Poor Gary Driggs, everyone keeps saying. Such a shame. Gary and his two brothers–John and Douglas–have been booted out of their soft spots as chief moneychangers at Western Savings and Loan. Sure, it’s true that Western has dropped $300 million in the last two quarters. But, after all, the Driggs…
Maybe you cannot imagine what it is like to be Robert Usdane. He is a Republican leader who is the key to a Democratic bill to honor Martin Luther King Jr. with a paid holiday. He is a Jew who sits on the board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League…
Charlie Keating and Gary Driggs have fallen. And in a city edgy about the self-destruction of its icons, a question is being posed: Will Keith Turley, the man who pushed the Arizona Public Service utility into real estate and banking with disastrous results, be next? A few years ago, the…
Want to know why the freeway system is running out of money? Want to know why you’re likely to be asked to vote for another tax hike to complete the 230-mile system voters approved in 1985? Well, read this and weep: The right-of-way for the entire system–just the land on…
Is Phoenix’s potential “Central Park of the Southwest” going to become just a piece of little-used turf stuck amid yet another gaggle of shiny high-rises? That’s what some activists fear is inevitable as an eight-person team starts its job of overseeing the planning of midtown’s controversial Indian School site. “You…
She was the Queen of Television and we worshiped at her throne. So great was our devotion that some of us even worshiped at her son’s throne: In 1953, a company called Moulded Products actually manufactured a Little Ricky potty seat, a multicolored toilet-training device decorated with caricatures of Lucy…
Great Caesar’s ghost! SHOOTER’S WORLD, a giant indoor shooting range that opens May 6 in west Phoenix, proudly proclaims “Armorum securis” as its slogan–which goes to show you that Latin’s a deadly language, not a dead one. PENSUS GROUP prexy and gun-range developer RICHARD SHAW tells us the phrase, which…
The gang rape in Central Park is one of those unspeakably vicious crimes that traumatizes the entire country. The other morning, Donald Trump bought full-page ads in New York’s newspapers calling for a renewal of the death penalty there. The New York Post keeps referring to it as the nightmare…
Despite excessive cheerleading from the Arizona Republic, the Phoenix Suns are not a lock to win the National Basketball Association championship. They may not even come close. If Fat Lever didn’t sustain an injury last Sunday night I wouldn’t have bet on them to get out of the first round…
Morton Downey Jr. is at the vital center of a fascinating urban mystery. Downey claims he was attacked by skinheads in the men’s room of the San Francisco airport. He says they chopped off clumps of his hair and marked his face with swastikas. But there’s some doubt that Downey…
I used to look forward to my son’s birthday, but the event isn’t nearly as much fun as it once was. The lad is catching on. First birthdays are the best. One-year-olds have no idea what a birthday is, and no expectations means no disappointments. You don’t have to deck…
First of all, you must be lucky. I can never really understand what’s happening in a trial merely by reading newspaper accounts. For example, no matter how much I read about Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s trial, I remain a prisoner of the impression he made during the televised Iran-Contra hearings…
Just eight days ago, on April 25, Craig Malmstrom entered an Arizona State University classroom armed with a semi-automatic 9mm pistol. When he confronted three blacks who were giving a presentation to the class, Malmstrom had one bullet advanced into the chamber and the safety was off. He carried two…
In California, it’s a hazardous waste, but in Arizona, it’s a bargain. It’s used oil from industrial plants, car engines and a host of other sources, and it’s polluted with an alchemist’s nightmare of heavy metals and PCBs. California doesn’t want it. But trainload-size gaps in Arizona law have resulted…
One of these days Oliver North is probably going to be found guilty by that Washington jury. Once the verdict condemning the Marine war hero is reached, the battle to save him will begin in earnest. The outcry against sending North to jail will make the abortion demonstrations seem like…
When you see it for the very first time, steaming up from the table in front of you, Mexican food doesn’t look like something that was planned. A glop of brownishness sits by itself on this corner of the plate. Something doughy and tubular rests over here, covered with a…
There’s an obvious problem when you’re known as “the iron lady.” Everyone wants to see if you’re really as tough as you seem. Or if the title is more about bluster than guts. So far, the first woman speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives has shown she doesn’t blink…
For the third year in a row, a New Times writer has been named Arizona’s top print journalist. Deborah Laake won the Arizona Press Club’s Virg Hill Journalist of the Year Award at the club’s annual banquet on Saturday night. Staff writer Terry Greene was last year’s winner, and staff…
Ralph Milstead thinks heterosexual officers present the best public image for the Department of Public Safety. The opinion of the chief of the state police didn’t change with the embarrassing revelations that one of Arizona’s finest made a habit of stopping female motorists and demanding sex in exchange for overlooking…
On many weekday mornings, Acme Records publicist Wendy Harte sits in her suburban Los Angeles office and prepares press kits to get the word out to the media about semifamous rock bands with colorful names like E.I.E.I.O. and Thin White Rope. Sometimes, Harte says, she works so hard that she…
Last month, Phoenix shut down two more heavily used drinking-water wells in Maryvale, saying that they are suspected of sucking up more and more swill from an underground plume of TCE-contaminated groundwater. TCE, an industrial solvent, is a suspected carcinogen. Officials point out that the water from the most recently…
Land baron DENNIS DeCONCINI, already flushed with embarrassment over the looting of half a million bucks from his campaign treasury, is trying to steal a toilet from a union. The wealthy Democratic senator’s staffers in Tucson recently moved into new offices only to discover that they had to share a…
