Jeff Stone smoking a cigarette?! During his eight seasons on The Donna Reed Show, he’d have had plenty to answer for. But two weeks ago, waiting to make a personal appearance at a Nick at Nite promotion in a mall outside Dallas, it’s 45-year-old former actor Paul Petersen who’s demanding…
Chris Milke lived life on the edge, but he had no choice. During the child’s first two years, his alcoholic and drug-abusing father, Mark, weaved in and out of jail. His mother, Debbie, partied hard, scraping by and moving the kid around from apartment to apartment, city to city. The…
I saw my son’s still-damp footprint upon the bathroom tile . . . Later, in the twilight, he slept in my arms as I watched the evening news. The broadcaster described the blockade against Saddam Hussein that was gathering itself like a jelling thunderhead; even so, I tried not to…
We were driving south from Shannon Airport, heading for tiny Kenmare, in County Kerry, not far from Ireland’s fabled southwest coast, the land of the Ring of Kerry, Bantry Bay, Valencia Island and the isolated but magnificent Dingle Peninsula. Christina the Lawyer had rented a 150-year-old farmhouse on thirty isolated…
As a child of the Sixties Who was into love and peace, It, like, wow, man, really bummed me To see global strife increase. So I long ago decided, If I ever had some sons, That never would I buy them Any war toys, any guns. That’s a vow I…
Now that the biggest fish in the S&L pond, Charles Keating, is sitting behind bars, a little-noticed state agency thinks it’s time to go after the minnows, too. While Keating’s attorneys file appeals aimed at getting the former millionaire developer out of the hoosegow in L.A., the Arizona Board of…
“I am not a racist,” Nancy Burnett pleads over the phone. She doesn’t see what the big deal is or why other Cottonwood residents are up in arms over her statements. But Nancy Burnett is getting used to being at the center of the fire storm in this community 100…
Except for the pimple-faced neo-Nazis putting together Molotov cocktails, the alley was empty. It was too dark that February evening in east Phoenix to see the shaved head of the youngest, an awkward sixteen-year-old with freckles and tattoos. One tattoo especially would have stood out had there been more light:…
I recently came across the results of a government study which concluded, after years of exhaustive research, that husbands do less housework and family cooking than wives. Obviously, this project was conducted by the kind of freeloading, fed-funded Einsteins who would surmise, after years of exhaustive research, that men are…
A key architect of the Victims’ Rights Initiative has been accused of sexually abusing at least three female employees. Allen Heinze, who resigned unexpectedly Friday as executive director of the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys’ Advisory Council (APAAC), was already under fire in a $3 million sexual-harassment suit brought by Colleen Shallock,…
In the past two years, Arizona’s contingency of young neo-Nazis has doubled from 100 to about 200. This is according to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, a group that monitors extremist hate groups in the United States. The ADL estimates there are some 3,000 skinheads nationwide. “Phoenix is a…
The punishment of Charles Keating has begun. Even before a jury has been chosen, a California judge, eager to increase his voter-approval rating, sets a bond so incredibly high that it be comes nothing less than an indefinite jail sentence. This preposterous ruling by a judge trying to curry public…
A writer of fiction most certainly would enjoy a rare literary feast in sitting down to write a novel based on the rise and fall of Senator John McCain. McCain’s life story has all the elements required for the creation of a complex, even memorable, fictional character. His life is…
I changed planes in Boston last weekend on the way home from my vacation in Ireland. While waiting to catch the plane for Phoenix, I bought both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. I n reading through the two papers, I was astonished at the number of stories discussing…
Things have been pretty pleasant in Pleasant Valley in the last hundred years or so, since its name was branded on frontier legend. But folks up here by the Mogollon Rim think it might be time to set the battle lines again. Flashback to 1887. On February 2, a Mexican…
In this atmosphere of tense campaigning, where Georgia Staton, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, has been publicly scorned as a “junkyard dog” by a prominent attorney and has been deserted right and left by members of her own party, it is probably only fair to point out that she…
At Dick Mahoney’s rambling, Spanish-style house in Encanto, there are some very noticeable things: a slightly disreputable gazebo in the backyard, a swimming pool filled with silt, and a pervasive air of altogether cheerful neglect. All his books are noticeable. But most noticeable of all is the poem. “A Poem…
In the Superman comic books of my youth, the Man of Steel often hung out in the far reaches of the universe on a cube-shaped planet called Bizarro World, where all the rules of nature, logic and common sense were reversed. Green traffic lights meant stop, red meant go. Dogs…
Into the lobby of Terry Goddard’s downtown campaign headquarters, someone has just lugged a canvas banner that is painted in new campaign colors. At the moment, Goddard is sequestered upstairs with television reporters and he cannot witness this event. His absence doesn’t matter much, however, since he has become such…
Before September 11, there were seven of them. Seven candidates standing for major office who, at age 45 or younger, were a collective statement about the turnover in Arizona’s political power. There probably never had been so many youngsters clamoring to run the state before. And the sudden swarm of…
On the wall of Grant Woods’ office is a photograph, taken of him when he was at Occidental College, together with an old black man named Preacher. Woods attended the small liberal arts school in Los Angeles beginning in ’72, so he missed the pure Sixties, but there are certainly…
There is a very peculiar thing about Fife Symington’s education at Harvard, and it is that he felt persecuted there. He is not a conspiracy theorist in other ways, not the sort of arch-conservative Republican who is likely to try to hire a private investigator to look over the shoulders…
