It’s Friday night at Scottsdale Stadium. Michael Jordan walks up the dugout steps at 6:41 p.m. As he reaches the top step, Jordan looks around the stands as if to count the house. When Jordan ruled the National Basketball Association and led the Chicago Bulls to three consecutive titles, he…
While Tempe attorney Barbara Ross was preparing to represent a client in a civil trial, her former husband was busy, too. He was quietly convincing a Maricopa County Superior Court judge that Ross had suffered a serious relapse of mental illness. She was, the ex-husband contended in mid-July, unfit to…
Jane White’s house is a noisy place, and not just because of the cars zipping past on the new, improved Pima Road, barely 50 feet from her front door. The phone rings constantly, and the caller is usually somebody with something to tell her about freeways, or about meetings about…
Several victims of the Valley’s fallen “King of Probate” may get some financial satisfaction in the next several weeks. Bonding companies are expected to cut checks totaling about $800,000 to the heirs of 14 estates that were plundered by Mesa attorney Wayne Elmer Legg and his sidekick, Webber Mackey. The…
Tried earlier this year for pruning her spouse’s privates with a carving knife, Lorena Bobbitt was found not guilty by reason of insanity. But thanks to a just-released porno docudrama inspired by the case, it’s husband John Wayne Bobbitt who’s not exactly playing with, ahem, a full dick. “Now, for…
Here are some things you ought to know about Congressman Jon Kyl, that passionless and aloof candidate of the Republican ultraright, before you vote to send him to the United States Senate. Kyl represents everything that is detestable about the current political state of affairs in Washington, D.C. Like his…
The cars seem remarkably new for a university parking lot. There are no bikes or beaters, no VW buses with bumper stickers that read “Honk if something falls off.” These are shiny Tauruses and Sentras, the sensible cars of people with jobs. The cars’ owners are middle-aged middle managers, white-collar…
Benita Venegas shuts her dark eyes and considers something for several seconds. The 16-year-old fixes her inquisitor with a mournful expression. Suddenly, she pounds her left fist into her chest and releases a haunting, high-pitched wail. She whirls to face her foster mother, Ellen White, a Paradise Valley woman in…
It’s less than a month before the election. Do you know who your school-board candidates are? While the silver-spoon governor and the chubby grocer are busy trying to be “the education candidate” and former state senators Lela Alston and Lisa Graham battle for the primarily bureaucratic position of state superintendent…
Say Cheezy! State legislator Sue Grace caught a familiar sight, glancing up from her microphone at a candidates’ forum last week. It was Becky Fenger. And her camera. A bit of history: Fenger, who unsuccessfully challeged Grace in September’s Republican primary for the House of Representatives seat in District 24,…
The chairs in the dirt yard are draped with children openly eyeing me. They are too young and innocent to bother masking their curiosity. When their mother talks, they are quiet. “I don’t raise my kids that the police are some kind of Officer Friendly. I tell these children the…
An hour before the game started, Richard Dumas was out on the court, chewing gum and blowing gingerly on his hands to warm them up. He was always one of the first players out of the dressing room. His hair was cut very short. His eyes always seemed so wide…
Fred Linch leans forward. He glances down at his favorite breakfast of bacon, eggs and a toasted bagel. He sits at an outdoor table at Scott’s Generations Delicatessen. If Linch stares straight ahead, he can see the entire shopping-center parking lot at Seventh Street and Missouri. At 6:30 in the…
Perhaps it’s only an illusion brought on by overfrequent moviegoing, but it sometimes seems as if good movies tend to arrive in swarms. One slogs through months of scrounging what merit one can find out of dull movies, and then suddenly there come, all within a few weeks’ time, Quiz…
The race to lead the nation’s eighth-largest city has been so quiet that Skip Rimsza was able to undergo and recover from triple-bypass surgery this summer without missing a beat on the campaign trail. Rimsza, who represented north-central Phoenix on the city council until March, when he resigned to run…
The steer and the guy on horseback seem to burst from the gate at exactly the same time, but if you know charreria and have trained your eye on the action, you’ve seen the anxious horse fidgeting in place at the door, the spring of the wooden gate, the charro…
“Here we go!” exclaims Phoenix Mayor Thelda Williams, cutting a yellow ribbon and watching it flutter to her feet. Ribbon cuttings come with the mayoral turf, but Williams’ wielding of the ceremonial scissors last Saturday at a north Phoenix manufacturing plant was spiced with irony. For the past six months,…
These are troubled times for University of Arizona astronomers. Their 15-year effort to build a $200 million, seven-telescope observatory atop Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona is in jeopardy. Environmentalists hope to prevail soon in a long and bitter battle to keep the project out of 470 acres of old-growth spruce…
Dick Mahoney is relaxed. His left leg rests over the arm of a chair in the living room of his Encanto Park home. Mahoney seems at ease with himself. He has no regrets over his hard-fought campaign for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. Sam Coppersmith holds a margin…
Buddy Ryan is a better football coach and a better man than all his detractors rolled into one big, fat jellyroll. I predict Ryan will demonstrate his coaching mettle this Sunday when the Arizona Cardinals defeat the Minnesota Vikings at Sun Devil Stadium. The Cardinals will stomp the Vikings. With…
To many people, Dennis Lamothe would seem to pose an unacceptable risk. For starters, on this scorching Saturday morning, he is busy loading three solid-propellant motors inside his very large–two stories high, 350 pounds–homemade rocket. The motors are encased in shiny aluminum tubes. They weigh about 40 pounds each. Each…
In about one week, Kathy Smith will endure a bitter anniversary. Two years have passed since she was called before her bosses and fired from a lucrative job selling advertising for the Yellow Pages in Phoenix. Smith and another salesperson named Kimberly Seagraves were fired at about the same time…
