nuclear-weapons business. Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary has promised the plant’s dark secrets will be dragged into the light. And the federal government seems serious about cleaning…

part 2 of 2 In April 1990 Stephanie was dawdling along the aisles of the Wild Oats health food store when the young woman from the ashram approached and asked if she had heard the news. Revelations of the guru’s sexual demands had come out at a meeting of devotees…

part 1 of 2 Have you heard the news?” Stephanie Mines was startled by the young woman’s question. She recognized her in the aisles of the health food store as another devotee of the Swami Amar Jyoti, whose Sacred Mountain Ashram is west of Boulder, near the small mountain town…

Brawl in the family: The fact that Family Focus was here first–the nonprofit service agency was founded in Denver almost twenty years ago–hardly mattered. Once James Dobson moved his Focus on the Family organization from California to Colorado Springs a few years ago, it didn’t take long for people to…

The Scales of Justice Regarding “Justice (Dept.) Is Served” in the April 27 issue: Enough already about Rocky Flats! You’ve coasted on this topic long enough. Can’t Westword’s editor find anything else to write about? Joe Garcia Arvada I very much appreciated grand jury foreman Wes McKinley’s assessment of the…

The break-in at the small South Broadway office a month ago had all the sinister overtones appropriate to what would turn out to be Richard Nixon’s final weeks. In fact, a Denver police detective recalls the phone conversation that put him on the case: “The guy called up and said,…

Former Aurora resident Sunny Big Keem, convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder in connection with the 1992 slaying of a California millionaire, is expected to be sentenced to life in prison next month in Los Angeles. When the prison door slams shut behind him, it…

The controversial Winter Park Recreation Association went a long way toward smoothing over its frosty relations with the City of Denver last week. It fared more poorly at the Moffat Tunnel Commission, which turned up the heat–and the numbers–in its efforts to collect rent from the cash-flush mountain resort. While…

Austreberto Aguirre’s big vision is a shadow of its former self. This week’s edition, anyway. La Gaceta, the newspaper he’s published in one form or another since 1947, today is little more than a few Xeroxed pages stapled together. Inside, where Senor Aguirre, editor and founder, once ran hard-hitting exposes…

part 2 of 2 Most physicians who are honest with themselves will acknowledge that cancer can be a capricious disease and that claiming success for cures or remissions is an inexact science. Add to this the fact that many terminal patients go to oncologists with the expectation only that they…