The irate caller to KTAR’s Talk to the Governor radio show last November 24 sounded a bit like Dustin Hoffman doing “Tootsie.” “Hello, Governor,” the man said in a kind of Southern accent, after introducing himself as “Bill from District 18.” “I’m calling about the criminal bill. . . …
On the first day of March in 1985, the woman they all called “Mrs. Wright”–Oglivanna was the third wife of Frank Lloyd Wright, but the only one any of the Taliesin West Fellows ever knew–suffered a heart attack. Though she was 87 years old and recovering from a flu that…
As nightclubs go, Nino’s in Tucson was one of a kind. Loosely defined as a steak house, the club’s food was an afterthought, being both cheap and bad. But no one went to Nino’s for the food. What drew people was music. A crazy idea–booking bands in a checkerboard-floored side…
Officers Ruben Ortega and Ralph Milstead walked into the Bridge Tavern one afternoon to arrest a small-time addict for a burglary he had committed to finance his habit. In years to follow, Ortega and Milstead would become two of the most powerful law enforcement figures in Arizona, heading the Phoenix…
Hunter S. Thompson has been, until now, larger than biography. Chief American chronicler of the days when drugs were fun, Thompson has produced two classic books (Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), one near-classic (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 72)…
One day last October, Robin Asaki spent the better part of an afternoon frantically racing around Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport looking for an air-sickness bag. Not just any air-sickness bag, mind you. The bag had to be unused, which was understandable enough. Not so understandably, the bag also had…
The biggest challenge the prosecution faces in pursuing the Don Bolles murder case is that time may have finally drained all passion from what was a shocking crime. Nevertheless, prosecutors Fred Newton and Warren Granville have been working through mountains of documents and interrogating hundreds of witnesses for two years…
Basketball is the most difficult of the traditional American sports to write about. The ball moves too fast to describe. There are not just a half-dozen important plays; there are hundreds. Sometimes, dazzling bits of showmanship follow each other in a breathtaking series of acrobatic events that shifts constantly from…
I have to hand it to him. All these years, I thought Fife Symington was just another low-level hustler with an Ivy League veneer. I never figured him to possess either the gall or the imagination to become a real character. Now my hat’s off to him. J. Fife Symington…
How many millions of automobile travelers have wondered, while making their way through Arizona on Interstate 10: “What the heck is The Thing?” And how many of those travelers ask, after pulling over to see it: “Why the heck did I ever stop at The Thing?” The Thing experience, housed…
When the Nevada Highway Patrol stopped Sheryl for driving 95 mph two years ago, in her bright red Mitsubishi Eclipse, they found gambling chips, several hundred dollars in cash, two guns and a $10,000 cashier’s check. The car was a few months old, and it was paid off. Sheryl claimed…
Professor Leonardo Felix lets out a hoot. He shakes his head. He turns another page. “Es ridculo,” he says. He is reading the official Spanish version of the Arizona Driver’s License manual, which is supposed to inform monolingual Spanish speakers of state traffic laws so they can pass their driver’s…
John Stetler Brown escaped criminal prosecution for five years after he admitted in open court that he had molested a 7-year-old girl. But thanks to a 1991 New Times story that led to an investigation by Phoenix police, the real estate agent is spending a year in jail, followed by…
By now everyone in town has seen the television footage of Charles Barkley climbing over the scorer’s table in New York’s Madison Square Garden. The film shows the pride of the Phoenix Suns acting in what is clearly a state of the highest dudgeon. At the apex of his trek…
Each afternoon, just before the sun went down, Eva Byington, our neighbor, came out to water her lawn and flower beds. She had lived at the corner of Ninth Avenue and Latham for decades. “The weather is wonderful,” she would say. “It was never this good back in Ohio. I…
The whole lousy deal started for Milt Heinemann, as it does so often in Arizona, on a golf course. In 1990, a friend introduced the retired engineer to an affable fellow duffer from Minnesota named Bob Pomerenke. During their round, the name of Pomerenke’s son John came up. John Pomerenke…
The first appearance is startling: George A. Hormel II, whom everyone calls Geordie, has a shocking cascade of gray hair that fans across his shoulders, and a full, white beard that frames a bemused expression. Though he’s heir to millions of dollars, he favors slouchy suits that he buys at…
Is Calvin Goode making a mountain out of a molehill? Not according to the results of New Times’ Totem Poll (Squaw Pique,” December 30). Fired up by the Phoenix councilmember’s recent squawk that Squaw Peak’s name is offensive to Native Americans, scores of readers answered our plea for a politically…
Feeding data on carcinoma cases into a computer is a fairly ghoulish form of bean counting. But the way Georgia Armenta Yee sees things, it’s a good way to protect the public’s health. If only some cancer doctors would obey the law. Yee is manager of the Arizona Cancer Registry,…
1. There’s a clear signal President Bill Clinton might give during his inaugural address. It would diminish the fears of those who voted for him, because they believed him when he promised he was going to be the agent of change. First, Clinton could assure everyone that the bombing of…
In a city where gossip columns are as scintillating as Christmas newsletters, one column is a breath of pure nitrous oxide. It’s dishy. It’s swishy. And, to borrow one turn of phrase that recently brightened its pages, “it couldn’t be more fun than if it rained martoonies!” It’s also disturbing,…
Perhaps not since the Manson family crawled out of the desert has there been a crime scene as horrible and baffling as the one Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies were called to on the morning of August 10, 1991. Inside Wat Promkunaram, a Buddhist temple in the far west Valley, nine…
