Klondyke, Arizona, is little more than a dot on the map west of Safford, a general store on a dirt road that passes a few hundred yards from the middle of nowhere. On a lonely September evening, Gordon Whiting stood in the kitchen of his ranch house there, drinking beer,…
On a hot July morning in Camp Verde, Ed Phillips, state senator and TV weatherman, briefs the Arizona Federation of Republican Women on the year’s environmental legislation. He’s light on his feet as he chatters pleasantly about the guy who waters his lawn and lets it run down the street,…
Three days a week at 5:30 in the morning, with the sun not yet up, Mayor Paul Johnson laces up his Asics Gel running shoes for a ten-mile run. He meets a coterie of city employees, staff members, police officers and the occasional local politician, and 10 to 15 at…
On Thursday, July 23, Air Force Staff Sergeant Tom Paniccia, 28, sat nervously on the set of ABC-TV’s Good Morning America, resolutely blinking at the camera lights, his black hair combed back so tightly it looked painful. His mission that day ran counter to Air Force regulations. He was “coming…
“How does it feel to have a target on your back?” That’s what A. Milton “Mickey” Whiting, chairman of Kaibab Industries, asked an Arizona Game and Fish Department supervisor after a March 1991 Game and Fish Commission meeting. His company was completing a massive and unprecedented freedom of information search…
Friday evening at the base of Squaw Peak, cars jockey for parking places right at the trail head so their owners won’t have far to walk to their hikes. A white Toyota idles in the heat, waiting for a Volvo to back up, and as soon as it does, from…
All that remains of the mining town of Seymour is a dilapidated, one-room stone house and a turn-of-the-century millstone used to grind ore. They’re on Ed Knipp’s ranch south of Morristown, surrounded by cattle beneath the spreading shade of ancient tamarack trees that run down to the banks of the…
Dan Huey’s got the chiseled features of a frontiersman and the stomach to do a job nobody wants. He pumps your septic tank when it overflows, cleans out the grease trap of your restaurant and the sand trap of your car wash. In the first six months of this year,…
Alan Goldman, by many accounts, was an inspiring classroom teacher who attracted students to the communications department at Arizona State University West. Doing good work wasn’t enough for him to keep his job, however. He and two other popular instructors were let go to make way for “big league” professors…
KIERAN SUCKLING didn’t want to meet at the Sundowner Lounge in Alpine, a logging village near the New Mexico border, 8,500 feet up in the White Mountains. “You can get killed talking about spotted owls in there,” he said with characteristic overstatement. Certainly, Alpine is the kind of place where…
DR. LAURA JACKSON’S Toyota pickup barrels down Route 87 south of Casa Grande. The young scientist, a sturdy Midwesterner with a thick braid the color of Kansas wheat, has the windows rolled down so she can point out the cancers that afflict abandoned farmland: last year’s tumbleweed, black and clotted…
Portia Erickson, the assistant county manager who oversees the ME’s Office, notes that the economy is picking up and there may be funds available soon. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid given the workload and the facility, that’s not good enough,” says Keen. You can’t just put the bodies in plastic…
TWO DAYS BEFORE his retirement as Maricopa County medical examiner, Dr. Heinz Karnitschnig swings open one of two silver vaults near the back of his office complex to survey last night’s harvest. It’s a walk-in refrigerator about the size of a restaurant’s meat locker, and inside there are eight corpses…
Dewitt Weddle works 266 acres of cotton southeast of Phoenix in Eloy, just three-quarters of a mile from the plot his father and grandfather farmed before him. My dad went broke in 1959,” he says with a drawl as hard and dry as the soil he tills. Ran out of…
The second psychological hurdle is landing, a phenomenon called ground fright.” Up high, the plane seems to move smoothly and slowly, but as it gets lower and the runway comes up closer, all movement seems to speed up, the brain starts screaming, I’m falling!” and you open the throttle to…
GREG GLEBE’S airplane looks more like a dune buggy than an aircraft, a three-wheeled erector set of neon-green pipe, six feet tall and ten feet long, with a back-mounted fan you’d see on an Everglades airboat, and all of it hung from a parachute. He built it out of scratch…
Last June, Father Gerald Yeager of Saint Edward’s Catholic Church at 44th Street and Southern canceled the once-a-month Mass he gave in Spanish. The bishop told me I could cancel it if I could fire a cannonball down the aisle of the church,” he has said many times since. Attendance…
