ARCHITECTS WOULD always rather start with a clean slate-a nice, bare patch of dirt with no other buildings crowded around it, and no architectural masterpieces in the neighborhood that a new kid would either have to bow to or fight with. When the lot isn’t vacant and the architect has…
MAURICIO RODRIQUEZ celebrated his 20th birthday a few days after Christmas 1990 by hot-wiring a late-model Chevy pickup. He and two friends then careened through the streets of west Phoenix in the stolen vehicle. ²Along the way, the Phoenix man slowed long enough for his pals to hop out, then…
A few months ago, a Shar-Pei escaped from his north Phoenix backyard and wandered to a nearby apartment complex on Shangri-La Road. The friendly dog trotted up to a woman named Vickie Back, and she fed him a snack and a bowl of water. No dummy, he stuck around Back’s…
To the state Land Department, it seemed like a good way to make money. A group of civic boosters touted it as an economic shot in the arm.” But to many of the people who live north of Carefree Highway, the very idea of three 200-foot-high radio towers in the…
The romantic mirage of small-town life is bucolic contentment. This is one of life’s sadder delusions. In remote Arizona, the disputes are loud, frequent and messy. Worse, the intimate potholes of your life fascinate your neighbors. Your debts, your love interests, your spouse’s shingles-it’s all grist at the local coffee…
That’s certainly one viewpoint. But it ignores entirely the faculty’s feeling that its members had no say in campus matters. And Dr. Walker was widely viewed as ruling the campus like Idi Amin Dada. Walker enforced a gag order that forbade all faculty and staff from making any public statements…
Jeanine herself got cancer in her late 40s. Before she died in 1989, she told her daughter Lisa that she suspected that living near the plant had a lot to do with the family’s illnesses. Then Jeanine’s husband, Tom, got cancer. Next, Lisa got cancer. Now 31, Lisa thinks a…
Of course Lee Vance has heard of Arazi. Lee Vance is an air-traffic controller at Yuma International Airport, from which 250,000 airplanes land and take off every year. He helps make sure they don’t crash while they’re doing it. It’s an `initial approach fix,'” he says of Arazi. No, Lee…
The ax fell with scant warning at Community Legal Services last week. The nonprofit law center that serves as a last resort for poor clients fired one-fourth of its staff, including four attorneys, in the face of a hefty drop in funding. Long in precarious financial straits, CLS decided that…
¯ Oh, brother. We definitely drank it. There’s no doubt,” says Lisa McNamara, who lived just four doors down from the Motorola plant. It just makes me sick that the city didn’t start testing the wells earlier.” Lisa McNamara has reason to be angry. Various members of her family have…
DANIEL E. NOBLE was hardly a charismatic patriarch. He was bald and soft-bellied, with a thin, stiff smile. His favorite conversations centered on transistor design. Nobody paid much attention in 1949 when he opened a research lab on North Central Avenue called Motorola.” But it wasn’t long before folks renamed…
This was an estimated annual discharge rate from this facility that could have been ongoing for previous years,” the report says. Motorola admits it emitted solvents into the air-in 1987, for instance, 500,000 pounds of solvents were released. But the company won’t say for sure that during the span of…
You can watch the news and you can see Malcolm and Martin in the people they interview,” says a young black woman during a discussion following the opening of Black Theatre Troupe’s new production, The Meeting. The play could not have opened at a more apt-or a more painful-time. Last…
For almost a year, Jerry Holt has worked in bureaucratic limbo as Governor Fife Symington’s commissioner of the Arizona Department of Real Estate, running the agency and awaiting word on whether the state Senate will confirm his appointment. Now, with a hearing on his confirmation likely next week in the…
Time is running out. Unless attorney Steve Mitchell finds the woman, the murder charge against Dan Willoughby must be dropped. Without her testimony, there is no case. Yesenia Patino is her name. For months she has been on the run in Mexico since allegedly collaborating with Willoughby in the brutal…
Here’s an interesting way to begin your day. Lie awake in bed before the sun comes up thinking about explaining to the woman who cares for your 3-year-old that you are not a cocaine dealer. No matter what the morning newspaper says. Television reports had begun airing that charge about…
Cantelme’s bitter relationship with Ortega extends at least back to the Eighties, when the police administration and firefighters lined up on opposite sides of the issue of political redistricting. The hatred grew between these two and, at one point, Cantelme was the only non-police officer to march in a protest…
Pat Cantelme and Duane Pell, the firefighters whose friendship Bartlett claims has caused him to be persecuted, say that they know him only glancingly through Democratic functions, and that he was not involved as a private investigator at the time of Cantelme’s indictment. (The charges against Cantelme were dropped.) There…
A few weeks back, Don and Bobbie Shepard were among the very few people in town actually looking forward to the arrival of April 15. And why not? As owners of a mom-and-pop iris farm in northwest Phoenix, their business was blooming and, furthermore, their stalk portfolio had never looked…
Phoenix fire captain Gary Pykare underwent his latest cancer surgery several weeks ago, just as a commission that studied the incidence of cancer in Arizona firefighters was finishing its unprecedented study. Now Pykare says he feels much better. Results from the commission’s work, on the other hand, are inconclusive. After…
Few of the 40 or so public officials gathering in a cozy auditorium last week for a half-day forum on pesticides were aware of the poisoned political air engulfing their seemingly benign gathering. Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy, in cooperation with the three state agencies most responsible…
To understand politics, you must first understand ambition and the thirst for power. Take the case of Rick Romley. He was an anonymous figure when he joined the County Attorney’s Office. His first supervisor was Michael Ryan, now a Superior Court judge. The two did not hit it off. Ryan…
