Year: 1995

In three weeks, the law firm that provides most of the free legal aid to Arizona’s poor people will quit filing class-action lawsuits and slash other legal-aid services. Two of the state’s most politically powerless groups of poor people–farmworkers and urban Indians–will be especially hurt by the cuts. Community Legal…

The .38-caliber “snake shot” ripped into the back of Bayard Horton’s left hand on that night in August, leaving more than 50 metallic pellets embedded in his fingers, hand, wrist and lower arm. The close-range gunshot blast tore away skin and exposed tendons and ligaments on the hand that Horton…

Say Cheeseball! The pension funds that Governor J. Fife Symington III stiffed for $11.4 million are turning up the heat in his federal bankruptcy case. Attorneys for the union pension fund managers, San Francisco-based McMorgan & Company, have mailed more than 15 deposition notices. Formal subpoenas will follow. Pension fund…

PATTY: Let’s go, Snoopy, up and at ’em. It’s a magnificent day for chasing rabbits. The air is clear, the sun is shining, the fields and woodlands lie open and inviting. SNOOPY: If it’s such a magnificent day, why spoil it for the rabbits? –from You’re a Good Man, Charlie…

Election night, 1995. Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza is beaming. Though it is the lowest-turnout municipal election anyone could remember, voters have given Rimsza a sizable victory over three challengers. In his victory speech, flanked by supporters, His Honor chalks it up to the confidence and sense of good stewardship he…

According to the results of an informal neighborhood poll, I am the only parent alive who has no desire to see his kids become professional models, star in their own breakfast cereal commercials or topline a weekly television sitcom. Hell, it’s hard enough to evolve into a normal human being…

A great deal has already been said about Arizona’s failure to pass a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and most of it has taken the form of pronouncements. On some days since the election, the Arizona Republic has contained little but the wallowing and finger-pointing of every self-impressed columnist from…

“It’s a goddamn racist state and no one will say that. It just pisses me the hell off.” That’s the opinion of Rick DeGraw, the Democratic consultant who ran the grassroots portion of the campaign for Proposition 302. He’s not speaking on a hunch, either. In 1988, DeGraw worked against…

Patrols of cheery individuals in bright blazers will soon leaflet downtown Phoenix announcing that the homeless are no longer with us. These civic boosters will be hired from a security agency and their primary purpose will be to tell potential shoppers that there is no longer a threat downtown from…

A great deal has already been said about Arizona’s failure to pass a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and most of it has taken the form of pronouncements. On some days since the election, the Arizona Republic has contained little but the wallowing and finger-pointing of every self-impressed columnist from…

Here’s a tip about Arizona for visiting Deadheads: Local authorities are very uncool about pot smoking at big rock concerts. Here’s another tip: Don’t plan on enacting your usual tailgate-Woodstock ritual this weekend. The preceding public-service announcements were brought to you because the Grateful Dead, one of the world’s oldest…

When Suzanne Ellis was awakened by the phone at 2 a.m. on July 7, she knew her son Tommy was in trouble. The voice at the other end of the line was her ex-husband, who had taken Tommy into his home two months earlier. “I can’t keep him here,” she…

There is nothing terribly offbeat about Becky Ruffner Tyler. She drives a Volvo. She’s fashionably slim, and her thick blond hair is stylishly coifed. She wears tailored clothes. She is the founder of a school popular with parents who are lawyers and doctors and architects. She serves on important statewide…