Laura Slade still doesn’t have an in-house bathroom, but she finally has electricity. And running water. The inconvenience of having to use her neighbor’s “facilities” is a small nuisance to the 38-year-old woman who will tell you how proud she is of her mobile home and her five-acre homestead out…
Although she’s come a long way in the past few years, Pia Zadora is currently going nowhere fast. But this time, the singer is happy to report, that lack of momentum has absolutely nothing to do with her career. Trapped in a noon-hour traffic jam on L.A.’s Sunset Strip, Zadora…
This is not how Art and Lynn Shupe envisioned their life in Arizona’s White Mountains. “Since all this happened with the company, we haven’t had any life,” Art Shupe says. “My place is about destroyed. We had this beautiful spring–clear as a pin–and the fish were pretty. The water was…
Remember those stuffy lawyers who whined recently about the “noise” from the city’s noontime concerts in PATRIOTS SQUARE interfering with their “billable hours”? “They’re humbugs–that’s what I call them,” says SUSAN TRAVIS, a downtown law-firm receptionist who loves the idea of music in the park. “It’s something to look forward…
An elderly Pinnacle West stockholder poked Keith Turley gingerly in the back. At this very moment, Turley was standing nervously at a urinal in a men’s room on the main floor of the Hyatt Regency hotel. “Hi there, Mr. Turley. How are you doing?” Turley, former chairman and chief executive…
Cotton Fitzsimmons is my clear pick for National Basketball Association coach of the year. Nobody comes close. Cotton came back to the Phoenix Suns when they were at the bottom. They were reeling from a drug scandal almost entirely created by Ruben Ortega’s police. Their spirit was broken. There was…
I write this column assuming you already know that Jimmy Breslin is the best newspaper columnist in the country. During a thirty-year career on various New York papers, Breslin has gotten into all the good fights. He has done so in his own way. He has ridiculed racists and anti-Semites…
There’s no use sugar-coating the bitter truth. Mary See, 135-year-old grande dame of the soft-center set, is finally showing her age. For one candy lover, the ravages of time recently became shockingly apparent when a box bearing See’s newly wizened image showed up as a Mother’s Day gift. “Land’s sake!”…
Many people have lived in Phoenix for years and never gone to Sun City. Here are ten reasons the long drive out might be worth it. 1. The Hillcrest Golf Course, 20002 Star Ridge Drive, Sun City West. Its championship layout makes it challenging to good players, and its tall…
When Marie Kelso moved to Sun City five years ago, she was not interested in meeting a man. She was eighty then, and met one anyway. It happened at a pinochle game. He used the direct approach. “Are you married?” he asked. When she said no, he took her out…
The man was absorbed in vacuuming the gravel that graced the front yard of his house in Sun City when photographer Allen Dutton cruised past. Dutton was there to document life in the retirement community, and this improbable spectacle was more than he could resist. “How come it doesn’t pick…
It’s 2:05 p.m. on a Wednesday. We’re working the second-shift patrol out of Sun City Sheriff’s Posse headquarters. My partner’s name is Jack Goodrich. Moved out here from Omaha a few years ago after retiring from Union Pacific Railroad. Me? I’m a civilian just along for the ride. Things seem…
I was an illegal alien in Del Webb’s community of oldsters. For seven months in 1984 and 1985, I lived in a Sun City condominium owned by my parents. Because I was only 28 at the time, this was a problem. In fact, it was more than a problem, it…
Like most people, my only regular exposure to Sun City-ites is what I hear them say on talk radio. “Okay, next we go to Raymond in Sun City,” the host says. “Ray, thank you for calling.” What usually follows is five minutes of bitter invective aimed at politicians, liberals, lawyers,…
Some scenes cling to your mind. They are so powerful that they are impossible to block out. For me, there will always be that remarkable television footage of an enraged Evan Mecham pounding his little fist on the counter at the secretary of state’s office. “You have a Martin Luther…
So it’s shocking that Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies used stun guns on environmental protesters in little Mobile? And it floors you that Arizona’s elected officials and oxymoronic Department of Environmental Quality don’t always act in the best interests of the state’s citizens? That shouldn’t be news to anyone who has…
PRODUCTION: hit list measure includes five inches for an addition on Monday. Please save that amount of space. The day after Grand Canyon University fired basketball coach Bill Westphal April 5, he met with his team one last time. Westphal said some parting words and handed each player a copy…
Peering from beneath a thicket of false eyelashes, the ageless Acquanetta carefully scrutinizes a publicity photo of the four young women who call themselves the Aquanettas. “It’s been very strange,” admits the 69-year-old one-time horror movie starlet as she examines a cassette copy of the Aquanettas’ Love With the Proper…
This is what Pete Span believes. Two United States marshals went to the home of his elderly father in search of a fugitive. Without a warrant, the officers ransacked the house and roughed up the 74-year-old man. After leaving the father’s home, the marshals went to the Span family’s place…
She looked small and frail and bewildered. Her fashionably bobbed hair, like so many women wore in 1931, needed washing. Her dress and hose were soiled. Her gaunt cheeks showed her hunger. Her enormous eyes didn’t seem to focus. She cradled her left hand, a bullet still embedded, already gangrenous…
Max Lehman is packing. Boxes and bags filled with clay, paint and scraps of paper surround him on the wood floor, the remains of six months’ work. Lehman, 28, is one of five artists whose home is likely to be leveled for the further downtown development expected to be spurred…
Suntans, once the gift of Mother Nature and now a commodity purveyed under tanning lamps all over town, are about to be placed on a par with some kinds of drugs. Just as prescriptions for Valium are recorded by the corner pharmacist, the number of suntans a person can purchase…
