IT STARTED unpromisingly enough in a kitchen in central Phoenix in 1986. Pat Coultrap and Mary DeConcini were venting their frustration over the proposed Esplanade development. They knew it would bring dense traffic and cut off their neighborhood’s view of Squaw Peak, but developer Fife Symington had the city council…
When Carol Hottell answered the telephone in her east Mesa home late on the evening of September 6, she heard a voice that made her shake. Her half-brother Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins was calling from death row in Columbia, South Carolina. She always felt confused about Pee Wee. This time…
IT BURSTS OUT of the asphalt steppes at McDowell and Scottsdale roads like a Dada stage set, a crazed, skewed, hallucinatory caricature of pueblo architecture. Part nightmare, part cartoon, it looks like it might have been designed by a committee composed of Salvador Dali, R.C. Gorman and Fred Flintstone, all…
“What a beautiful day!” said the Governor. J. Fife Symington III was smiling incessantly and reached out to shake my hand. There was a blissed-out look in his eyes. “A really beautiful day–and the weather was perfect!” Symington said, still pressing my flesh. The barkeeps were pouring expensive liquor at…
Maryvale movie maven Jack Hardy has problems. Reel problems. Luckily, his family understands. “My wife is very supportive of this,” says Hardy as he gingerly picks his way through the maze of film cans, videocassettes, editing tables and movie-history books that have transformed his west Phoenix home into the equivalent…
As government bureaucracies go, the Arizona State Legislature is usually an open book. You want public records? Just ask. Unless you’re a legislator. Eleanor Schorr, a Tucson Democrat in the Arizona House, is embroiled with House Speaker Jane Hull, a Phoenix Republican, over access to public information that even lowly…
College is in session once again, and once again I’m moved to offer some advice on the topic. Your college years, of course, are extremely important. Some say your course for life is set at the university level. Never again will you have such opportunity to test your beliefs or…
BRENDA CAYMEN had known for a long time, with some part of her mind, that Rob Roemhildt was going to die. It is the sort of brutal fact that 35-year-olds are forced to accept about their best friends these days, when their best friends have AIDS. What she hadn’t expected…
Once again, on Sunday night, there was the irate face of J. Fife Symington III. The governor’s moistened lips were pursed with aristocratic disdain. I thought that was just fine. After all, any governor worth his salt should come equipped with a certain aristocratic demeanor. In politics, appearances are everything…
The level of fear has risen. I don’t think anyone realizes just how seriously. The murders of the Buddhist monks on August 10 have changed the climate of this city. The other day I saw a housewife call out to two workers hired by the city to do a repair…
Mike Tyson’s lifelong criminal tendencies have overtaken him. His life has become the classic cautionary tale of the talented young man who zoomed to the pinnacle of the brutal sport of boxing at the unprecedented age of 20, achieving wealth beyond his ability to comprehend–or to handle. The incredible physical…
Dr. Richard Ireland has been many things in his time. Nightclub mind reader. Psychic sleuth. Hollywood seer. Corpse. On this particular day, however, the “Godfather of Psychics” is merely late. En route to an interview, the self-described “Phoenix Oracle” somehow fails to foresee that the car he is riding in…
Tim Miller grew up in Whittier, California, the hometown of Richard Nixon. He became an activist early. In 1974, still in high school, he wrote a letter to the then-President saying, “As a son of Whittier, I am ashamed and I hope you will leave office.” “That he actually did…
When my friend at the Phoenix Art Museum told me I could make an extra $50 posing as a museumgoer for a documentary on the museum’s newly mounted Yoruban art exhibit, I didn’t believe her. “Seriously,” I asked, “50 bucks to pretend I’m going through the exhibit?” “Yep,” she said,…
While ex-governor Bruce Babbitt is still harboring dreams of being a world leader, his wife Hattie is already leading. And if there’s any doubt about it, ask Fidel Castro. The Cuban government–the last outpost of communism in this hemisphere–has portrayed Hattie Babbitt as a dupe of the CIA, accusing her…
“I thought I had all the answers, and I don’t know shit,” Richard Horwitz is saying. He is hunched up in a chair in a tiny room for visitors at the Madison Street Jail, his feet in their prison-issue flip-flops braced against the edge of a tabletop. He is wearing…
They sit there in growing awe. The silence of the darkened theatre is broken frequently by applause. It is billed simply as “A Tribute to Jodie Foster.” They do this for one film legend every year here at the Telluride Film Festival. Often it is for some dead actor from…
I watched as they unloaded the shooting victims from the ambulance. One after another they were gently lowered to the pavement and then pushed quickly through the emergency-room doors. The victims were indistinguishable on the gurneys with tubes feeding into their veins and pressure bags cloaking their limbs. You could…
Imagine a garbage dump the size of a small lake. Into its great belly would tumble not only common household waste, but asbestos, petroleum-contaminated soils, pesticide containers and the sludge from sewage-treatment plants. By the time its useful life was over, this landfill would contain enough refuse to fill 93…
Everybody knows that Arizona’s failure to establish a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday has cost the state millions of bucks in convention revenue. Ironically, the mass murder of nine people in a Buddhist temple west of Phoenix earlier this month apparently has had little effect on a Buddhist convention scheduled…
For seven years, Beverly Lemieux donned her blue waitress uniform and slung hash at a Smitty’s restaurant in north Phoenix. Lemieux enjoyed the give and take with her customers at the popular supermarket eatery near Seventh Street and Cave Creek Road. She operated in the lovable-wise-guy manner of waitresses everywhere…
Joanna Wray didn’t have anything to do one night in October 1987, so she tagged along with a friend to hear a seminar given by Wade Bruce Cook, lecturer, writer and self-professed real estate wizard. For several months Wray had listened to her friend rattle on and on about Cook’s…
