Give It Arrest Tony Ortega’s diatribe about Sheriff Joe Arpaio (“Mutiny at the County,” April 25) is a first-class rendition of yellow journalism. Very typical of New Times: “El Flasho” took his pot shots (Flashes, April 18) and now it’s Ortega. Page after page of innuendoes, half-truths and outright lies…
April 19, at approximately 8:50 a.m., I set out to become an Outdoors Woman. I never made it. I drove all the way to Friendly Pines Camp outside Prescott. I brought a sleeping bag. I brought a pocketknife. I brought a long book (a biography of William Tecumseh Sherman). I…
My parents were the sort of folks, God bless them, who taught me that it is not very polite to poke a sharp stick into the eye of a handicapped person, unless of course you are jabbing a farmer or one of his kin. Dad, a suspicious, big-city greaser, didn’t…
Maricopa County taxpayers have paid for the training of 2,694 badge-carrying men and women who make up Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s posse. They have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to train 800 of those posse members to shoot straight. Yet only 21 warm bodies fill chairs this morning at the…
In John Griffin’s visions of the future, it is always do or die. They are visions probably not unlike those of his counterparts in the amateur Arizona Ironman Football League: It is a must-win situation, and he is playing for some pro team like the Minnesota Vikings, and the other…
It took only a few minutes for the Phoenix City Council to deliver what some would consider a $40 million gift to the growing empire of Phoenix sports mogul Jerry Colangelo. It was easy. There was no public opposition. No impassioned speeches by councilmembers. No outrage over an apparent giveaway…
Three New Times staffers are finalists for the top awards given by the state’s largest media organization, the Arizona Press Club. If the previous sentence inspires a feeling of deja vu, there is good reason. All three staffers were finalists for the Press Club’s highest honors last year. Staff photographer…
A Great Reason to Reprint This Photo The two eldest sons of Governor J. Fife Symington III last made news in 1995, when it was revealed they had been ticketed by Scottsdale cops for urinating in public. Now, apparently, they’ve zipped their flies and gone entrepreneurial. With Dad in bankruptcy…
The living room of Florence Vanosky’s central-Phoenix home is filled with pictures of family, but for years Vanosky’s only roommate had been her dog–a purebred golden retriever named Scooter. Now Vanosky lives alone. On April 9, an investigator for the Arizona Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals removed…
Mariano Albano entered this life 44 years ago on a pool table in downtown Phoenix, a few yards from where America West Arena now stands. Two decades or so after that auspicious debut, Albano joined the Phoenix Police Department as a skinny rookie patrol officer. Last week, the incurable iconoclast–who…
The Sound and the Juror From time to time, I have read of the travails of the Span family after its run-in with a couple of thugs who were conveniently sheltered by the office of the federal marshal (“Lives Overturned,” John Mecklin, April 11). It seems that the tender mercies…
Sure. Friends, relatives, even Gail, my mail carrier, are always telling me what a thoroughly talented individual I am at this words-on-paper thing, but imagine my surprise when I opened a big manila envelope last week and pulled out a letter from Spelling Television Inc.! As in Aaron Spelling. As…
The Label Dinner The scene here in a back room of an upscale Mexican eatery in old town San Diego looks like “The Last Supper” gone indie rock. Margaritas are flowing instead of wine, and the disciples have been replaced with a dozen young record-label reps in band tee shirts…
The afternoon sunlight glimmers across Wet Beaver Creek as kingfishers squawk and swoop, angry about an intrusion. A wide cattle trail soon splits into scores of paths that shoot off like nerves from a spinal cord into the thorny mesquite brush. Immediately to the left is the southern boundary fence…
Say You Ain’t Slow, Joe So you’re part of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s public relations dream team and you want to make up for the inmates-burying-the-dead blunder. What do you do? Book the Crime Avenger and his new book, America’s Toughest Sheriff, on a national television show where savvy guests trade…
Info:Correction date: May 2, 1996 Miner Regulations Arizona copper kings are enthusiastic about a pending mine-reclamation law–because they wrote it By Terry Greene Before Arizona’s 42nd Legislature shuts down this month, it is expected to quietly pass a law that runs counter to all the principles of regulatory reform espoused…
If it weren’t for the Earth’s gravitational pull, a Phoenix grandfather claims he’d have pedaled his stationary-exercise bicycle a fifth of the way to the moon by now. Punching some figures into his pocket calculator, the robust retiree amends the progress report on his hypothetical bike ride through space. “Actually,…
Don’t try to tell Dixie about the Freudian symbology of a lock and a key. She isn’t buying. Instead, the northern Arizona widow is selling–or at least attempting to sell–her late husband’s padlock collection, a lifetime obsession that eventually filled an entire backyard travel trailer with thousands of locks and…
One of Arizona’s largest commercial-rafting operations is up the Salt River without a paddle–or any other equipment for that matter. Salt River Rafting, which is based in Tempe, has had its river-running permits yanked by the White Mountain Apache Tribe and by the Tonto National Forest. And the company’s owner,…
Uno Dose Dewey Webb’s “Drugstore Caballero” (April 4) was entertaining, but New Times did us legitimate over-the-border pill buyers a disservice. On my frequent sojourns to Mexico, the farmacia is a required stop. Case in point: Ceclor, an antibiotic that I’ve been prescribed to fight recurring sinus and respiratory infections…
Let’s say you are meandering down the rows of a vast junkyard in South Phoenix. On one side there is a porcelain graveyard of yawning toilets. On the other, the entire history of American ovens–Dixie, Roper, General Electric, Amana, Monterey–simmers quietly in the sun. Walk toward the rear of the…
Harvey McElhannon is 65 years old, a tall man with good posture, an open face, a sincere smile and a firm handshake. He is patriotic to a fault, though he’d probably say that no such thing is possible. Hanging on the walls of his office are beautifully framed copies of…
