Attorney Steve Doncaster, an ardent cyclist, was pedaling home from work the other day. He was heading west on Washington Street from his office at Salt River Project when a car pulled out of a side street, crashing into Doncaster and his bike head-on. The driver fled. A Good Samaritan…
You might not be surprised to learn that Alex Gonzalez is an unhappy camper, considering he has spent much of the last four years in pawnshops. For the Arizona Pawnshop Association and its public-image-improvement efforts, the problem is that you might not be surprised; for Gonzalez, who has been fingerprinted…
David Wilbur Studli’s voice sounds disconnected and hollow, like he’s calling up from the bottom of a well. He speaks in short, nervous bursts of words that come quickly but still sound flat and murmurous. He is talking on a speaker phone from a room somewhere inside an Arizona state…
Everyone’s a Critic “I made some stupid mistakes,” Eddie Basha says matter-of-factly. Once again, “chubby grocer” is his full-time occupation. During a ten-minute phone interview Monday from Bashas’ Inc. headquarters, the vanquished Democratic gubernatorial nominee employs some brutal adjectives to summarize his performance against Fife Symington–like ignorant, unsophisticated and naive…
Bill Lowery has a police officer’s poker face and a flat and factual Jack Webb voice. “I’m not a police officer, but I talk to a lot of them,” he says. Lowery is a salesman, and he sells the future of police work in a box of circuits and silicon…
The police reports describing the South Mountain High School riot are written in the idiom of men apparently striving to emulate the literary style of a veteran sergeant. All drama is drained. The tone is monotonous. The repetition of phrases fogs the reader’s mind. But after you’ve read enough police…
When Roberto Frietz, now 39, was a student at South Mountain High School in the 1970s, a riot brought on by racial tensions broke out at the school. “I had no charges brought against me, because I wasn’t a participant,” Frietz recalls. “But I still remember what it was like…
There was a time when Bob Crane was even more famous than O.J. Simpson. But that was years ago, and our memories are short. Crane’s every movement was noted with a sort of breathless wonder by gossip columnists across the country. If Crane was seen in the company of a…
Tom Cutler walks through the corporate training room preparing for his evening sales meeting, pausing for a moment to fiddle with the flowers on the front table. The 33-year-old businessman is most at home here, surrounded by a buzz of new clients and suited sales folks. Cutler is no stranger…
Last spring, the state’s largest daily newspaper launched an expensive legal challenge to force the federal Resolution Trust Corporation to unseal hundreds of pages of documents filed in its $217 million lawsuit against Governor J. Fife Symington III and other officials of the failed Southwest Savings and Loan. Over the…
You may know that Tiny Tim was one of the most aberrant things to emerge from the Sixties. You may know that two and a half decades ago, he took his long hair, ukulele and piercing falsetto to international prominence, that he married a 17-year-old named Miss Vicky on The…
First things first about Cop Shoot Cop. The band’s name is not some sort of white-boy take on Ice-T anger. And it’s not a pithy stage direction from an old Keystone Kops flick. At least not according to Tod A., Cop Shoot Cop’s lead howler. “We used to have a…
I rang the doorbell at Senator Alston’s house in the 4100 block of West Cheery Lynn Road the other day, and was greeted by the tumultuous sounds of three dogs, two of them quite small but all yapping away at a great rate. Promptly, the door was opened by one…
After a certain age, you don’t get weepy over country-music laments or wonder at the integrity of politicians. But even if you’ve got the digestive system of a boa constrictor, it is difficult to swallow the level of distortion, the high-finance perversion of facts and the bald-faced lying that is…
It’s 3 a.m. What were only minor problems in the daylight are nightmares in the dark. Who can sleep with thoughts closing in like tarantulas stepping across my pillow? What if as a child I’d been adopted by Mia Farrow? Or, even worse, what if Carl Kunasek is elected to…
I knew I wanted to be a sportswriter when I was 14 years old. I had discovered Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly in the library . . . —Ron Rapoport of the Los Angeles Daily News in the introduction to A Kind of Grace: A Treasury of Great Women’s…
As election day nears, so dawns the realization that by this time next week, we might not have Governor J. Fife Symington III to kick around anymore. As a public service befitting the gravity of the occasion, New Times has marshaled its vast resources to reflect on what we and…
U.S. Senator Larry Craig, a conservative Republican from Idaho, came to Phoenix a couple of weeks ago to lunch at the Arizona Biltmore and stump for GOP Senate hopeful Jon Kyl. Kyl’s opponent, Democrat Sam Coppersmith, celebrated the Idaho senator’s visit by faxing around a newspaper clipping that quotes Craig…
In Tim Burton’s recent big-screen biography of Ed Wood, actor Johnny Depp re-created key scenes from several of that Grade Z movie director’s masterworks from the 1950s: In the climactic flying-saucer attack that highlights Plan 9 From Outer Space, flaming paper plates dangling from fishing poles strafe a papier-mch model…
Basically, Debra Colbert and Joanne Lee got tired of waiting until February. February is Black Heritage Month, and that’s when most of the bookstores would bring out the stuff by current African-American authors other than Toni Morrison and Terry McMillan and Alice Walker and Bebe Moore Campbell. There’d be little…
Rudman Flees, Sparks Fly Anyone who has driven through east Phoenix in the last year has seen Roger Rudman’s handiwork. He’s the guy who posted those horrendous signs urging voters to “Recall Rebecca Macbeth.” Macbeth is a justice of the peace and Rudman’s estranged lover. Rudman put up the signs…
“Ah, Phoenix,” a New York contractor told a Valley colleague during a professional conference last year. “Nice place. But don’t drink the water.” Phoenix’s water system, it seems, is the talk of bored water and waste-water contractors everywhere. The Best Run City in the World is also the last major…
