Kids in Maria Jimenez’s fourth grade class at Valley View School in South Phoenix sit at tables reading and discussing books in both Spanish and English, depending on which language their books are written in. It’s a bilingual class. Nearly all of the children are Hispanic, most of them from…
On February 23, Michael Shoemaker, 20, was sentenced to one year in jail and three years probation for his part in a fatal knife fight at Paradise Valley Mall in 1995. His accomplice, Gregory Acevedo, went to trial in 1997, and was sentenced to consecutive sentences of six years in…
“What’s in the mountain preserve now?” asked Ruth Hamilton, the octogenarian stalwart of the Phoenix Mountains Preservation Council (PMPC), a citizens’ watchdog group that guards the city’s mountain preserves. She was directing her question at Jim Burke, deputy director of the Phoenix Parks, Recreation and Library Department, who was just…
The child had apparently been eaten, his skull cracked open ear to ear, his brain scooped out, his bones scattered as trash. All that remains of him is the plate of bone that gave form to his face. It had lain for centuries beneath Southwest soil, sat decades more on…
Rob Smith, head of the Sierra Club in these parts, is a mild-mannered, middle-aged man. He doesn’t look like a bomb thrower. So he was taken aback when the Phoenix police detective approached him in a courtyard at the Pointe Hilton Resort at Tapatio Cliffs, where he was awaiting the…
All these years we thought we knew them. The Phoenix Mountain Preserves used to consist of 16,500 acres of South Mountain and 7,000 more acres in the mountains up north–Shaw Butte to Squaw Peak, Shadow and Lookout Mountains. Now we’re not so sure. They were cobbled together over more than…
How does a mile-deep hole in the desert become a cultural icon, a mystic symbol and the world’s biggest tourist attraction? That’s what Arizona State University professor Stephen J. Pyne set out to explain in his new book, How the Canyon Became Grand. “The simple view is that here’s this…
On Art Hamilton’s first day in the Arizona House of Representatives, as he tells the story, the speaker of the House, Stan Akers, looked straight at him, leaned to his microphone, and started whistling “Dixie” over the House sound system. Hamilton was watching from the gallery, not from the floor…
Saint Travis, hear our prayer. Patron of all-American boys, role models and virginal heartthrobs, protector of sweet-swinging lefty hitters, first baggers, ambidextrous athletes, lead us in the basepaths of righteousness in His game’s sake. Step to the plate and knock one into the cheap seats. Deliver us from the ignominies…
Welcome to Bizarro World,” said assistant state attorney general Mitchell Klein near the beginning of his address to the Arizona Association of Industries on August 14. Last year, in a panel discussion on whether environmental regulation in Arizona is excessive and harmful to industry, Klein argued in favor of the…
George A. Hormel II went on a shopping spree in 1992. With a $13 million inheritance in his pocket, Hormel, whom everyone calls “Geordie,” had been lured from Los Angeles to buy the 57,000-square-foot McCune Mansion in Paradise Valley. Phoenix-area real estate values were still in the dumper, and, at…
Info:Correction Date: 08/27/1998 Info: Trainspotting Nearly three years after Amtrak’s Sunset Limited was sabotaged near Buckeye, firefighters who rode to the rescue remain on the FBI’s list of suspects By Michael Kiefer An hour and a half past midnight on October 9, 1995, when four cars of Amtrak’s Sunset Limited…
John Wilson can’t go straight home in the morning. The city of Phoenix won’t let him. He lives just blocks from where 32nd Street and Shea Boulevard dump all of north Phoenix, north Scottsdale and Paradise Valley’s rush-hour traffic into the north end of the Squaw Peak Parkway. Three years…
Jen Scott knows that whatever she says when she stands up to speak at a zoning commission meeting will be discounted. She’s lived near Prescott for only a year and a half, so who is she to speak out? And furthermore, she’s a Californian, the most despised of all newcomers…
Deborah Ham, the eccentric country lawyer who led an uphill legal battle to keep a copper mine out of Pinto Creek, a tiny forest stream just west of Globe, died suddenly of a stroke on May 13. She was 60 years old. Around 7 o’clock in the evening, Ham met…
Tailings are the mess left by mining, what’s left after ore is broken into rock or crushed into powder and the metal has been extracted. It has no earthly use, but it has to go someplace, and so the rock gets dumped into unsightly toxic piles and the powder gets…
The bell that House Speaker Jeff Groscost rings to summon legislators back to the House floor sounds alarmingly like a door-chime rendition of the theme from Jeopardy!. At jeopardy on this particular day (some weeks ago) is the school-finance bill, and the esteemed House members are hammering out its final…
Last week, the chair-lift conversation at Arizona Snowbowl in Flagstaff repeatedly turned to whether the ski area would be allowed to cut new trails through the trees on its northernmost flank, or whether a letter-writing campaign by a ragtag group of environmentalists and traditional Native Americans would bring the plan…
“Mr. President, Mr. President, you have ignored me again.” The elderly bearded gentleman dances in the aisle like a small boy who has to pee, and he waves his hand contentiously, disrupting an already heated meeting of the Dysart Unified School District governing board. The president summons him to a…
It’s an archetypical Western story. Four earnest young cowpunks pile onto a bus and set out on the hardest road they can find, looking for life and adventure and irony. Along the way, they make people laugh and dance. They find unexpected success, then return home with an empty gas…
When Jane Hull became governor last September, she quickly announced that she did not intend to have state policies decided in court. “I try not to comment on what was done before,” she says in her middle-school principal’s voice. “My attitude is that we don’t do well in court, usually,…
On Friday, July 12, 1996, the Southwest regional headquarters for the United States Forest Service sent out a press release to announce that it was about to break the law. Charles “Chip” Cartwright, the regional forester, was giving the go-ahead to start cutting trees, even though a federal injunction had…
