School Daze Against all odds, Michael Ballez will be graduating from North High School this year. Those odds include: the classmates who’ve dropped out, one by one, until only a handful of the kids he started with as a freshman remain in school. The pressures he’s faced — and fought…
Shortly after midnight on Saturday, May 9, all state employees received this e-mail from Julie Postlethwait in the Department of Personnel & Administration: “This past Wednesday, Governor Ritter took time out of the last week of a busy legislative session to acknowledge all you do for our State; he officially…
At 12:34 a.m. on May 9, an e-mail from Julie Postlethwait, PIO for the Colorado Department of Personnel Administration, arrived in the in-boxes of all state employees: This past Wednesday, Governor Ritter took time out of the last week of a busy legislative session to acknowledge all you do for…
Timing is everything. Early on, as president-elect Barack Obama started filling his Cabinet, Ken Salazar’s name kept surfacing — but so did word that what the first-term senator and former Colorado Attorney General ultimately wanted was a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, and in the meantime, he was perfectly…
Governor Bill Ritter is heading down to Colorado Springs today, where he’ll host a town-hall meeting and sign a number of bills. And along the way, he’ll no doubt pass a handful of unauthorized signs along I-25, all asking, “Why does Ritter hate El Paso County?” Why indeed? I asked…
According to state senator Greg Brophy’s blog, “he’s been called one of the most conservative members of the legislature and a Prius driving, bicycle riding, eco freak. You decide.” But first read this, and you might come up with a couple of other descriptors. On April 24, he recounted the…
If the Colorado Legislature can tie a debate on the death penalty to the dismal economy, no reason California can’t do the same for a discussion of legalizing marijuana. “Well, I think it’s not time for (legalization), but I think it’s time for a debate,” Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said Tuesday…
It’s impossible to travel through Five Points without thinking of Charles Cousins. His signs are everywhere — offering this property for rent, announcing that his company manages another. But Cousins, who passed away Monday morning at the age of 91, left his mark in so many other ways. The history…
Yes, the Nuggets are advancing, but Colorado can already claim a real winning team: the East High Constitutional Scholars, who just won the We the People contest in Washington, D.C. — for the third year running. The high schoolers are already preparing to make it four in a row, but…
With two cases of swine flu (the “other white flu”) confirmed in Colorado and bumbling Vice President Joe Biden calling for quasi-quarantine, it could be time to go to your bookshelves and dust off that copy of The Stand, Stephen King’s 1978 novel. In this epic (it was re-released, uncut,…
After pork producers and Israeli officials complained about the name “swine flu,” world health authorities have come up with a new name for the pending pandemic: “the other white flu.” Variations on that joke have been flying around the Internet for days, but to Brian Gansmann, who was on the…
Andrew Speaker, Denver’s accidental tourist, has some sense of timing. Speaker, the focus of our last international health-scare when he went on the lam, and in the air, after being diagnosed with tuberculosis and warned not to fly, this week filed suit against the Centers for Disease Control for invasion…
At Greetings From Colorado, a store on the A concourse of Denver International Airport, don’t expect to find many actual Colorado greetings. Yes, there are cards from Leanin’ Tree, the Boulder-based Western art emporium that Edward P. Trumble founded back in 1949; and gilded aspen-leaf jewelry created in this state;…
“Colorado Speaks for Itself.” That’s the tagline of a new Colorado tourism campaign, a variation on the old “Let’s Talk Colorado” that puts quote marks around pretty pictures of the mountains. But sadly, the campaign can’t leave well enough alone. A pricey two-page spread in the April 20 edition of…
At Monday’s tourism rally, Governor Bill Ritter urged us to “Rediscover Colorado” this summer. I started by walking the length of the 16th Street Mall at lunch yesterday, and found that this seventeen-block stretch — touted as the most successful pedestrian mall in the country and one of this town’s…
Verse came to worse last night at the Central Library, where close to a hundred people gathered for last night’s Fresh City Life poetry reading inspired by “Mustang,” Luis Jimenez’s blue horse sculpture out at Denver International Airport. We were in the depths of the basement, but spirits soared as…
Before we were panicked about swine flu and twisted by torture-memo leaks, we were terrified by the Devil Horse, Luis Jimenez’s killer sculpture that stands guard outside Denver International Airport, its red eyes shooting deadly lasers at unsuspecting passersby. Or are those glowing orbs actually illuminating this town’s deep well…
I’m looking out my back window over the Platte Valley, across the highway and the river and the railyards to Union Station, and thinking that I’ll never see the Ski Train pull up again. After close to seventy years, the last twenty of them under owner Phil Anschutz, the train…
One of Denver’s greatest draws is its strong network of neighborhoods, dozens of neighborhoods, each filled with advocates rooted to their particular patch of turf, but also to the city at large. And even in these depressing times, there’s good news coming from them. The EZE Mop Shopping District, a…
My first look at Colorado was from a train. When I was a kid, my family was part of a group that would pile onto the Denver Zephyr in Chicago late on a winter afternoon. While the parents sat up all night in a coach car, our cadre of kids…
Back in 1967, Stella Cordova was working as a cook at Chubby Burger Drive-In at 1231 West 38th Avenue when its owner, Bill Gray, asked if she wanted to buy the place. Even though she had a big family and little money, she took him up on his offer, paying…
With just a week to go until InDenverTimes decides whether to pull the plug or revise its business plan, news comes of yet another paid, online newspaper venture. This one is Journalism Online, another brainchild from Steven Brill, who brought us the magazines American Lawyer and Content (a now-defunct journalism…
