Current job: Second baseman, Chicago Cubs. Cool because: Has won six straight Gold Gloves. Needs 73 more games at second base to qualify as the all-time leading second baseman in fielding percentage. Lifetime batting average of .284. Resides in Tempe during the off-season because: “When I was with the Phillies,…
Current job: Player-personnel senior adviser, Montreal Expos. Cool because: Hit .279 over fifteen years as a big-leaguer. Former Cubs manager. Scottsdale resident. First spring training: “I came here as a player in 1947 with the New York Giants. The Giants were in Phoenix, and the Cleveland Indians were in Tucson…
Current job: Sports columnist, Chicago Tribune. Cool because: Has covered the Cubs in spring training since 1959. Biggest change in spring training since then: “Well, I’ve just gotten older, that’s all.” Other changes: “There’s more people watching. The Cubs now draw as much for a workout as they used to…
Current jobs: Motivational speaker (thirty to forty appearances a year) and inventor (Big League Chew, bubble gum made to look like chewing tobacco, and Big League Cards, personalized baseball cards for regular people). “My latest invention is called Table to Go, and it’s a combination plate, tray and table. It…
Current jobs: Cubs broadcaster on WGN TV and radio. Budweiser salesman extraordinaire. Cool because: Cub fan, Bud man. Third, fourth, fifth and sixth favorite local restaurants: “I go upstairs to Gregory’s, I go to Don & Charlie’s, I go to the El Chorro across the street from the Mountain Shadows…
Current job: Executive recruiter for Mattel and Hasbro toy companies. Cool because: While working as an usher at Phoenix Municipal Stadium (“I quit my job to go to spring training one year, and I was living with a girl and she said if I didn’t get a job, I’d have…
It’s a freezing winter evening, cold enough so that the streets of this Old Town Tempe neighborhood are devoid of activity. Even the usually omnipresent cats and dogs have either begged entry into living rooms or become icebound in their water dishes. But the musical sounds that are thumping and…
Whatever else you might say about Patriots Square, you can credit it with the overdue arrival of architecture criticism in Phoenix. The monsoons of invective that have buffeted the park and its architect, Ted Alexander, haven’t all sprung from cool and reasoned analysis, but there’s nothing wrong with bloody-fisted emotional…
If the widow of cartoonist Al Capp married actor Al Pacino, she’d be Mrs. Al Capp Pacino. Yes, everyone, it’s an Italian coffee joke. I know you people just love ’em. Speaking of coffee, it just so happens I’m not drinking any. I’m nervous enough already, thanks. I’m nervous because…
Rebuffed in previous attempts at closing down adult bookstores and movie theatres, Representative Leslie Whiting Johnson has reversed field and now says she wants to protect their customers. So the Mesa Republican is sponsoring legislation that would require testing of the machinery that shows dirty movies. Specifically, she wants the…
Two long-time friends recently decided to get married after seventeen years of dating. How this could happen in 1989 America is beyond me. But it did. The wedding was to be a major northern California to-do, attended by some two hundred of the bride and groom’s most intimate intimates, many…
An interviewer once asked Vladimir Nabokov: “What are the literary sins for which you could be answerable someday?” And Nabokov replied: “Of having spared in my books too many political fools and intellectual frauds.” I am, each morning, astonished by the Salman Rushdie story. Rushdie has written a virtually unreadable…
Richard Mallery is so smooth. He has the velvet touch. In a real estate deal, there’s no one who can touch him. Mallery is the slickest operator in the West. A senior partner at the powerhouse law firm of Snell & Wilmer, Mallery was a founding member of the Phoenix…
We sat in the foothills kitchen of Tracy Thomas as the nanny waited to take his infant son. After our cup of coffee, he would climb into his Mercedes and depart for the men’s grill at the Paradise Valley Country Club. It is a natural thing for a man who…
When is a deal with the Phoenix City Council not a deal? Apparently when the public finds out about it. Bonnie Bartak, aide to Phoenix Mayor Terry Goddard, is unhappy New Times reported earlier this month that the city council had approved a deal with the owners of business properties…
Wearing his trademark pith helmet (with chin strap) and an oversize pair of sunglasses, Ulysses Horatio Penelopi Poindexter C. Mortimer Alewishus Hale Gammill II regularly drives his Model T along Central Avenue to his Rotary meeting in downtown Phoenix. The doors of the classic car he bounces along in are…
The 800 people who stormed into the Maryvale High School auditorium one June night in 1987 were outraged and insulted. They had just learned from this newspaper that for more than a decade, a suspiciously high number of children in their working-class part of town had died of cancer. Although…
It’s the cops who always are accusing judges of turning criminals loose on technicalities. These days, however, nine current and former Phoenix Police Department officers are smiling because a technicality may have gotten them off the hook. Not that Max Dunlap’s civil suit against the cops, filed in June 1982,…
As soon as it became clear a couple of months ago that Mayor Terry Goddard was abandoning the Municipal Center project, I phoned Ed Wundram. Wundram is the professional adviser who in 1985 oversaw our much-touted international design competition for a monumental building complex to house city government on the…
I recently came across the results of an Urban Institute study that set out to determine how much it costs to raise a child up to age eighteen. The numbers ranged from about $52,000 per poor child to $143,000 for a well-to-do one. Now that these figures have been released,…
One of the following charlatans will be the next governor of Arizona: David Hinchcliffe: He’s the double-domed thinker who introduced the resolution at the state Republican convention declaring this a Christian nation. He’d be perfect for a state packed to the borders with right-wing crazies. Jim Brock: The ASU baseball…
What is this? Some sort of fluke? How is it possible that Cousins could be the sweetest, tangiest romantic-comedy treat since Moonstruck? The film’s odds for success certainly don’t seem very high going in. It’s a Yank remake of a popular French comedy (1975’s acclaimed Cousin, Cousine), a subgenre reamed…
