Too bad Fife Symington peaked early. He could have used State of Emergency, a political potboiler published in October by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, as his own Mein Kampf. The novel is right up Fife’s alley, brimming with babes and bureaucrats and right-wing ideology all rendered in a florid style. Fed…
The City of Phoenix has found a cheap and efficient way to quantify the interplay between social forces and social services in the public schools within city boundaries. There are 292 schools in Phoenix in 25 elementary and high school districts, districts whose boundaries overlap the city boundaries, zip code…
In April, the state auditor general released a report saying that the State Land Department was asleep on the job, allowing ranchers to renew grazing leases without putting them out to competitive bid, and virtually giving away northeast Phoenix and north Scottsdale to developers. Then, in late July, Superior Court…
The message from the president was not memorable, an obligatory platitude on the occasion of the judge’s retirement, a well-deserved thanks for 36 years of service to his country, but it brought tears to the old man’s eyes. “I have a tendency to cry on certain occasions,” the judge said…
On July 18, Donald Johanson moved his Institute of Human Origins from Berkeley, California, to the Social Sciences building at Arizona State University. Johanson, 54, and two of his colleagues at the anthropological research institute will join the university as faculty. Johanson is a paleoanthropologist, an expert on prehistoric man,…
Through May and June, as the late-spring melt flooded into Lake Powell, scientists, environmentalists and river runners all wondered aloud if the water level would reach the top of the Glen Canyon Dam spillway gates, which serve about the same purpose as the overflow drain on a bathroom sink. Everyone…
What would you call a public high school where students invent pregnancy tests for livestock? Where they run genetic tests on plants for local companies? Where they design their own equestrian helmets and get them marketed by a major sportswear company? A school whose teachers win national awards? A school…
Maestro Hermann Michael, the new music director for the Phoenix Symphony, is a natty man who wears two-tone shoes and layers sweater vests over short-sleeved shirts, even when temperatures outside reach 100. He beams and beckons his way through rehearsals with the orchestra, slashing out perfect Nike swooshes with his…
Bob Hartle first found out he had an evil twin in April 1994. His mother, who was living in Phoenix, was in the hospital to have a leg amputated because of diabetes. Hartle had been calling her from his home in Iowa every night, and one night, his brother John…
A year ago this week, on March 26, 1996, Dave Wegner and Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt were standing at the base of Glen Canyon Dam, giving simultaneous interviews with competing national morning TV news shows, shouting over the roar of the torrent that rocketed 100 yards out of…
With the Kennedy reference in its title and its promise to choreograph “the hits of a generation,” Ballet Arizona’s new work–“Ask Not . . .”–could easily have been a shameless grab at baby-boomer bucks. “There’s a generation out there who should have very vivid memories, who are the new powers…
At first, Rosemary Diehl didn’t realize she had been robbed. She owns two houses in northwest Phoenix. Her mother lives in one, but over the Christmas holidays, her mother was staying with a relative in Kansas. When Diehl would stop in to pick up the mail and check her mother’s…
By modern ski-industry standards, Arizona Snowbowl in Flagstaff is a failure. It has no slope-side hotels and condos; no high-speed detachable quad lifts; no “terrain gardened” (bulldozed) slopes to make sure the downhill run is as effortless as the uphill ride; no snowmaking equipment; no picturesque village full of art…
The muscles in Gail Passey-Reed’s back pulse and pop and ripple like a circuit board as she goes through her warm-up stretching routine, flexing her shoulders and arms and stretching her tortured calves on the barre, preparing for rehearsal of her last major dance role with Ballet Arizona. This is…
Last Friday, December 27, a coalition of Southwestern environmental groups once again asked a federal judge to issue an injunction against the U.S. Forest Service to keep that agency from violating federal law in its logging practices. The law of the land is apparently meant to be broken–at least the…
In charter schools’ second year of existence, Arizona already has more of them than any other state. About 17,000 Arizona students are enrolled in these publicly funded but privately owned bastions of education at 168 individual school sites (maintained by a slightly smaller number of charter holders). To date, only…
Gail Battistella is a diminutive woman, 50-something, with crisp gray bangs and a tiny, high-pitched voice. But she holds within her an explosive potential that could be measured in megatons, a force that hums and sputters and draws people to her almost as powerfully as it blows them away. Battistella…
If you build it, they will come. That is, build a stadium, and entrepreneurs will cater to the resultant demands of the marketplace with shops, restaurants and bars. And parking garages. In response to the parking problems anticipated for the opening of Bank One Ballpark in 1998 (“Parking Breaks,” November…
“I don’t happen to like baseball and I don’t understand it,” says Margaret Mullen, executive director of the Downtown Phoenix Partnership. Mullen doesn’t “do computers”; she doesn’t need to. With her computerlike memory, she accesses chapter and verse of exactly why there will be only two daytime baseball games during…
U.S. Justice Department lawyer assaulted an attorney representing several environmental groups earlier this month during closed-door talks in Phoenix aimed at ending the 15-month-old injunction that has halted logging, one environmentalist says. According to Peter Galvin of the Southwest Forest Alliance, who witnessed the alleged assault, John Marshall, a Washington,…
Marchelo Bresciani found himself running, literally and figuratively. Last year, when he was 13, he joined the track team at Shea Middle School in north Phoenix, and suddenly found himself running ahead of the pack in track meets against other middle schools. By the end of the school year, he…
Arizona is a hang-’em-high state, and its political leaders are death-penalty poster boys. Governor Fife Symington publicly blasted the courts for granting a stay of execution. Sheriff Joe Arpaio commended a journalist who witnessed a lethal injection for coming “to see what we do to murderers.” Attorney General Grant Woods,…
