Tempe on a Friday night. Mill Avenue, the main drag, is a warm, yeasty environment, alive with frat rats, gang wanna-bes, packs of young women from the dorms and mom-and-pop tourists in the kind of ugly madras shorts that only Ohioans bring to the desert. A shaggy transient toting a…
During the final days of a heated 1990 Republican primary campaign for Arizona attorney general, candidate David Eisenstein accused Grant Woods and his family of doing business with a known mobster. Eisenstein claimed the Woods family’s failed project, the former Radisson hotel in downtown Mesa, would cost taxpayers millions of…
It was just another Friday night at Stinger Cocktail Lounge at 19th Avenue and Camelback: September 24, and the serious drinkers were balanced precariously on their stools. Colleen Speed was tending bar when a regular named Russell, who everyone knew as “the Mexican guy with one arm,” took a seat…
Like everyone else these days, Tammi and Chris Carmody have many questions about the Clintons’ proposed health plan. But this young Phoenix couple knows for sure that a “health insurance for everyone” scenario sounds better than what they faced after the August 1 birth of their second child. The Carmodys…
In a cool, hushed room on East Magnolia Street, Maricopa County officials threw away more than $12 million in taxpayer money last week. The county’s Health Care Agency–with the blessing of the Board of Supervisors–began to dismantle a brand-new, multimillion-dollar computer system that was mostly paid for but had scarcely…
David Parker lovingly unwraps a plastic baggie and carefully flattens it on the coffee table. Inside the bag are the remains of a badly disintegrated cigarette butt. Most of the tobacco has long since fallen out, and one end of the crumpled paper bears a faintly visible crimson smear. As…
Have you looked at your latest cable bill? Thanks to Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and your local cable-television company, that monthly amount-due reminder might surprise you. It will prove especially surprising if you recall headlines over the last few months touting something called the Cable Act of 1992, government’s…
The ax has finally fallen on Kamala Stillwell, director of the Maricopa County Library District, who has been involved in a bitter, years-long fight with County Manager Roy Pederson about how the district spends its money. On September 22, after a brief executive session, the county Board of Supervisors voted…
Those who tend to wheeze when their fingers do the walking should perk up at this news: Local phone companies have a new service that saves callers the maddening task of dialing after they’ve called directory assistance. Go ahead–pick up the phone and try dialing U S West’s directory assistance…
Everett Hind was the love of Evelyn Hind’s life. Although she remarried after Everett died in 1972, Evelyn never forgot her first husband, the man with whom she had her only daughter, Sharon Browne. Before Evelyn died August 17, she told her daughter that she wished to be cremated and…
There is nobody in the medical field in this state with a better reputation than Dr. John Eckstein at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale. Having been thoroughly confused by what everyone tells me about President Clinton’s health plan, I decided to seek out Dr. Eckstein the other day for his…
Ernest Hemingway said that no one had ever written a truer account of battle than Stendahl in his re-creation of Waterloo in his classic novel The Red and the Black. “Once you have read it,” Hemingway wrote in Men at War, “you will have been at the battle of Waterloo…
As she described her third suicide attempt in ten days, Debbie Townsend didn’t leave out many details. Struck with “an overwhelming desire to be dead,” she pulled a sheet from her narrow bed. She hung it over the door leading to her bathroom and climbed on a desk chair she…
These two old guys are at the track, standing near the finish line. It’s the first race. The field comes around the last turn, passes the men and crosses the finish line. Then one of the old guys keels over. The paramedics arrive. “Is he alive?” they ask the other…
A federal grand jury is conducting an investigation of Governor Fife Symington’s development company that apparently extends beyond previously known probes into the governor’s business activities, documents reviewed by New Times reveal. The grand jury, impaneled in Phoenix, recently sought financial records on 17 Symington Company projects in Arizona, the…
The neighbors from hell had left a message. I saw the huge potted palm that blocked the driveway at once. The wilted plant sat there in a 100-pound pot, ominously blocking the path to our new neighbors’ house. Do not come near me, was the obvious message. Since it was…
Even in Arizona, you do not normally get your aspirants for high public office on a grand-theft-auto rap. But last week, U.S. Senate front-runner Dick Mahoney was explaining to me how he had not stolen another man’s truck. Startled into accounting for his behavior, Mahoney put his explanation together slowly,…
Peggy Rogers noticed the smoke when she was driving home from the supermarket with her daughter. It was just after lunch on June 10, a hot and dry Thursday in Fountain Hills. The smoke was coming from the west along Shea Boulevard, and so she turned the car in that…
Upon receiving an Emmy Award for her work on Cheers in 1991, actress Kirstie Alley jolted audiences with the highly unorthodox conclusion to what was otherwise a standard-issue acceptance speech. Eyes narrowing into sly slits, the actress grinned wickedly at the audience, then gave special thanks to her husband, Parker…
Atop Mount Graham inside the Columbine Visitor Center on a brisk Saturday morning, a half-dozen Department of Public Safety officers stood in a circle. They were discussing the merits of shining their shoes. “The colonel says we can wear Reeboks if we can get a shine on them,” one officer…
It seemed a flawless setting. Dennis DeConcini visualized this as his final great moment in Arizona politics. Such presumption was not surprising. Over the years, the senior senator’s opinion of himself has been inflated in direct correlation to the swelling of his bank account. He was fresh from a single…
At the time, it seemed of no consequence. It happened on a night in Chicago while the Suns were playing in the championship series against the Bulls. The Suns had their backs to the wall after losing the first two games of the series here in America West Arena. And…
