Charlie Hoover seemed to be at the top of his game in early 1984. The big-money Phoenix attorney had just concluded a massive deal on behalf of First Federal Savings and Loan (now MeraBank). It was the bank’s largest deal ever–a $400 million loan to the Marriott Hotel chain for…
Stop the presses! The top story on Sunday night’s NEWSCHANNEL 3 wasn’t the crumbling Berlin Wall or the newest slaughter in El Salvador. No, the top news of the day according to CHANNEL 3 just happened to be the story of an ex-Arizona mom accused of shooting her own children…
In order to be a topflight journalist like myself, you need keen powers of observation to pick up on the subtleties of life that escape the common folk. And lately, one thing I’ve been noticing is that the difference between fathers and mothers is as great as the difference between…
To many people, Hollywood animation means the Disney cartoon–which in a slow, six-decade decline has seemed increasingly aimed at the very young and insatiably sweet-toothed. Over the years, dozens of would-be animation moguls have threatened a revolution. But last year, the studio that proved a mouse can talk bounced back…
Bill Frieder clearly has a retarded person’s view of modern communications. Frieder is too dense to realize those cute and self-serving remarks that he makes to sportswriters from New York and Detroit have the ability to bounce back to Arizona within minutes. So when Arizona State University’s new basketball coach…
Where is Joy Johnson? The little “Wednesday’s Child,” whose thwarted adoption was profiled in last week’s New Times, has been moved to Oklahoma by her current foster parents. The couple who had wanted to adopt her are now asking, is this the “stability” the Arizona Department of Economic Security promised…
John Pomeroy was an “incurable animation addict” when he joined Walt Disney Productions in 1973, heralded as part of the “new breed” set to replace Walt’s original animation veterans. But within six years, the bloom was off the cartoon rose: Pomeroy and a handful of other new breeders walked out…
Think “Arizona Public Service” and what comes to mind? Bloated electricity rates, incompetent management, gross callousness toward public concerns about nuclear safety? Whether the topic is overpriced skyboxes or plummeting dividends, APS is the company we all love to hate. Its cross-town counterpart, however, is another matter entirely. The Salt…
On July 31 police from the small Arizona town of Parker caught the high school’s football coach in a compromising phone conversation with a twelve-year-old Indian girl. It was not the first such incident involving the highly successful coach. After resigning from Parker High School, the football coach was hired…
Wednesday’s Child feature Pauline Johnson was transfixed by the beautiful three-year-old on the television screen. The child had a smile that could steal your heart. Her luminous face was framed by dark, wavy hair caught up in pigtails. She was captured playing and laughing as Channel 12’s Kent Dana implored…
In these days of ravaged rain forests, a tattered ozone layer, nuclear weaponry and global overpopulation, the cause that Doris Daniel has taken on may seem, well, a bit quixotic–unless you’re an oldster who shops at Park Central Mall. About two months ago this spunky, raspy-voiced 64-year-old grandmother launched a…
Kim Moody, a cockatiel perched on his left shoulder, sits at a table in the backyard of Alwun House, the beleaguered alternative-arts organization he directs. He’s smoking Marlboros and sipping black coffee, but otherwise looking pretty relaxed, considering that Alwun, located in a 77-year-old three-story house at 1204 East Roosevelt,…
Why does Bob Corbin, our clownish attorney general, lead such a charmed life? Five United States senators are currently battling against disgrace because of massive campaign contributions from Charlie Keating, “The Bluebeard of American Finance.” But Corbin, who accepted proportionately greater sums of Keating’s largess, remains untouched by criticism. He…
The other night we had some friends over, a couple with a fourteen-month-old daughter. Wherever Daddy went, baby followed on all fours. Whenever Daddy sat down, baby would climb into his lap. Whenever anyone else tried to hold the child–including her own mother–she’d feign sudden respiratory failure until returned to…
If you are a young nurse in a big hospital, most days have a tedious sameness. But the tension never leaves. You learn to walk fast. You rarely stop to make small talk in the hallways. There’s always too much to accomplish and not enough time. You knock softly on…
Eight-year-old Satsay Singpradith and his brothers and sisters huddled around their mom and dad shortly before going to sleep. But this was not just another bedtime story. The family had fled Laos and was living in a miserable refugee camp in eastern Thailand. Chan Singpradith, the family’s patriarch, kept promising…
Let’s condemn the Cards. And own the team ourselves. Hell, we could run it as well as Bill Bidwill. And the day may come when, if we want pro football here, we’re gonna end up as team owners. We’re talking about getting ready for the day Bill Bidwill decides the…
Michael Cooley’s nightmares began some weeks before he finally allowed a Scottsdale neurosurgeon to operate on his brain. Cooley recalls waking up from his nightmares with a sickening sense that something dreadful would happen to him in the operating room. But he also knew the surgery was necessary; the large,…
I received this letter awhile back, and the smoke still hasn’t cleared from my mailbox. Quit your bitching and be thankful you have a wife to help you out. Try being a single father. Try working full-time, in addition to being a loving, responsible father. Try putting off things like…
A. Bartlett Giamatti, baseball’s late commissioner, wrote the following words about the game while he was still teaching at Yale University: ” . . . It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling…
Arizona sinks deeper every day that Rose Mofford remains in the governor’s office. In fairness to the voters of the state, Governor Mofford should announce immediately her intention to step down at her term’s conclusion. Some truths about the state’s sinking condition cry out to be heard. After all, we…
In a Sunnyslope bedroom, beneath a map of the intended targets, the gruesome crime unfolded. As Michael Bloom plotted, his partner Carl Schall listened. The plan was to dynamite black people during church services, to kill little children at Jewish day-care centers and to slaughter impoverished Mexicans at social-service agencies…
