I walk into the small garage on Route 30, an hour’s drive south of Chicago. It’s quiet here in Chicago Heights. Many of the factories and steel mills have shut down. It’s hard times. There is only one man at work in the garage. He also pumps the gas. I’m…
Still such annoyances were to be endured as part of the desperate gamble involved in my becoming a novelist. –Ralph Ellison in his introduction to The Invisible Man I sit there waiting for Ralph Ellison to take the microphone. What will he be like, I wonder. Among writers Ellison is…
Uh-uh.” Dance-hall owner Jack Smythe shakes his head while skimming an application from a well-groomed, middle-aged woman who’d just applied for a job as a hostess at his new establishment. Forty-five-year-old men don’t want to come in here and talk to a 45-year-old woman,” says the 49-year-old Smythe. If he…
After the stunning Phoenix City Council vote on June 16 to, in effect, not vote on a controversial gay rights amendment, air horns blared and whistles blasted as supporters and opponents alike voiced their disapproval. For a moment, the two factions that nearly filled the Civic Plaza showroom seemed to…
I’m standing in the grocery store check-out line. Suddenly I sense something strange about the covers of the supermarket tabloids that shout to me from the metal racks near the cash register. The usual photographs of Roseanne Arnold, Oprah Winfrey and Jack Nicholson are missing. They’ve been replaced, for at…
SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, 80-odd warm bodies gathered to determine what to do with a hundred cold ones. Although officially billed as the second annual “Mass Fatality Incident Management Conference,” the marquee in the lobby of the Fountain Suites Hotel in north Phoenix announced the event in verbiage that was at…
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…
Jack and Penny Laetch may end up telling a judge they deserve a break-but it won’t be at McDonald’s. The elderly Scottsdale couple turned from McCustomers into McBlackmailers last month, police say, after scheming to extort money from a man who owns several of the fast-food joints. The alleged shakedown…
SLOUCHING toward adjournment, the 40th Arizona Legislature is a dispirited beast. Many of the 90 men and women sitting in yet another marathon session hate their jobs, and it shows. Republicans war among themselves, and a Republican House clashes with a Democratic Senate. Both chambers have given up hope that…
ARE YOU REALLY HAPPY with your current politicians? Perhaps Doug Wead can inspire you. Arizona’s newest big-time politician, Wead often tries to display a disarming sense of humor. He doesn’t jab you in the ribs; he’s kinder and gentler. At his May 12 campaign kickoff rally for the state’s newest…
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…
Look! Up on the wall. … It’s a bird! Near some planes! It’s supermural! And since last month, when officials at Sky Harbor International Airport announced the upcoming closure of Terminal 2, the future of the famed phoenix mural has been up in the air. Installed in the spring of…
Amid the orgy of publicity last week following the made-for-television police raids of the Aldabbagh family’s topless- and nude-club empire, the arrest of Phoenix attorney Joe Romley was barely a footnote. But while time will tell if police have unearthed the massive money-laundering and racketeering operation they claim, Romley’s arrest…
Jottings in an outsider’s political notebook: 1. H. Ross Perot strikes me as a perfect little fascist dictator. I sense about him nothing more than a haughty, autocratic, overbearing know-it-all. Our flirtation with him as a presidential candidate mirrors our desperation. A dozen years of Republican rule have made us…
WITH A THROAT raw from marathon campaigning and a CNN camera crew recording his every self-deprecating head bob,Bill Clinton and his retinue arrived in Phoenix last month. His May 8 visit allowed the candidate just enough time to deliver a semi-custom stump speech, clutch a few hundred hands and pick…
Up on a platform, three go-go boys in jockstraps (one of whom hangs upside down from a pipe running across the ceiling) simulate a menage a quatre with an exotic girl in a rubber dress. And from their vantage point up on a scaffolding, two young women in cat suits…
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…
For $75,000 a year, 31-year-old attorney and former journalist Jay Heiler has been hired to help Governor Fife Symington shape the policies that will benefit all Arizonans.” But his appointment last month as Special Assistant to the Governor for Policy Development has sent ripples of uneasiness among some who remember…
The vacant expression in Joe Stedino’s eyes shocks me. I expect him to look more menacing, more unfeeling, like a Mafia soldier from a Mario Puzo novel. But instead Stedino seems vulnerableÏperhaps a little lost. For years he has suffered from a panic disorder. In order to raise the courage…
So just who has been paying Schmidt for his services over the past few years? A random sampling from a list of current and former clients provided by Schmidt indicates it has been a mixed bag of small businesses. Some liked what he did for them, while others were not…
DAVID HANS SCHMIDT begins each day staring at the wall above his couch, where the Great News Volcano hangs. It is a six-foot-tall painting, which Schmidt commissioned, of a volcano in fiery eruption. Rising from the plume, painted in large letters, is the word News.” Every morning I play the…
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…
